Following on from Bishop Budde's protests (#139, 140), the Catholic archbishop in D.C. and a group of prominent black D.C. pastors have all spoken out against using religious symbols as props for political speech that actually goes against the values of peace and justice.
I hope at least some who voted for Trump will think a second time about all this. Some Republicans currently out of power, like George W. Bush, have at least spoken out.
Christiane Amanpour's PBS program from last Thursday, with David Brooks as well as Sen. Chuck Schumer, was one of the better ones lately. The full hour doesn't seem to be online, but those two interviews are (last group of links below). Brooks is very articulate about how we seem to have lost the sense that maintaining the common good is a traditional social value worth hanging on to.
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Washington Archbishop Condemns Trump's Visit To Catholic Shrine ...
Washington’s Roman Catholic archbishop has roundly criticized President Donald Trump’s visit to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine on Tuesday.
One day after Trump used federal police to forcefully disperse a peaceful protest in front of a D.C. Episcopal church for a photo op with the Bible, Archbishop Wilton Gregory insisted that the former pope the shrine is named after would never have condoned the president’s tactics.
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree,” Gregory, the first Black archbishop of Washington, said in a statement.
https://adw.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/20...
Saint Pope John Paul II, known for opposing communism in his native Poland during his papacy, was an “ardent defender of the rights and dignity of human beings,” the archbishop said.
“He certainly would not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate them for a photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace,” Gregory added. ...
Trump briefly visited the Saint John Paul II National Shrine with first lady Melania Trump, who identifies as Roman Catholic. ...
The Saint John Paul II National Shrine is managed by the conservative lay Catholic men’s organization, the Knights of Columbus. ...
Several hundred people gathered outside the shrine to protest Trump’s visit. Catholic activists prayed the rosary, listened to a reading of the Beatitudes, and held signs, including one that read, “Our church is not a photo op.”
Susan Gunn, director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, a Catholic ministry, helped to organize a prayer vigil outside the shrine. ...
Bob Cooke, a leader for Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore, local chapter of a left-leaning Catholic group, told HuffPost that he believes the Trump administration has long acted in ways that are antithetical to the gospel. But violently dispersing peaceful protestors for a photo op while the nation grieves 400 years of racism was “more than many Christians could take.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/catholic-bisho...
‘I find it baffling and reprehensible’: Catholic Archbishop of Washington slams Trump’s visit to John Paul II shrine
The shrine was opened as a museum to John Paul in 2001 but nose-dived financially and was bailed out in 2011 by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s religious organization that has lobbied for conservative political causes, such as opposing same-sex marriage. ...
It’s unusual for someone like Gregory to make such a stark statement about Trump specifically; Catholic bishops generally speak about issues more broadly. In a statement last week, Gregory, who was installed as the first black archbishop of Washington in 2019, said Floyd’s death, "like all acts of racism, hurts all of us in the Body of Christ since we are each made in the image and likeness of God, and deserve the dignity that comes with that existence.” ...
“The Bible is a book we should hold only with fear and trembling, given to us that in it we might find eternal life,” J.D. Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention said in a statement to the Washington Post. “Our only agenda should be to advance God’s kingdom, proclaim his gospel, or find rest for our souls.”
Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Religious Liberty and Ethics Convention, said in a statement that he was “brokenhearted and alarmed."
“For me, the Bible is the Word of the living God, and should be treated with reverence and awe,” he said, adding that Americans should listen to what the Bible says about the preciousness of human life, the sins of racism and injustice and the need for safety and calm and justice in the civil arena.
“The murder of African-American citizens, who bear the image of God, is morally wrong,” Moore said. “Violence against others and destruction of others’ property is morally wrong. Pelting people with rubber bullets and spraying them with tear gas for peacefully protesting is morally wrong.” ...
Stephen Schneck, former head of Catholic outreach for then-President Barack Obama and current executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, said he was “disgusted that the Knights would allow the Shrine to St. John Paul II to be used for what is transparently a Trump reelection campaign event.”
“Pope St. John Paul II was an ardent foe of racism. In his last visit to the United States the saint begged our nation to eradicate racism from its heart. One cannot imagine a worse insult to John Paul II’s memory than to hold a Trump re-election event at the saint’s shrine,” he told The Post in a statement.
Messages to the Knights of Columbus were not immediately returned Tuesday morning. Trump’s attorney, Pat Cipollone, was a top lawyer with the organization, holding the title “supreme advocate.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/...
Clergy join protest in D.C. after Trump’s photo op at St. John’s Church
The clergy members huddled in a group outside the fence set up around the White House.
While protesters chanted loudly and banged on the black chain-link, the deacons from Maryland and pastors from Washington and Arlington quietly discussed one of the main reasons they were motivated to come out to protest for the first time: dismay over President Trump’s controversial appearance in front of St. John’s Church on Monday.
Their starched black clothing stood out in a crowd that featured tattoos and handmade T-shirts with protest slogans. Others in full garb also circulated in the crowd.
“To see the American people protesting civilly, quietly and peacefully in the capital of the United States, to see them forcibly removed so our president could have a photo op in front of a church holding up a Bible, is a complete contradiction of what it stands for to be a Christian,” said the Rev. Timothy Freeman of the AME Zion Church on 16th Street NW. ...
Biden will attend George Floyd’s funeral, family attorney says
An attorney for Floyd’s family told “PBS News Hour” on Tuesday that former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is expected to attend Floyd’s funeral in Houston next week.
The family will also hold memorial services this week in Minnesota and North Carolina. A public viewing and formal funeral will follow in Houston.
“And we understand vice president Biden will be in attendance,” Ben Crump, the family’s attorney, said. ...
McConnell blocks resolution condemning Trump over clearing of peaceful protesters
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday blocked a resolution offered by Senate Democrats that would have condemned President Trump for “ordering Federal officers to use gas and rubber bullets against the Americans who were peaceably protesting” near the White House on Monday night.
The resolution also would have expressed the sense of Congress “that the constitutional rights of Americans to peaceably assemble, exercise freedom of speech, and petition the government for redress of grievances must be respected” and that “that violence and looting are unlawful, unacceptable and contrary to the purpose of peaceful protests.”
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) made a unanimous-consent request for the resolution’s passage, but McConnell objected. ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06...
Amid Mass Arrests in Washington D.C., One Resident Sheltered More Than 50 Protesters in His Home Overnight ...
A 7 p.m. curfew was imposed by Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Monday; according to Mayor Bowser, 25 minutes before the curfew started, federal police used “munitions on peaceful protestors in front of the White House.” This was seemingly to allow President Trump to stage a walk from the White House, where he had held a press conference at 6:30 p.m., to the nearby St. John’s Church. A supply and support station for protesters that had coalesced outside the church was broken up by police and federal officers using tear gas to allow for the President’s arrival.
Later on that evening, Rahul Dubey was sitting on his stoop in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, a mile or so from the White House, watching police setting up a brigade near his house, preparing to arrest those who were still on the streets after the curfew. Some protesters later reported that officers were blocking all possible exits from the streets they were being corralled into. ...
The police presence in his street soon grew chaotic, Dubey said. Crowds began to amass in front of his house (as well as other residences) as police unleashed pepper spray at protesters and threw others on the ground.
Dubey told NBC4 that he saw protesters “absolutely decimated and beaten.”
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/doze...
“It was like a human tsunami on my stoop and I opened up the front door and … I hung on to the railing and everyone that was on my steps started running into the house,” Dubey said. Police continued to shoot pepper spray through the windows, he said, at those who had found safety inside.
Social media footage seemingly shot on the street — and from those inside Dubey’s house — shows many protesters who were unable to escape being arrested by police. D.C. news station NBC News4 reports that 194 people were arrested in the vicinity of Dubey’s residence on Monday night.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/doze...
In an overnight interview with Esquire, Dubey also claimed that police officers employed “trickery” to entice the protesters to leave his residence. “They send decoys to the door, telling them they can’t leave out the front, but if they leave out the back alley, they’ll be safe, Dubey told the magazine. “They just hijacked the pizza delivery guy for an hour.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a327424...
Most protesters stayed [at] Dubey’s home until the city’s curfew ended at 6 a.m. Tuesday morning.
https://time.com/5846659/rahul-dubey-shelter-...
George W. Bush calls out racial injustices and celebrates protesters who ‘march for a better future’
Former president George W. Bush addressed the nationwide protests in a solemn, yet hopeful statement Tuesday, commending the Americans demonstrating against racial injustice and criticizing those who try to silence them.
Bush closed his statement, which came a day after peaceful protesters were cleared by force to make way for President Trump to come outside, by pointing to a “better way.”
“There is a better way — the way of empathy, and shared commitment, and bold action, and a peace rooted in justice,” Bush said in the statement. “I am confident that together, Americans will choose the better way.”
Describing himself as “anguished” by the death of George Floyd, who died more than a week ago after being suffocated under the knee of a white police officer, Bush urged white Americans to seek ways to support, listen and understand black Americans who still face “disturbing bigotry and exploitation.”
The nation’s 43rd president’s statement does not mention Trump, but his call for compassion and unity presents a stark contrast to the current president’s more inflammatory rhetoric.
“The only way to see ourselves in a true light is to listen to the voices of so many who are hurting and grieving,” Bush said. “Those who set out to silence those voices do not understand the meaning of America — or how it becomes a better place.”
“We can only see the reality of America’s need by seeing it through the eyes of the threatened, oppressed, and disenfranchised,” he added.
Bush also seemed to offer a veiled criticism of the aggressive stance taken by some police against protesters, saying it’s a strength when protesters, protected by responsible law enforcement, march for a better future.” ...
He and his family have had a strained relationship with Trump and have rejected his politics, though they have largely avoided directly criticizing him.
Shortly after Bush released his statement, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, who has also said little critical of the current president, decried Trump’s response to the protests, specifically his desire to militarize it and use aggressive force, in an essay published in the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/202...
Mullen wrote that he was “sickened” to see security forces deploy hostile measures on protesters outside the White House to clear the way for Trump to venture out for a photo op.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/georg...
What Democracy Scholars Thought of Trump’s Bible Photo Op
The president’s true believers saw a message to appreciate. Many others saw something more alarming. ...
If another leader of another nation stood in another simmering capital and instructed police and law enforcement to “dominate the streets” against protesters, then walked through a park where government officers had forcibly cleared demonstrators from his path, then arrived outside a church to hold a Bible aloft like a championship trophy for the cameras — well, what would America think of that?
“If we were seeing this in another country,” said Kori Schake, a former Pentagon official and Republican policy adviser, “we would be deeply concerned ...”
It is time, some opponents and academics agree, to have the conversation.
From the earliest days of this norm-smashing administration, fretful critics, scholars and foreign policy experts have kept watch for signals of President Trump’s anti-democratic streak. This has not always required an exhaustive search. ...
... some Democrats are deploying a term that they have turned to occasionally in these three and a half years, but perhaps never with such frequency and conviction.
“The words of a dictator,” Senator Kamala Harris of California said.
“He behaves like a dictator,” Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted.
“For us to just shut our eyes and somehow believe he won’t go that far — he just ordered the federal government to fire at innocent protesters,” Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona said in an interview. “We need to accept the fact that this president, if given the opportunity, will try to be a dictator.”
Mr. Gallego, a veteran of the Iraq War, predicted that military leaders would find themselves at a decision point soon: “They’re going to have to say no to the president and not follow illegal orders.”
Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seemed to echo this anxiety on Tuesday in an article for The Atlantic. While he was confident that uniformed officers would obey lawful orders, he wrote, he had less faith “in the soundness of the orders they will be given by this commander in chief.” ...
Yascha Mounk, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively about threats to liberal democracy, said that Mr. Trump was best understood as “an authoritarian populist.” In Mr. Trump’s conception of authority, Mr. Mounk said, “what that means is that he and he alone truly represents the people. And anybody who disagrees with them, anybody who criticizes him, by virtue of that fact is an enemy of the people.” ...
“I don’t believe Donald Trump, when he took his oath of office, thought, ‘I want to be a dictator.’ I don’t think that today that he wants to be a dictator,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s outlandish to worry that should he be re-elected, the democratic system in the United States would be in serious danger.”
Mr. Trump’s invocation of religion in the context of law enforcement muscle struck several scholars as especially notable.
Katherine Stewart, an author who has focused often on the Christian right, said that the church visit on Monday called to mind political leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
“Trump doesn’t quote anything from the Bible. He really just uses it as a pure symbol of partisan identity,” she said, adding: “Authoritarianism frequently comes veiled in religion.” ...
Most Republican lawmakers have declined to criticize Mr. Trump this week, though a handful have publicly taken issue with his comportment.
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska on Tuesday declared himself “against clearing out a peaceful protest for a photo op that treats the Word of God as a political prop.” Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, often a willing Trump critic, has lamented the president’s “incendiary words.” And Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the capital’s most prominent black Republican, spoke critically of the decision to violently clear protesters from the area for a presidential photograph.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politic...
A photograph shows Adolf Hitler holding a bible in a crowd. ...
False. ...
On June 1, 2020, police officers and members of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., used tear gas and batons to clear an area occupied by peaceful protesters in front of St. John’s Church before U.S. President Donald Trump arrived to give brief remarks and pose for photographs outside the church.
The incident stirred up outrage online and many social media users accused Trump of behaving like a dictator.
Soon thereafter, a pair of photos started to circulate online that compared Trump to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. One picture showed Trump holding a bible in front of St. John’s Church. The other supposedly showed Hitler holding a bible in a crowd ...
The image of Trump is real. ...
The image of Hitler, however, is a fake.
A genuine photograph of Hitler standing in a crowd of people delivering the “Heil Hitler” salute was manipulated to appear as if he was holding a book.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hitler-hold...
Amanpour interviews with Chuck Schumer and David Brooks
5/28/20
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/05/2...
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/05/28/a...
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The rest of the May 28 show included an interview with Dr. Cara Natterman, author of a book about teenage boys and young men, and a clip from a CNN interview with Philonise Floyd, which someone mentioned earlier.
Other notable guests on recent shows have included Houston police chief Art Acevedo and St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter.
https://www.cnn.com/shows/amanpour
