Going On From The Age Of Degeneracy Secular And Religious

Before Ken Starr and the House Republicans such as Henry Hyde and Lindsay Graham, not to mention various American billionaires, multi-millionaires who financed scandal mongering and creations, the cabloids on cable, the tabloids, not to mention the venerable newspapers including the Great Grey Drab of the New York Times who flew with every lie and cooked up scandal and dragged us into the private relations of the Clinton marriage and Monica Lewinsky and introduced second-graders who might not have already heard of blow jobs, I'd have been entirely unwilling to discuss the consensual infidelities of public figures.   I figured that the only people such stuff was the business was were the adulterers and the wronged party, possibly any children of those involved and that it had no proper place in public discussion. 

But that all flew out the window when the Republicans figured such stuff was the proper concern of special councils of their appointment and liking.   Their pursuit of that made their own conduct a matter of public record, the infidelities of Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, who was selected by Republicans to replace the adulterer Gingrich, only to find Livingston also was an adulterer, before they lit on Denny Hastert who only later was revealed to be a pedophile boy molester, not to mention those Republican pillars of propriety such as Henry Hyde, who also was an adulterer and others whose sexual habits have been and have yet to be made public.  I know of one other of the House Managers of the Clinton impeachment whose sexual reputation is well known in Washington D. C. but which he has managed to keep under cover with the help of the same media who reported every false rumor in that matter.

All of this is a prelude to why I have not gone much into the revelations of Donald Trump's consensual adultery, with many women, known and unknown, going back to before he was turned into a public figure by the media, the creators of what most of those who voted for him believed him to be.   His serial assaults and reported rapes are a totally different matter, those are crimes and always should have been obviously the concern of the public as well as why he was never prosecuted for them.  The reported intimidation that Stormy Daniels revealed in her interview might have some bearing on that, Trump has hired a series of thugs, some lawyers, some former cops, who knows who else who might have done such stuff for him.  All of which should have been reported on over the decades of his celebrity and all of which should have disqualified anyone from being president of the United States.   The same is true for someone like Denny Hastert who the "family values" party put in charge of the House of Representatives for many years. 

I don't look forward to hearing any details of Trump's infidelities, any thought of Trump and sex is repellant.  I suspect that last night in the United States there was probably a significantly lower incidence of sex because thinking about Donald Trump having sex is probably productive of continence than anything else.   Eeewww!  It's enough to make you want to not do it.  Same with the idea of Henry Hyde or Denny Hastert or Lindsay Graham . . .  Yech!

I'm almost tempted to feel sorry for Melania Trump, who I can't imagine is happy about being exposed as a wronged woman, though she certainly had fair warning of what she was getting into when she married him.  And if she chooses to stay with him, maybe it doesn't bother her that much.  I don't think that the statement about the mentioning of her minor son in the scandal is legitimate, not anymore, considering the use Republicans made of the young Chelsea Clinton.   Like it or not, by sticking with Donald Trump, she is as responsible for him being relevant to the very public news about Donald Trump's adultery.   If she wanted to shield him from that attention, the time to have done that was before Trump ran for office.  It's a shame that she didn't do what she could then to prevent this.  I don't like it at all but the Republicans opened that pandora's box two decades ago with the full participation of the American free press.

------------------------------------------

Among the most important results of this is the total discrediting of the pseudo-Christian "evangelical" industry, especially the biggest names in it as seen on TV and as promoted by big money.   The Franklin Graham operation, the Falwells, etc. should never be allowed to operate as if they aren't what they always have been, religious frauds.   There are, for example, Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals who have acted in the same way and should be considered as discredited but the larger Catholic church isn't a franchise operation of that sort*.   But the high-finance TV and media based fraud that goes by the name "evangelical" is entirely discredited, its faithless faithful have been shown to be either dupes or phonies.   I noticed, beginning in the late 1970s that the American media was intent on branding Christianity as being that kind of right-wing, racist, politically Republican fraud while entirely ignoring Christians who were not an asset to the oligarchy.   Now that that kind of "christianity" has discredited itself, I think there is a lot of work to be done to evangelize such people.   And I would include many Catholics in that, those who are duped by right wingers, even some bishops and cardinals such as Raymond Burke into rejecting the papacy of  Francis.   There are certainly those who have been so duped who are scandalized by the support such frauds have given to Trump and Trumpism, not to mention the Republican Party of the Hydes, Hasterts and other sanctimonious phonies.


*  Former Irish President Mary McAleese, who has been targeted by right-wingers in the hierarchy recently said it best.

Asked why she remained Catholic, she said “I stay now because I choose. I choose to be one of 1.2 billion people spread across five continents, part of an institution that has no equal on the planet in terms of its outreach to the poor, the dispossessed, to the marginalised, part of an institution (that can be) the hands of God’s work in the world.

“No NGO does what that Catholic Church does through ordinary people They’re the people who inspire me, it’s their work that drives me on and gives me hope for the future,” she said.

There is nothing in secular life which has been created and, I have come to believe, never will be created to do that work.   If secularism was going to generate it, it would have by now.  In his more recent work Walter Brueggemann notes that to get the kind of outcome that such things depend on takes a specific kind of substrate,  a particular set of beliefs of a specific kind which will lead to such results.  Secularism doesn't have it.   He identifies it with the Jewish scriptures, including those of the New Testament.   I'm convinced that that is right, that is the reason that the history of such efforts and egalitarian democracy has developed the way it has, in the places it has, among the people it has.  It is the reason behind the history of the United States in which groups of people, largely people motivated by the social justice teachings of the scriptures and the monotheistic religions have wrested any measure of equality from the original oligarchy, slave-holder friendly Constitution.   It's not a question of whether or not human institutions and human beings are going to be exposed as imperfect, it is that it is necessary to acknowledge that we are all sinners but that there comes a point when you have to choose that enough is enough.  But some entities are even more durable than the current form of it.

The Catholic Church in its current form will not survive, former president Mary McAleese said in Rome on Thursday.

“The clericalised church will not survive and that will be good. Just how long it might take or whether I’ll be around to see, or whether my children will be still Catholics, my grandchildren, that I don’t know.

“But frankly I did my best and the people who let me down in the job that I was given, the vocation as a Catholic mother and a Catholic woman, the people who let me down are not very far from here (in the Vatican),” she said.

I think if there is a Catholic church in the future, it will be one that is much different from the one we have now,  if there is still a United States it will have to be one that is much different from what it is, today.