Republicans showed us something important about their coordinated, orchestrated attack this Easter weekend on Biden and Democrats in general. As Biden went to church on Easter Sunday and Trump did not – as he never does – but spewed bile on social media, Republicans mounted a coordinated, orchestrated attack on Biden and Democrats because Easter coincided with trans visibility day this year.
This was planned. It was strategic. It tells us they intend to go whole-hog this election cycle with the claim that ONLY Republicans own Christianity, and Democrats by definition cannot be Christian – even as Biden went to Easter Mass while Trump sat home raving.
The very fact that Biden demonstrates that another kind of Christianity is possible other than the politically captive, debased white Christian nationalism they want to anoint as "real" American Christianity forces them to mount this attack.
They have to demonstrate that they own Christianity in an exclusive way, and that this ownership gives them the right to own and control the rest of us as a minority of the populace.
This is all about ownership and control. This is why the ongoing Republican battle to impose a twisted version of Christianity held by only a minority of voters on all of us as "real" Christianity always fixes on a vulnerable segment of the population – trans people, LGBTQ people, migrants and immigrants – to prove its point. If it can own and control that segment of the population, it has shown that it can own and control all of us.
The twisted kind of Christianity that Republicans want to promote as "real" Christianity depends radically on othering some human beings for the benefit of other human beings. When Donald Trump persistently calls migrants "animals," he is dehumanizing and othering them to open a pathway to treating them as brutally as possible – while his white Christian base applauds this treatment as holy and in line with Christian teachings.
Ask those of us who are LGBTQ and who have been around a while about our experiences with the churches in the US, and you'll hear an earful about ugly dehumanization that allows many church people to other us and lay groundwork for abusing us by defining our humanity as less than theirs, as less than that of "normal" people. These attitudes may be shifting, but they've long been deeply entrenched in Christianity in the US.
I forgot to crack the #chocolate#Easter#egg while the grandson was visiting.
so I sent him this photo and told him I was sorry and had shared it with his #StarWars figures who had left hardly anything at all when grandad and grandma got up in the morning. They’d carved it up with their light sabres and were all lying about like fat little plastic eggs plus Darth Vader had been sick and I made him clean it up.
Taking essential #healthcare away from needy children on #Easter is incredibly fucked up. These #Republicans continue to claim exclusive ownership of #Christianity while behaving in a way that would have infuriated their #messiah. They're literally acting directly contrary to the foundational teachings of the man they claim to revere and follow.