Women nationwide are denouncing Donald Trump. Conservative Marybeth Glenn is furious that men aren’t following suit—and she has a message for them.
you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.
Get this straight: We don’t need you to stand up for us, YOU needed to stand up for us for YOU. For YOUR dignity. For YOUR reputation. Jeff Sessions says that he wouldn’t “characterize” Trump’s unauthorized groping of women as “assault.”
Are you kidding me?!
Others try to rebuke his comments, yet STILL choose to vote for a sexual predator – because let’s be honest, that’s what he is. “What he said is wrong, and the way he treats women is wrong, but it’s not wrong enough for me to not vote for him.”
Thanks, cowards.
Various men in the movement are writing it off as normal, confirming every stereotype the left has thrown at them. So I’m done. I’m sooo done.
If you can’t stand up for women & unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you. I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door.
.. These sentiments felt so familiar to me. Then I realized why. It’s how I heard Catholic women of my mom’s generation talk after the church’s child molestation scandal broke. Learning about the predatory behavior was awful in its own right. But what really caused them to lose faith, what caused many of them to never return to the Catholic Church, were the religious leaders who failed to denounce the molestation; who dishonestly minimized it in hopes of saving the institution in the short term.
A bad actor can cause a scandal in any institution. The true test of core soundness or rot is how everyone else reacts to the depravity.
.. If the groups that Trump targets, especially the sizable ones, like women and Latinos, turn out in large enough numbers to vote against him, handing a crushing loss to the corrupting billionaire; if other folks who usually vote Republican join in that protest, to signal that this behavior is a dealbreaker; then the GOP will likely never nominate a man like this for high office ever again.
.. rare election where the larger the margin of the GOP loss, the better the chance it will have to be reborn into something viable and constructive.
Donald Trump and the Politics of Fear
Trump’s candidacy relies on the power of fear. It could be the only way for him to win.
.. Overall crime rates may be down, but a sense of disorder is constant.
.. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention similarly made clear the extent to which his message revolves around fear. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” Trump thundered. “Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally; some have even been its victims.”
.. But he also, in a more unusual maneuver, summons fear in the abstract: There’s something going on, folks.
.. When back-to-back terror attacks hit Paris in November and San Bernardino in December, he pointed to them as proof that his warnings about Muslims were justified, and voters flocked to him ..
.. Trump’s standing in the polls rose about 7 percentage points in the aftermath of the attacks
.. Trump supporters, recent polling has shown, are disproportionately fearful. They fear crime and terror far more than other Americans; they are also disproportionately wary of foreign influence and social change. (They are not, however, any more likely than other Americans to express economic anxiety.)
.. It is a feedback loop: He stirs up people’s latent fears, then offers himself as the only solution.
.. fear is a handy tool. “Fear is easy,” Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican ad maker, told me recently. “Fear is the simplest emotion to tweak in a campaign ad. You associate your opponent with terror, with fear, with crime, with causing pain and uncertainty.”
.. A majority of Americans now worry that they or their families will be victims of terrorism, up from a third less than two years ago
.. Nearly two-thirds worry about being victims of violent crime. Another poll, by Gallup, found that concern about crime and violence is at its highest level in 15 years.
.. “the psychological management of uncertainty and fear” to be strongly and consistently correlated with politically conservative attitudes.
.. the characteristic most predictive of a person’s political leanings is his or her tolerance for ambiguity. “The more intolerant of ambiguity you are—the more you seek control over your surroundings, certainty, clear answers to things—the more you tend toward conservative preferences,” ..
.. he would bring order and control to a chaotic world.
.. I really thought this was a rational policy disagreement that was headed toward a logical compromise,” Sharry told me recently. “Now, I see it as deeply cultural. It’s racially charged, it’s tribalism, it’s us-vs.-them. It’s a referendum on the face of globalization,.. The fearful mind sees immigrants as an invasion force, refugees as terrorists, rising crime as a threat to one’s family, drugs as a threat to one’s children, and social change as a threat to one’s way of life... “Trump speaks to our id, something latent in all of us to different degrees. This is not a political campaign. It’s an identity campaign.”
.. From colonial times to the early 19th century, the pervasive, virulent fear was of Catholics, who were seen as inferior, unassimilable, and in thrall to a foreign dictator (the Pope).
.. The mass immigration of Irish Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s ratcheted up the panic and convulsed American politics, with the Whig Party collapsing and the anti-Catholic nativist Know-Nothing Party briefly becoming America’s second-largest political party.
.. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is now campaigning on a fear-based appeal of her own—the fear of Trump.
.. as President he would escalate the likelihood of catastrophic violent conflict from without and within, posing a serious threat to the future of the United States,” her team wrote in a memo outlining their findings. This message, they noted, was far more effective than emphasizing Trump’s “misogyny” or depicting his economic record as bad for working people.
.. “Every time Clinton says, ‘Trump is dangerous,’ what people are hearing is, ‘The world is dangerous, it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous,’” she told me. “It just plays into the message of chaos.” And the more chaotic the world feels, the more people may look to Trump for comfort.
The New Catholic Truce
MODERNITY has left nearly every religious tradition in the Western world divided.
.. In each case, disagreements about the authority of tradition, the reliability of Scripture, and eventually the proper response to the Sexual Revolution have made it impossible for liberal and conservative believers to remain in community or communion.
.. What the church considers serious sin becomes mere “irregularity.” What the church considers a commandment becomes a mere “ideal.” What the church once stated authoritatively it now proffers tentatively, in tones laced with self-effacement, self-critique.
Spotlight On Truth
It is hard to find someone more cynical than I am about the media business, but I tell you, watching this movie made me so proud of the Globe reporters and editors on the Spotlight team, but also of my profession. I knew most of the narrative portrayed in the film, but I did not fully grasp until seeing this movie how difficult it must have been to tell this story in Boston.
.. That kid’s father might have been a working man from Latin America who didn’t speak a word of English, but he understood what was happening. He went out and hired a Jewish lawyer, and sued the church on behalf of his son. Smart man. Often, it takes an outsider.
.. I winced at a scene later in the film when one of the Catholic good ol’ boys tells Robby that the Globe shouldn’t run the story because people need the Church “now more than ever” (this is shortly after 9/11), and besides, Cardinal Law “is not perfect,” but he’s a good man, and we can’t let a few bad apples, blah blah blah. I had Catholic establishment people – more than one – telling me, an observant and quite conservative Catholic at the time – the same thing. Except the phrase that they tended to use was, “I know the bishops haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory, but …”. It’s stunning to think of it now, in 2016, after all we know, but there were quite a few good Catholics back then who rationalized ignoring the horror in just that way.
.. I believe he really is a saint. Nevertheless, it was Pope John Paul II who reassigned Bernard Law to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, one of the most honored churches in the Roman Catholic world.
.. In nearly every single case, I was powerless to do anything, because I could not convince these sources to talk.
.. If you think being a Christian is simply about knowing things – as in, getting the doctrinal questions correct — you are setting yourself up for a very great fall.
.. I thought I knew where the lines of good and evil ran within the Church, and between the Church and the World. And I thought the main thing about being a Catholic Christian was assenting to the teachings, receiving the sacraments, and following the rules.