Are white evangelical Christians "real Americans" or off on a tangent?

Poking around in attitudinal polling data, as I am wont to do, I ran across a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) pre-midterm election poll that brought me up short. I had not realized the extent to which people who identify as white Christian evangelicals have become outliers in the U.S. religious landscape. Though they are often treated as, and consider themselves, the true representatives of "real America," most of us -- even other whites -- have distinctly different opinions on the conflicts of our time.

... With the unique exception of white evangelical Protestants, majorities of all other major religious groups have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Majorities of black Protestants (80%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (75%), Hispanic Catholics (74%), non-Christian religious Americans (73%), white mainline Protestants (52%), and white Catholics (52%) have a negative opinion of Trump. By contrast, almost seven in ten (68%) white evangelical Protestants have a favorable view of Trump, including 28% who have a very favorable view. ...

... With the exception of white evangelical Protestants, strong majorities of every major religious group believe that Donald Trump has damaged the dignity of the presidency. More than three-quarters (77%) of religiously unaffiliated Americans and about two-thirds of white mainline Protestants (68%) and Catholics (67%) agree that President Trump has damaged the dignity of the presidency. This view is shared by less than half (47%) of white evangelical Protestants. A majority (53%) of white evangelical Protestants say that President Trump has not damaged the dignity of the presidency. ...

... With the exception of white evangelical Protestants, all other major religious groups believe that the country’s racial and ethnic realignment will be mostly positive. Majorities of Hispanic Catholics (81%), black Protestants (80%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (74%), white Catholics (51%), and white mainline Protestants (51%) believe that this change will be mostly positive, while less than half (44%) of white evangelical Protestants hold this view. A majority (54%) of white evangelical Protestants say that becoming majority-nonwhite nation in the future will be mostly negative. ...

White evangelical Christians simply are no longer normative. The rest of us have moved on. ...At Religion News Service, Mark Silk disaggregates what exit polls tell us about the participation of white evangelicals in the election.

According to the exit polls, 26 percent of the electorate in last week’s midterms consisted of white evangelicals. Yet white evangelicals make up just 15.3 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to PRRI’s widely used survey data. What gives?

...As Faith and Freedom Coalition chairman Ralph Reed, who’s in the business of boosting evangelical turnout, told a National Press Club audience, “We had an astonishing level of evangelical voters cast their ballots.”

Silk opines that, when asked outside a voting location, significant numbers of white mainline Protestants and even Roman Catholics identified as "born again," making up the difference between known numbers of white evangelicals and their claimed proportion of the electorate.

This set of query answers is presumably a function of the strength of the generally held assumption that if a white person identifies as Christian, that means identifying as evangelical. So maybe the exceptional "evangelical" views PRRI names aren't so exceptional after all -- just not so denomination-linked as we might assume.

Still, it's nice to realize that even slim majorities of self-identified white US Christians aren't on the Making America White Again train.

How many stolen children remain to be reunited?

The child whose cries we all heard thanks to the reporting of ProPublica has been reconnected with her mother.

It's the names!

Way back in 2008 I wrote the story of a progressive white friend's interior struggle to understand her own hesitations about then-Senator Barack Obama's presidential run. Finally she blurted out: "It's the names. I felt it when I watched Michelle's speech and his daughters came on stage. They were called something I can't pronounce." Being the good soul and justice warrior she is, she rapidly learned how to pronounce "Barack," and "Sasha," and "Malia." I suspect she would hardly remember her discomfort today.

But I remember, because that phrase -- "it's the names!" -- has become one of my touchstones in this dark era. A segment of white people fear they are being erased and look to Trump to Make America White Again. But I look at bylines and mentions in U.S. media every day and rejoice that our everyday names have irreparably changed and we now live in a wider world amid a wider national family.

For a few days, I grabbed a small selection of names that would have been strange and foreign to my parents' generation. (A little more behind each link.) Vivek Ranadive. Duke Tran. Ishaan Tharoor. Malkia Amala Cyril. Seung Min Kim. Latona Giwa. Taurean C. Sanderlin. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Rustem Kazazi. Karthik Nemmani. Yphtach Lelkes. I could pull hundreds more, just from my regular reading.

Trump and the GOPers stumble over this reality. Kris Kobach (perhaps a German-origin name?) -- Secretary of State of Kansas and inventor of numerous stratagems to prevent people of color and other Democrats from voting -- fell on his face when he tried to convince a federal judge that many non-citizens were polluting his state's elections. He produced an "expert witness" to explain how they had identifed these improper voters.

[Kobach's expert Jesse Richman] simply flagged people with “foreign”-sounding names, although he was inconsistent in his execution. As Talking Points Memo reported, “two respondents with the last name Lopez were coded as foreign, and three Lopezes were not.”

On the sixth day of the trial, [ACLU lawyer Dale] Ho read a series of names and asked Richman if he would label them as foreign-sounding. When he came to the name Carlos Murguia, Richman said he probably would flag it as foreign. Ho responded that Carlos Murguia was a federal judge in that very courthouse in Kansas City.

Ooops.

The exponentially increasing number of names we bear in this country is one of our national joys and strengths. I'll give the last word to Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozado, whose Latinx name seems conventional to most of us in the U.S. Southwest.

The American experiment is not just worth the fight — it is the fight. With passion always strained, the pursuit of prosperity, freedom and belonging is an endless battle, an enterprise in equal measures exhausting and exhilarating.

A profound moral crisis

Erudite Partner and I are on our way to the border to pray and protest against the Trump/GOPer regime's cruel treatment of migrants. You are more likely to see photos than text here for the next couple of days.

But I thought some might appreciate some thoughtful reflection on this country's history of child snatching from Adam Serwer of The Atlantic.

... part of what horrifies Americans is not the novelty of Trump’s policy, but its familiarity. Americans are fighting a part of themselves that they naively thought they had vanquished. From chattel slavery to American Indian schools to convict leasing, child-snatching has been a tradition in America since before there was an America. If one is convinced that the parents are not truly human, then the children cannot truly be children, and what should be unthinkable becomes inevitable.

Few of the Trump administration’s policies better exemplify the Trump campaign’s commitment to restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race, religion, and gender, than family separation. That commitment—and Republicans’ muted opposition to or vigorous support of the administration’s actions —has plunged the United States into a profound moral crisis that will define the nation’s character for decades to come. To harden oneself against the cries of children is no simple task. It requires a coldness to suffering that will not be easily thawed. The scars it inflicts on American civic culture will not heal quickly, and they will never completely fade.

People who would do this to children would do anything to anyone. Before this is over, they will be called to do worse.

Serwer points out that the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin which gets some credit for spreading the anti-slavery gospel in the north in the 1850's revolves around child theft. Once again, when they revel in their villainy, we cannot be silent or passive.

What's the point?

This plea is scratched on a bench in immigration court where I sat in during a deportation hearing yesterday. The message is nowhere near as dramatic as Senator Jeff Merkley's videoed effort to investigate an immigration detention center for undocumented children in Brownsville. But both images bear witness to the Trump regime's cruel effort to Make America White Again.

Jose, whose hearing I attended, is the very type of the sort of immigrant caught up in the ICE dragnet. He came to the US from Mexico 24 years ago at age 15, driven by family poverty. He has worked here without papers ever since in the sort of unstable pick-up jobs that undergird the economy: yard cleaning, landscaping, laying down asphalt paving, tile hauling. He described his work history, exhaustively and proudly. I felt as if I was in the presence of a living instance of Marx's "reserve army of labor" -- a man used as hands and a back that can be summoned when the job is too painful or too dirty to attract people who have any other option, and then can be cast aside when his utility to employers has passed.

Jose formed a relationship, fathered a daughter, broke up with his child's mother -- but faithfully provided $200 a week in child support for nine years. He just kept working. He fell into the traps that are poverty. A broken taillight in 2001 led to a ticket for driving without a license (he was undocumented after all) -- but he never found out he had a ticket hanging over him because the notice was mailed to an address he'd left for another job ... He just kept working. In the superheated Bay Area housing market he decided the rent was just too high to allow him to continue to support his daughter, so he started sleeping in his car... He just kept working. Somebody complained, he was arrested in September 2017, and has been in immigration detention ever since, fighting to stay in this country with his child.

Another bit of unfinished legal business hangs over his case. He was found guilty of a DUI in 2014 and funneled into "diversion." Somehow he came up with the money to pay $2400 to the owner of a car he had sideswiped and partially completed a nine-month alcohol education program for which he was charged $200 a month. He claims to have given up drinking. But the program charges were more than he could earn and continue to support his daughter, so after four months he gave up the program. ... He just kept working. In detention, he's still proudly working; he told the court all about his voluntary work in the jail kitchens.

There are certainly legal justifications for Jose's deportation. But do we really want to deport someone who has lived, gainfully and usefully, among us for a quarter of a century and who is the loving responsible father of a US citizen child? Jose is collateral damage of several decades of Congressional inaction on the realities of immigration in the southwest US. Should his life be crushed because successive people with power never got around to creating equitable systems and rules?

What's the point, except to Make America White Again?

Yesterday's hearing was inconclusive, continued until a Stanford child specialist recruited by Jose's non-profit lawyers can evaluate the impact on Jose's daughter.

100 days of resistance

After 100 days of Trump, I'm liking the people of this country. It turns out that a whole lot of us aren't willing to roll over and play dead because some of our fellow citizens put a cruel ignoramus in office by a tiny margin. We hold on to hope for a better future.

So we have resisted: women have marched; people have mobbed airports in defense of immigrants, Muslims, and refugees; Congresscritters can't come home without Indivisables getting in their faces; scientists and their friends have demonstrated; folks who demand to see the Kleptocrat-in-chief's tax records don't quit. And some of the frayed and fragile institutions of society and government -- courts, legislative hurdles, tireless lawyers, segments of the media -- have impeded the worst impulses of the Cheato and his GOPer friends.

Shock, awe, and instant autocracy seem averted. Instead we have ahead some number of years of steady assault on the lives and security of vulnerable people, mostly black and brown; of additional pollution and desecration of the only planet we've got; of theft of everything that isn't nailed down for the enjoyment of a tiny class of billionaires. Lovely prospect.

It appears to be the case that Trump has no substantive agenda greater than enriching himself and his clan. Nor has he any competence. He merely has prejudices and vendettas which empower more competent actors who do have a project: Making America White Again -- MAWA.

It goes almost without saying that this starts with an Attorney General telling polices departments to fire away with impunity. Recent history offers no reason to expect restraint unless we force restraint, locality by locality.

But also, there is an enormous amount that empowered thugs in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) can do to make miserable the lives of racially profiled residents, many of them citizens. Presidents since Bill Clinton have gradually warmed to these unaccountable tools to such an extent that even under Obama, nearly 50 percent of federal criminal prosecutions were for illegal entry, reentry, and other immigration offenses. But that increase in enforcement was just about playing politics, trying to throw the nativists a bone by promising "border security." With a neo-Confederate Attorney General, this trend could become far worse. Sanctuary cities and a rapid response network can perhaps get in the way, but the law gives very little recourse to people caught up in the cruel farce of immigration proceedings.

And the GOPers in Congress might be able by legislation to restrict even legal immigration very substantially. There are impediments and we can make more of them. But most of us alive today are probably unaware that the United States rejected most immigrants and refugees (including people fleeing fascism) for decades after 1924, a pause in immigration that enabled earlier waves of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe to "become white," to make themselves "real Americans." The MAWAs would like to repeat that -- to simply keep out the black, brown and yellow hordes of their nightmares. Those of us with a happier vision can make this difficult, but this is a fight we need to be ready for.

And there is worse possible. If, like most of us, you've managed to push aside memories of our enduring gulag at Guantanamo, this could sneak up on you. George W. and the Dick loved this island prison for "War on Terror" prisoners because they hoped to keep them out of any judicial review. Eventually the Supreme Court said no, and Congress gave them the Military Commissions Act. This was license to create a novel, from the ground up, jerry-rigged pseudo-legal system just for non-citizen enemies. So far, this non-system has been unable to convict anyone of much of anything, including the proud self-confessed master mind of 9/11. Starting a legal edifice from scratch is impossible work, especially when torture and abuse are involved. Anyway, barely noticed in the law that legalized this perversion of legality, is that it limits the use of military tribunals to non-citizens -- and that means that 43 million people in the US, including green card holders and others in various immigration statuses, could be subject to these kangaroo courts, according to Department of Defense lawyer (that job can't last?), Michel Paradis.

... the Guantánamo tribunals are a separate and unequal justice system into which noncitizens have been segregated. That creates a precedent that endangers us all. ...

... for all the dark periods of bigotry and national danger in U.S. history, this is the first time that we have retreated from the constitutional commitment to equal justice under law that has governed this country since the end of slavery. In fact, in every previous use of military tribunals, including those used to try Nazis during the height of World War II, citizen war criminals were tried on equal terms with noncitizens. The only countries that made the distinction now being made in Guantánamo were Germany and Japan. ...

... The Guantánamo tribunals have become a laboratory for the bare minimum of due process that the public can be convinced to accept. Each aberration, each shortcut on the rules of evidence, on torture or on judicial independence becomes a precedent. ... The Guantánamo tribunals perpetuate a naïve prejudice that the rule of law is a luxury, a waste of time or a privilege belonging to “us” and not to “them.”

This is precisely the dream of the racist xenophobes currently occupying the executive branch of government. The injury they can do to people and law itself is both all too easy to envision and incalculable going forward.

We've had a better-than-expected 100 days -- but we can't ease up. Resist and protect much.***Back in 2009, I wrote an assessment of citizen response to President Obama's first 100 days which both holds up alright for its moment and seems to emerge from another universe.

ICE, immigrants, and criminals

As has been widely reported, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- the deportation police -- have been snatching up people who have been reporting for routine immigration check-ins. The immigrant detainees are seldom "bad hombres." In northern California, last week a man named Martin

had no criminal record, had lived in this country for 26 years, his two sons are citizens, and he ended up in deportation proceedings because he was a victim of a fraudulent "notario" [a quack posing as a "lawyer"] 10 years ago. The case was litigated in court, appealed and finally lost for 10 years, and on Wednesday, when he showed up for his green card interview, he was detained and put on the deportation bus.

Calls from community members and the offices of Senator Feinstein, Rep. Matsui, Rep. McCarthy, Rep. Harrison, and Rep. Pelosi could not stop the ICE human-grinder. Martin was summarily shipped off to Mexico.

Sometimes community intervention can win a stay that leaves room for additional legal pleadings. Here's a heartening story of State (a senator) and Church (an archbishop) combining with community pressure to keep a sick elder in this country, at least for awhile.
In How Immigrants Became Criminals, Alan A. Aja and Alejandra Marchevsky have outlined how the deportation regime is integrated with the "war on drugs" and the mass criminalization of all people of color.

In 2016 more than 60,000 immigrants were cast out from the United States on criminal grounds. According to ICE, “criminal removals” comprised 92 percent of all deportations from the nation’s interior last year, compared with only 3 percent in 1980. Yet immigrants are not committing more crime than in the past. Rather the definition of “criminal” has broadened significantly since the 1990s, when the federal government began criminally prosecuting immigration infractions that were previously enforced as civil matters, while also deporting an unprecedented number of immigrants with minor criminal records. So-called criminal deportations bring into clear focus our nation’s “crimmigration” system, where immigration policy, criminal law, and their corresponding enforcement apparatuses are tightly intertwined. ...

Immigrants and their advocates naturally point out that these people are NOT criminals under any reasonable definition. But this argument has its own pitfalls.

... the oft-made claim of innocence furthers a disturbing respectability politics that aids the Trump administration’s assault on communities of color. By insisting that most immigrants do not deserve to be deported, advocates leave unchallenged the idea that the criminals do. The good immigrant narrative misses the ways that overpolicing and mass incarceration produce a reservoir of immigrants with criminal records, creating an endless chain of detentions and deportations....

The Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations bloated police department coffers and put tens of thousands more cops in communities of color. More police and bigger budgets meant more arrests, more convictions, and more incentive to police to maintain agency resources. The overpolicing of low-income neighborhoods has meant a sharp increase in the number of immigrants of color encountering the criminal justice —and thus the deportation—systems. In particular, more and more black and brown immigrants, both undocumented and authorized, were arrested and convicted of drug crimes, received longer sentences than their white counterparts, and then were deported. Between 2007 and 2012, there was an increase of 22 percent (totaling 260,000 deportations) in the number of lawful permanent residents and undocumented immigrants deported for drug offenses. Research shows that black deportees are the most likely to be legal permanent residents deported for drug convictions. The intersection of anti-drug policy and the Department of Homeland Security’s expanded deportation powers reflect and reinforce anti-black racism in our nation’s system of law, yet are rarely challenged in tandem. ...

While the good/bad immigrant debate is now being challenged by the immigrant rights movement and civil liberties groups (most notably the ACLU), progressive politicians and organizational leaders have yet to follow suit. Many states, cities and universities are creating sanctuary policies that make exceptions for criminal immigrants. ...

Although there has been growing awareness and action around the abuses behind mass incarceration, too often have they been siloed from discussions of and advocacy around mass deportation. Public pressure has forced many states to remove three-strike laws from their books, but few in the public are aware that the government may deport a non-citizen who has three misdemeanor convictions. Calls to roll back oversentencing in the criminal justice system have not made connections to deportation as a form of extreme punishment. ...

Draconian immigration enforcement -- and the War on Drugs -- and mass incarceration are all elements of Making America White Again (MAWA), all made explicit by the Trump/Bannon gang.

Resist and protect as we can. Join an Emergency Response Team in Northern California.

Judicial horrors

Because Neil Gorsuch is presentable -- he could probably be introduced to a suburban mother without acting like a thug -- it is unlikely Democrats will rise up to block his confirmation to the Supreme Court. It would take everything they've got and that isn't much. Sure, he's a stone conservative white man, perhaps slightly to the right of the dyspeptic curmudgeon he would replace, but they are likely to figure that at least Trump didn't nominate Steve Bannon to the court.

I'll be watching whether Democratic Senators raise two issues in hearings:

• Torture: During the GW Bush administration, Gorsuch was one of the merry band of torture apologists at the Justice Department making up rationales for the divine right of the President to order whatever extra-legal measures he might like in his war on an adjective. It's going to be the supreme test of our legal system whether judges will constrain a runaway president who can always cook up a national "security" threat when he wants to justify something foul. My often disappointing Senior Senator, Diana Feinstein, is the lead Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and, after being mistreated by the CIA herself when looking into abuses, has developed a bee in her bonnet about torture. So she might push for answers in this area.

• Birthright citizenship: I don't know if any Democrat will raise this, but they should. Maybe Senator Maize Hirono of Hawaii could do it; it would be good to hear it from a person of color. The Trump/Bannon project of MAWA (Making America White Again) founders on the fact that anyone born in the country is automatically a citizen under current interpretations of Congressional citizenship statutes and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. A citizen is any "person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." But right wing legal activists hope that the application of this principle to children of undocumented immigrants could be ended by simple act of Congress, if concurred in by a sympathetic Supreme Court. They'll go there if they have a chance; the MAWA project is a desperation move, and fails so long as people of color can't be kept from citizenship whether by exclusion or voter suppression and/or incarceration. The great contemporary historian of the Reconstruction era when the US adopted birthright citizenship, Eric Foner, writes of birthright citizenship:

   The 14th Amendment, as Republican editor George Curtis wrote, was part of a process that changed the US government from one “for white men” to one “for mankind.”

  Those were a different kind of Republicans.