Of Unicorns and Alternative Facts January 24, 2021 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Like many of you, I have a brother with whom I have found it nearly impossible to talk for the past several years. We were once close, though I have always been a liberal and he has always been a conservative, but until a few years ago, we always found a way to communicate in spite of our differences.
My brother and I visited with one another across the 500 miles that have separated us for the past 30 years many times, during Democratic presidential administrations as well as Republican. We disagreed politely about our nation’s responses to 9-11, and, without rancor, discussed our differing views on things, even as important as the invasion of Iraq . . . which he thought was necessary and I was convinced with illegal and based on falsified evidence. I, of course, was right about that war, but it didn’t keep us from having Thanksgiving together or visiting regularly.
What was different about the 2016 election was that the choice to support Donald Trump was not merely political. I would never stop talking to my brother because of political differences. It wasn’t politics, it was ethics. And, frankly, very personal ethics. Trump’s spying on underaged beauty contestants as they changed clothes, his unwanted sexual advances to dozens of women and even bragging about being able to grab them by the genitals, just made this father of a young daughter’s blood boil. And, more than that, my daughter is brown, and my daughter is an immigrant, none of which could have been lost on my brother who has known her since she was 4 months old.
So, what Trump had to say about people of color, and immigrants, is not a matter of politics. It was a matter of ethics . . . and more precisely, it was a matter of a lack of ethics. For years, when I have been traveling through my brother’s hometown, Birmingham, AL, I have stayed with lesbian friends of mine there and brought them with me to meet my brother for breakfast, and so, Trump’s ardent anti-gay rhetoric wasn’t political for me either…. It was personal, and he knew that too. The last time I was in Birmingham, I stayed with black friends and I didn’t let my brother know that I was in town because I knew how he would feel about that… again, not a matter of politics, a matter of ugly, indefensible, racism.
We agreed to try to start talking again. The Trump era is either over or it is ending and it is time to try to rebuild bridges to the more than one-third of America, including our own family members, who, even if they don’t want to wear the label of being racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, or Islamophobic, they certainly were not enough bothered by those things to refrain from voting for someone who was, indisputably all of those things.
So, where do we begin to start a conversation that has been stalled for years? At least for my brother and me, we talked about where our kids are, he has grandchildren, we have cousins, some of whom have died since we last spoke. We talked about weather, gardening, retirement, and our shared niece and nephews. We avoided the known triggers, though we will have to get back to those if we are to make serious progress.
You could almost feel the whole world heave a sigh of relief when, on Wednesday, Donald Trump left the White House, stripped of his ability to Tweet, to fly off to Florida and await the inevitable indictments that will be coming his way.
Most of us shed tears on Wednesday during the inauguration of Biden and Harris. I loved everything that was said, sung, and read that day but what I loved most of all is what did not happen. Of course, there were 25,000 National Guard soldiers there to make sure nothing untoward happened, but since the brazen and treasonous insurrection of two Wednesdays ago, we’ve been sitting on the edge of our seats, hoping that the right-wing militias would not show up to disrupt the inauguration.
President Biden especially said the right things, and again, more than what he said, I am grateful for what he didn’t say. He didn’t mention Trump by name. He didn’t mention the ongoing impeachment. And he didn’t mention the names of senators and members of congress who spun up the insurrection or continued to feed lies to the insurrectionists after their attack on the Capitol. And that is the right thing for President Biden to do. It is right for him to talk about, advocate for, and pray for unity. But it is the job of the Justice department to pursue justice, and for the media and our nation’s pulpits, to demand ethics.
I believe that it is vitally important for our country to become united again. I believe it is important for families, neighborhoods, and workplaces to become united again. And I believe that Biden is playing the role that was handed to him, but the role for the rest of us, I believe, has two vital elements:
A renewed commitment to what is true.
And sincere contrition on the part of those who have actively or passively attempted to replace democracy with fascism.
Over the past two generations, shameless lying has become an almost acceptable political technique.
Trump has been so dishonest for so long that when he has announced for the past three years that he was going to be releasing his healthcare plan in the next week or two, everyone knew that he didn’t have a healthcare plan and had no intentions of preparing one. He was all in to defend insurance company profits, no matter how many Americans died. And when he promised a middle-class tax cut would be passed before the election in November, when congress was not even in session and no such legislation had even been drafted, everyone knew that he was lying because he is a liar and that’s just who he is.
We have grown accustomed to constant lying, and a host of criminal financial dealings and election manipulation through foreign powers but the big lie, the lie that the election was stolen from him, that he had won by a landslide. . . the lie he used to give his supporters the courage to literally launch an insurrection against the legislative branch of government to overthrow the election and seize power, even by hanging the Vice-President on the Capitol lawn, and probably killing other legislative leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, that demands . . . that attempted coup, demands retribution.
What I have found especially disturbing, is that after this failed coup, in the wee hours of the morning, some of the Senators who caused the insurrection, came to the floor of the Senate and doubled down on the big lie. Our own jr. senator, Josh Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate and former Supreme Court law clerk, repeated the big lie, not because he is stupid, but because he believes that he can manipulate stupid people with lies. Hours after rioters had been removed from the Senate chambers, Josh Hawley stood at the lectern, grinning, and lying, as if he had no concept of moral responsibility for the danger he had brought on our nation.
And this week, after President Biden signed several executive orders trying to bring the United States back into the community of western democracies, Senator Cruz took exception to President Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, Tweeting that President Biden was showing more deference towards the opinions of people who live in Paris than he was to protecting jobs in Pittsburgh. Again, trying to act like the Paris Accord was something cooked up in coffee shops in Paris.
Thankfully, AOC called him on it with a follow-up Tweet, asking:
…do you believe the Geneva Convention was about the views of the citizens of Geneva?
Adding, “Asking for everyone who believes US Senators should be competent and not undermine our elections to incite insurrection against the United States.”
Again, Ted Cruz is not stupid. He is a Harvard Law School grad who also clerked in the Supreme Court. He is just a liar who thinks that he can manipulate stupid people with obvious lies.
Ted Cruz knows that the Paris Accord was written by the 190 nations that originally signed it. And, if you haven’t checked lately, there are only 197 countries in the world. So, we were not a part of it during Trump’s Administration, and we were joined by Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Turkey, the Sudan, and Eritrea.
There are perfectly good reasons not to be excited about the Paris Accord. When it was first signed in 2015, I published an article calling it what Confucius had described as putting plaster on a dung wall. It was far too little to solve our very real problems. But Cruz was attempting to manipulate his followers by suggesting that joining the accord was basically bowing to the whims of the French, something his South Texas constituents wouldn’t like.
I think that it should be illegal for elected officials to lie to the public about things over which they have some governance. It should be illegal, for example, to tell people to drink bleach to cure a Covid-19 infection, or to insist that hydroxy-Chloroquine was a legitimate treatment when medical science said the opposite.
And, it seems that both FaceBook and Twitter are going to have to take some larger responsibility for their role in repeating conspiracy theories, lies, and even foreign propaganda. Former Trump spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, famously coined the term “alternative facts,” but that paradoxical phrase was just a modern take on what the Reagan administration used to call Reagan’s egregious lies, his spokespersons would say that the president had “mis-spoke.” In fact, you could almost say that Reagan was the “king of mis-spoke” because he forced the FCC to back off of their requirements that news agencies either report only objective facts or at least give both sides of an issue fair enough exposure to let the people decide for themselves what they believe.
Reagan vetoed the Fairness Doctrine, because, he said in 1987, that it inhibited “free speech.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-21-mn-8908-story.html
Protecting lies and propaganda as “free speech” paved the way for the creation of conspiracy theory spreading organizations like Fox News as well as a whole universe of talk radio shows that turned paranoia, prejudice, and hatred into forms of entertainment. . . which is damaging enough to our society, but we have lately seen that it also becomes a way of influencing the outcome of national elections and may even pave the way for fascists to take over our government.
After years of opposing anything good that Obama tried to do for our country and then protecting Trump from the consequence of every crime he committed against our country, finally, even Mitch McConnell came to the floor of the Senate and said that the January 6th insurrection had happened because President Trump and other “powerful people” had fed the public a steady diet of lies. I recognize that McConnell never speaks or acts on principle and so I am sure that his real motivation is to separate the Republican Party from Trump’s influence, but still, he finally said something that was both true and relevant, and even though he did not name Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley as being the powerful people who were also directly responsible for the insurrection, we all, including, Hawley and Cruz, knew who he meant.
It took seeing thousands of misinformed, insurrectionists who had been fed lies for months coming to kill members of the congress, the senate and even the vice-president for Mitch to realize that it was time to tell the truth . . .
We have reached an unsustainable situation in our public dialogue where the difference between hard facts and totally senseless opinions are treated as if they have the same value. As if the difference between watching Fox or watching CNN was simply a matter of personal preference, as if alternative facts were just as good as actual facts.
Freedom of speech never included yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. What we have learned in the past few years that allowing Russian disinformation farms to post lies and conspiracy theories on Face Book and Twitter, allowing a president or a senator, to Tweet about election fraud and stolen elections, can be worse than yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Five people died in the Capitol insurrection on January 6th but it easily could have been 5000 and if those heavily armed hillbillies had been able to start a civil war over racism and tribal paranoia, it could have become 5 million.
My first point is that we need a new and powerful devotion to the truth. Hate speech is not entertainment. Lies are not a good source for thrill seeking around the TV in the nursing home. We need a new Fairness Doctrine that makes the media reliable brokers of the truth again, and elected officials who intentionally deceive the public should face more than expulsion from office, there needs to be jail time associated with these kinds of lies . . . as there already is in most western democracies. There is no real lasting freedom in the absence of responsibility.
For way too long, churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques have been allowed to peddle fairytales as facts. Folks, the pulpit should be held to the same standard as journalists, if not higher. Why do we allow the clergy to lie when they are supposed to be setting the standard of character, trustworthiness, and reliability? Please, there may be a wall that separates the church from the state but there should not be a smoke screen that separates the pulpit from reality.
My second point, and I will try to make this brief since I know that I am out of time, but join me this evening on our zoom discussion of the sermon and let’s talk more about this: I believe that if we are a nation of laws, we have to stop making exceptions for the rich and powerful. I am sympathetic with President Biden wanting to look ahead and not back. I understand why we don’t prosecute presidents for things they did wrong while in office for the sake of not using the justice department to persecute political rivals. And I get that people in government often make policy decisions that have questionable aspects to them depending upon what you value.
In 2017, Trump gave permission to the Dakota Access Pipeline to finish construction. Now, in 2021, Biden has reversed that decision. One president favored business and profit and the other is deciding in favor of clean water and protecting Native American Tribal lands. You know where I come down on that issue but that doesn’t mean that Trump should go to prison for the decision he made . . . about the pipeline. But must we view his months of telling his deranged and gullible followers that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, and that they should march down to the Capitol building by the thousands and disrupt democracy and overthrown the election as being like an executive order giving permission to build a pipeline through the Missouri River? One decision is dangerous and reckless, the other, is sedition, treason, and, realistically, murder.
You don’t prosecute differences in political decisions but was separating children from their parents at the border and then losing the children, there may have been a political goal behind those decisions but if your process involves traumatizing children, then that isn’t politics, is it? Isn’t that child abuse?
Are we the kind of people who will shrug our shoulders at child abuse? Does a President, an Attorney General, a State Department get to just walk away from that? In my mind, no amount of “whataboutism” or playing all butt-hurt about being a victim can shout down the call for justice.
Look, Colorado’s new member of Congress, Lauren Boebert, is a QAnon conspiracy theory believer, and a woman who thinks that she has a right to wear a weapon everywhere she goes, including in Congress. But she is so mired in her sense of personal privilege and her sense that liberals are evil that during the January 6th insurrection, she was tweeting the location of the speaker of the house, literally helping the insurrectionists to find and kill Nancy Pelosi. She has been credibly accused of giving tours of the Capitol building to insurrectionists in the days leading up to the riots on January 6th. And Lauren Boebert is still walking freely and attending sessions of Congress rather than waiting in jail for a trial she has so richly earned.
Colorado should be ashamed of having elected a high school dropout who wants to eliminate the education department. But that is politics, and it is up to the voters to choose. But sedition, being a coconspirator in insurrection and attempted murder, voters don’t get to make that decision.
At 4 p.m. this evening, I’ll give you a chance on Zoom to convince me that I am wrong but until then, I’m saying that people who assisted in, facilitated, provoked, or participated in the insurrection on January 6th need to spend many years in prison and never serve in elected office ever again.
The crimes that have been committed in recent American history are not matters of either politics or opinion, they are matters of law and they threated to rob this great nation of international credibility and they may become a boilerplate for a successful coup next time if they are not visibly and meticulously punished.
We were relieved on Wednesday that the 25,000 National Guard soldier managed to convince the insurrectionists to stay home. I believe that the gracious demeanor of President Biden and Vice President Harris were perfect for the day. But, of course, second only to images of Bernie Sanders huddled against the cold in overcoat and mittens made from old wool sweaters, was the reading by Amanda Gorman, the 22 year old Harvard grad, of her poem: “The Hill We Climb.” In part, she said:
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared it at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,
but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So while once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?’
We have survived a nightmare in America. It seemed as if we had lost our way and almost lost our democracy but now is a time of renewal, rebuilding, and restoration of dignity and character. We have some stuff to fix, but I believe that we can and that we will do it. This is our calling, this is our time to shine.
