Yes, you read that right. Many evangelical Christians believe that President Trump is just the man to trigger Armageddon and bring about Jesus Christ's return to Earth. Here's how it's supposed to work:
From Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones, the whole idea is,
"based on the war of Gog and Magog, a biblical conflict prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel. In the Bible, Gog is the leader of Magog, a "place in the far north” that many evangelicals believe is Russia. According to Ezekiel’s prophecy, Gog will join with Persia—now Iran—and other Arab nations to attack a peaceful Israel "like a cloud that covers the land.""
These folks believe that, "this battle would bring on the Rapture, the End Times event when God spirits away the good Christians to heaven before unleashing plagues, sickness, and other horrors on the unbelievers remaining on Earth. Meanwhile, the Antichrist reigns supreme."
Furthermore, in recent years, these believers, "have seen any number of Middle East conflagrations as fulfilling
Ezekiel’s prophecy, notably the US invasion of Iraq and the war in
Syria. Gog and Magog took on fresh relevance earlier this month, when
the Trump administration assassinated Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the
commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.
On many levels, President Donald Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran
seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy or
geopolitical plan for the future. The assassination has yielded few if
any tangible rewards for the US. But there is an eager constituency for
Trump’s improvised policy toward the Middle East and Iran in particular:
the evangelical Christians who see it as a means of ushering in the
return of Christ."
So to summarize:
1. The Bible describes events that will trigger Christ's return to Earth.
2. These folks believe in being proactive: let's make those trigger events happen!
3. That means they've got to get Israel and Iran to go to war.
4. So one way or the other, they've got to get somebody, perhaps the United States, to so antagonize Iran that war becomes unavoidable, and,
5. At the same time, provide ardent support for the most belligerent, hard-line leaders of Israel. (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will do very nicely, thank you.)
A little history. The biggest proponent of the program described above is televangelist John Hagee. In 2006, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone "joined" Hagee's Cornerstone Church to find out what they were up to:
"I chose Hagee because of his belief in the end of the world, and for the remarkable political influence he enjoys as a wealthy televangelist whose ministries are beamed into millions of homes each week. The drawling Texan with the kindly smile is one of America's chief pitchmen for "Christian Zionism," which in simple terms means he is a Christian who believes that the U.S. government should support the state of Israel.
In Hagee's view, supporting Israel will bring about the final battle at Armageddon, with satanic armies descending from the north (Gog and Magog in Revelations, Russia and Iran to Hagee) and God's army fighting under the banner of a resurrected Israeli state. Of course, Hagee's vision of this battle involves an Israel that has converted to Christianity, which one would think would be problematic for the Jews currently living in that country. But no: The Israelis love John Hagee. Benjamin Netanyahu once spoke at his church, and Hagee was even a keynote speaker at a conference for AIPAC, the chief Israeli lobby in Washington."
Fast forward to 2019: Big surprise, the Trump administration loves Hagee and his organization. From Jack Jenkins of National Catholic Reporter:
"Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
both addressed a Christian pro-Israel group July 8, lifting up the U.S.
ally as a bastion of inclusivity and railing against Iran.
Pence and Pompeo delivered their remarks at the annual summit of
Christians United for Israel, a conservative Christian organization led
by the Rev. John Hagee, which claims more than 6 million members."
Because of course the Trump team would show no hesitation to completely embrace a pastor who has stated his disbelief in climate change, and who has attacked Catholics, Muslims and (strangely enough) Jews, saying Jews are to blame for the Nazi Holocaust because they were disobedient to God.
And don't forget, according to "Christian Zionism", the Jewish people must convert to Christianity or they're all going to Hell! G'night folks!
Monday, January 27, 2020
Friday, January 03, 2020
A Few Links to Dispel Conservative Myths Part Fifteen: Homelessness
Bad news for the homeless. From a December 9 article in Mother Jones by Will Peischel:
"(I)n November, Matthew Doherty, the Obama appointee who’d been in charge at the US Interagency Council on Homelessness since 2015, was forced to resign. This week the administration announced its pick for his successor was Robert Marbut, a former community college civics professor and San Antonio City Council member with a longtime side gig as a policy consultant on homelessness."
Peischel notes that Marbut considers the root causes of homelessness to be behavioral and quotes Marbut as saying, "Too often there are no consequences for negative behavior of [homeless] individuals," "which encourages them to continue a lifestyle of vagrancy without incentive to leave it."
"Homelessness is a choice." We've been hearing that said for a long time. Let's jump back to Reagan era, a time that pioneered much of the cruelty toward the impoverished that we see today. A few weeks before he end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan offered the press some remarks on homelessness characteristic of his callousness and cluelessness regarding the problems many Americans face. From Steven V. Roberts of the New York Times, December 23, 1988:
"In an interview broadcast tonight, President Reagan dismissed the idea that his Administration bears any responsibility for the problem of homelessness and he said ''there are always going to be people'' who live in the streets by choice.
''They make it their own choice for staying out there,'' Mr. Reagan said in a farewell interview with David Brinkley of ABC News. ''There are shelters in virtually every city, and shelters here, and those people still prefer out there on the grates or the lawn to going into one of those shelters.''
As he has in the past, the President said that ''a large proportion'' of the homeless population is ''mentally impaired,'' and consists of people dismissed from institutions as a result of lawsuits brought by such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union. The President added that these former mental patients, once released, ''walked away from those institutions - they wanted freedom, but they walked out to where there was nothing for them.''
Mr. Reagan, who frequently insists that his policies have caused few economic hardships, repeated a suggestion he has made before that jobless workers are unemployed by their own choice. As evidence for his argument, he said there were ''hundreds of ads'' in every Sunday issue of The Washington Post, offering employment. ''That means there are employers looking for people to go to work,'' he said."
The above is a good representation of some of the older rhetorical nonsense in circulation regarding homelessness in America. For a more recent but equally distorted look at homelessness, here's an article on the pacific northwest's growing homelessness problem written by David Ross on Medium.com. For someone who describes himself as, "a former psychiatric social worker, homeless outreach case manager" Mr. Ross has some surprising views on the subject of homelessness.
"If I had a magic wand, I could make it cold, wet, and dark year round. That might help reduce the street population, sending them elsewhere, just like Mother Nature does," says Ross. (I must say, that is the strangest thing I've ever heard a social worker and advocate for the homeless say.) Mr. Ross claims we could, "immediately cut our street population by 50%". His solution? Law enforcement.
"Wouldn’t community-imposed and severely unpleasant consequences also help deter squatters, trespassers, or "campers" who often commit property crime, vandalism, and theft to fund addictions?"
"The most common protest against increased enforcement is typically that street people with addictions or mental illness don’t belong in a cage. I agree. However, they don’t belong under a bridge, on the street, or in an alcove either. That only perpetrates more problems, including becoming victims themselves. When I was a psychiatric social worker, chronically homeless people were sometimes saved by getting prosecuted for a crime."
"They typically got diverted into treatment programs, but usually with conditions of release that had some teeth. It also dramatically increased compliance by "treatment resistant" people who did not want to end up going to jail. We desperately need more of that, as the current policies simply are not working."
OK, before I sift the myths out of what David Ross says above, let's assume that everything he says is true. Suppose every homeless person completed a "treatment program." Does this mean that this same person then becomes not homeless? Even assuming such a person can then find a job, they're likely to find housing in Washington state far out of reach.
German Lopez of Vox.com summarized some of the myths about the homeless in 2015 including those documented above. From that article:
Myth #1: Homeless people are lazy and don't want to work. About 44 percent of homeless people around the country did some paid work during the previous month, according to a comprehensive 1996 Urban Institute survey. A 2013 US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) study found 17 percent of homeless adults in families, who share different characteristics than homeless individuals, had paying jobs, and 55 percent had worked during the previous year.
Myth #2: Getting a job will keep someone out of homelessness. The National Low Income Housing Coalition found a full-time minimum wage worker would have to work between 69 and 174 hours a week, depending on the state, to pay for an "affordable" two-bedroom rental unit (the federal government defines affordable as 30 percent of a person's income). A full-time minimum wage worker couldn't afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent, a standard set by the federal government, in any state.
Myth #3: Homelessness is long-term problem. The most common duration of homelessness is one or two days, according to University of Pennsylvania researcher Dennis Culhane. Nearly one in six homeless people were classified as chronically homeless — people with disabilities who have been homeless for a year or more, or experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in three years — by HUD's 2014 survey.
Myth #4: Homelessness is always related to mental illness. Serious mental illnesses are more prevalent among the homeless: About one in four sheltered homeless people suffered from a severe mental illness in 2010, compared to 5 percent of US adults, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). But city officials cited lack of affordable housing, unemployment, and poverty as the top three causes of homelessness in a 2014 survey from the US Conference of Mayors.
Myth #5: Most homeless people are addicted to drugs and alcohol. Roughly one-third of sheltered homeless adults had chronic substance use issues in 2010, according to the SAMHSA.
For similar observations on the subject, I recommend this FAQ & Myths from the Coalition for the Homeless and Myths and Questions About Homelessness from homelesshub.ca.
Let me close by addressing one other big myth about homelessness: The idea that shelters are always a viable alternative to living on the street. There are dozens of reasons why the homeless sometimes cannot go to shelters even when bed space is available. From Chris Walker of Westworld.com, people who can or will not go to shelters include:
All those who love their husband or wife and feel safer together than separated as shelters do to couples…
All those who work late nights and can’t get into a shelter…
All those who work nights and have no option to sleep in a shelter in the day...
All those who work early morning day labor and can’t get out of the shelter in time to work…
All those women who are traumatized by male staff in the bunk areas waking women to kick them out…
All those with pets or service animals who are rejected from shelters…
All those who can’t conform to regimented rules…
All those who can’t handle being ordered around and degraded by staff…
All those with insomnia who can’t watch TV or read but must be in bed with no cell phones...
All those who have stayed in a shelter program for ninety days with a promise of housing to no avail and given up on service providers…
All those who have been kicked out at 3 a.m. for no fault of their own because staff failed to sign them in or enter their chores in the records…
All those who need food in the night and fear being kicked out for keeping food with them in bed against the rules…
All those who don’t want to sleep with bedbugs...
All those suffering a drug addiction that can’t pass a urine analysis to stay in the shelters…
All those don’t make it in the lottery to get a bed…
All those who can’t get down on the floor to sleep on a mat…
All those with more than two bags of belongings who either go into the shelter and lose their property, or stay outside to keep their property...
All those trans-gender folks who have been abused in a shelter or forced to strip to prove their sex…
All those who want their time back from waiting in lines for early admission hours to get into a shelter…
All those who don’t want to be preached to by shelter providers…
All those with mental health struggles who can’t handle being around hundreds of people in a tight space…
All those released from the hospital at 1 a.m. onto the streets…
All those physically unable to move about when police ask them...
All those who feel safer staying outside with friends than in a building with strangers…
All those who feel safer or happier staying by themselves on the streets than with hundreds of people in a shelter…
All those who prefer the dignity of a tent to the warehousing and dehumanizing treatment of a shelter…
All those who want control of their own life and choices…
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