I’ll leave it to @Tim to explain for himself what he meant when he wrote:
Ah, I see. And, by the same token, if a Republican takes a position against the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world as documented in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he is not expressing an anti-Semitic sentiment, correct?
Wow, “Eddie.”
Oh, I see. So, unless you have investigated the claims of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you take a similarly “open-minded” position on the existence of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy for world domination?
As low as my opinion is of you, I actually expected better. You keep lowering the bar, “Eddie”, you really do.
Given that over the top rhetoric seems to be your stock in trade, I find that statement ludicrous.
As are your sudden demand for facts, after happily demanding that your personal experiences be valued above objective facts.
But, unlike you, I have no difficulty sourcing facts.
In this cross-sectional study of all US counties, 35.3% of US counties, where 38.7% of US women of reproductive age live, have a high Catholic hospital market share. Hospital networks in Marketplace health insurance plans included a lower share of Catholic hospitals than the overall county share.
No. It would be ludicrous to expect me to be able to track them all down – particularly as this would have been on most visible display when they were first elected, some years ago now.
No. But no attempt seems to have been made to disavow their hostility.
As far as I know there is none (and it would be unconstitutional for such a law to exist).
Being opposed to the imposition of Sharia Law on all Americans is not the same as being opposed to Islam as such.
That might be true if such an imposition actually existed – but the fact that it doesn’t is why it’s a conspiracy theory.
I did not discuss that subject. I have no evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. If there were such evidence, I would examine it dispassionately, just as I would examine dispassionately a claim that Protestant Freemasons were secretly planning to take over the world. But I am not aware of any such evidence.
As for whether people inclined to believe such a claim have anti-Semitic motives, I am sure that this is usually true. But the question, “Are you alleging this conspiracy because you hate Jews?” and the question “Do you have any evidence for such a conspiracy?” are logically distinct questions, and need to be handled by distinct means.
I repeat: I see no evidence for such a conspiracy. In fact, I regard Jews as allies of Christians in the project of Western civilization, and am not inclined to pit the two groups against each other. I had several excellent Jewish teachers in both undergraduate and graduate school. And far from being conspiratorial types, they were very big defenders of freedom of speech, religion, and opinion, in the university and in society at large. Bigger defenders than many of the half-secularized Protestant liberals teaching in the same religion departments, who thought it was right and good to police the expression of ideas in the name of political correctness. My hat is off to those Jews, and to all non-Jews who share that intellectual attitude.
We weren’t discussing conspiracy theories. Others have tried to divert the discussion to that topic. I was responding to the claim that Republicans are hostile to Islam. The claim was stated in an unqualified manner and I challenged it. If you have evidence that Republicans are hostile to Islam as a religious belief, as opposed to Islam as a militant force responsible for murders, repression, etc., then trot it out. Otherwise, please agree with me that the original poster (Mercer) has not provided evidence for his claim, and that it was too general and imprecise.
Are you conceding that you are unable to provide any statement by any Republican that Muslims, Jews, etc. should be forced to swear oaths on Christian Bibles?
We were discussing access to abortions. As I discovered after our last discussion on the topic, the vast majority of abortions in the USA are not performed in hospitals but in clinics. Abortions are generally not performed in hospitals except in very complicated cases. So the percentage of Catholic hospitals in the USA would seem to bear only a very distant relationship to the question of access to abortion. And in any case, no one is forced at gunpoint to receive care at a Catholic hospital. One can choose to go to a Jewish hospital, a state-funded hospital, or any other kind. Your references hardly establish any “stranglehold” of the Catholic Church on the US medical system.
You admit that you don’t live in the States, yet you seem to have very strong opinions on how churches, health care systems, etc. in the State operate. Has it ever occurred to you that you might be missing some nuances of what goes on in another country?
“People”? You can find “people” who will call for anything. Is any Republican candidate, at any level of government, calling for this? Is this part of the Republican platform federally or in any state? Was there a rise in the number of prosecutions under existing sodomy laws, or were abolished laws against sodomy reinstated, when either of the Bushes was President? Or are you merely talking about bar-room opinions? If the latter, then all the charge amounts to is that a number of people (unquantified, and very likely a small minority) who vote Republican would like to see certain things happen; but if there is no evidence that the Party intends to act on these bar-room sentiments, then the discussion is pointless.
I never made any such statement. As a matter of civil rights sexual minorities should be treated equally. That is not anti-Christian. What would be anti-Christian would be for a health or history teacher to say something like, “There was a time when, due to backward and savage religious ideas such as “sin”, homosexual behavior was illegal and socially persecuted. Fortunately, modern science has eliminated the irrational concept of “sin” and we now recognize that homosexual unions are every bit as morally and religiously valid as opposite-sex unions.” I am saying that such statements – if and when they occur – have no place in a public school system which is supposed to remain neutral regarding religion. They would be unconstitutional attacks on the beliefs of Christians, Muslims, and others who do not agree with such a view of human sexuality.
It’s interesting that in a discussion about the alleged lack of access to abortion in the US, the only example you can come up with is an Irish one; and even in that case, there are all kinds of nuances and complications (reported in your source, but which you don’t mention).
For one thing, at the time in Ireland the abortion option was ruled out because it was held to be against the law in the particular circumstances (the law was later changed, but the hospital was working with the law as it was), not because the hospital was run by bigoted Catholics imposing their religion on the patients.
You’re changing the topic. I don’t wish to start discussing Democratic policy on issues not directly related to religion. You’re letting a side-point distract you. I was merely responding to your unreasonable inference that by “business types” I meant only very rich businessmen, when in fact the majority of people who own their own businesses are not very wealthy, but just get by.
You and others here have been tacitly suggesting that the Republican votes comes almost wholly from the religious right, but that is not true. In fact, long before the modern “religious right” existed in the USA, many “business types” voted Republican. Whether their charges that the Democrats are too close too “socialism” are valid or not, the point is that their own free-enterprise opinions did not spring from literalist readings of the Bible.
First, it was not only conservative Christians, but all kinds of people, who voted for Trump, including mainstream, non-conservative Christians, and millions of not particularly religious businessmen, union members, etc. So your thesis should not be “conservative Christians are immoral people” but “people who voted for the morally bankrupt Donald Trump as president are immoral people.”
Second, it was not necessarily as clear 4 years ago as it is today what kind of person Trump was.
Third, you are presuming that people have lots of options, when in fact, in practical terms, they have only two, Democratic and Republican. So if they wanted a change of direction from Obama, they had to take the leader who was offered to them, warts and all. If America had three to five strong parties, as most of the advanced democracies do, there might have been two parties to the “right”, and one of them might have had a non-morally bankrupt leader.
Americans have to vote in one of the worst systems in existence. They have to hold their nose no matter who they vote for; it’s usually a choice between bad and worse, not good and better. And it will never change, as long as only two parties have any chance of capturing the White House or obtaining any significant representation in Congress. Why would the two big parties want to change a system which pretty well guarantees them power at least half the time? Why would they want other Parties, which would potentially diminish their time in office? Basically US politics is run by two more or less corrupt entities, operating far more for their own self-interest than for the good of the country. Given that fact, every once in a while a stinker of a President will be elected. The system needs to be changed. Americans should start diverting their donations away from the two big parties to create new ones that focus on the good of the country rather than partisan bickering. Until then, they will keep getting exactly the government that they deserve.
Debatable, since we have now seen Trump’s actual behavior in office, and thus have new data, but even if I grant it, you haven’t replied to the first point, which is the most important one. Faizal Ali singled out conservative Christians as “immoral”; you argument, however, implies that everyone who voted for Trump was “immoral”; so why the focus on conservative Christians? Why not focus on the “immorality” of, say, the certified accountant in Ohio who doesn’t even go to church, but who voted for Trump? Or the “immorality” of, say, the unemployed factory worker in Georgia, who doesn’t read the Bible, but who voted for Trump?
Yet the “Republican” answer to the first survey question does not imply that Republicans object to Islam when it is practiced in a peaceful manner. It indicates only belief in a tendency of Islam to produce non-peaceful actions. Also, it is a general question about Islam, not focused on Islam in the USA. It does not mean that Republicans think that Muslims in the USA never act peacefully; it does not even mean that Republicans think the majority of Muslims in the USA are non-peaceful. It does not mean that they would not be happy with peaceful Muslim neighbors, and it’s not incompatible with the belief that Muslims in the USA, insofar as they are peaceful, are in fact good neighbors.
Note also that only a third of Republicans surveyed said that most US Muslims were “anti-American.”
If you modified your statement to “some Republicans are hostile to Islam” I would not object. But your original “Republicans” was ambiguous; it could be taken to mean that all Republicans were hostile to Islam.
I don’t see any question asking for opinions on the existence of mosques in American cities.
Trump won mainly because prominent leaders of conservative Christianity called on Christians to support him. And those are the very leaders who have long been telling us that those Christians are the source of morality for the nation.
And I suppose survey showing a belief in a “tendency” for black people to be shiftless or in Jewish people to be stingy would not be an indication of racism or anti-Semitism, eh?
“That’s because conservative Christians are immoral people,”
Noting that you had put a “Like” on Faizal’s statement, I thought out loud:
Your next response to me, which I presumed was meant to justify your approval of Faizal’s statement, was:
The most natural way of reading this sequence of statements is: “We can know that conservative Christians are immoral people, because they elected the morally bankrupt Donald Trump as president.”
So, three questions:
1-- Can you understand how I and possibly others might read the sequence with that meaning?
2-- Are you arguing that we can know that conservative Christians are immoral people, because they elected the morally bankrupt Donald Trump as president?
3-- If that is not what you meant, what did you mean when you wrote “Conservative Christians elected the morally bankrupt Donald Trump as president”? What conclusion were you inviting your readers, or me specifically, to draw from that statement?
What’s the alternative? That Republicans should approve of the activities of Muslims not only when they are peaceful, but also when they fly planes into buildings, killing thousands of people? And also when Muslim regimes (or in some cases, not the regimes, but Muslim mobs) oppress, murder, and dispossess non-Muslim citizens in their countries?
Let’s review our fractions. A third is less than a half. Now, Mercer claimed that “Republicans” were hostile to Islam. When used without qualification, “Republicans” means either “all Republicans” or “Republicans generally”, i.e., more than half of them. So if only a third of Republicans think Muslims in the USA are anti-American, that’s less than half of them, and I’m asking Mercer to account for that result. Or you.
And gee, if you’re offended by fractions less than half, more than a sixth of Democrats gave the same answer as the Republicans. One in every six Democrats. Do you have any chastisement to offer that significant fraction? Or is it only Republicans that need correction?
You maybe weren’t. But in that case you are carefully avoiding a large number of statements by a number of prominent Republicans, including the President and the QAnon candidates for Congress. On the topic of anti-Islamic conspiracy theories, we have this:
We were discussing access to abortions. As I discovered after our last discussion on the topic, the vast majority of abortions in the USA are not performed in hospitals but in clinics.
But sometimes an emergency in a hospital situation requires an abortion in order to save the mother's life. If that emergency happens to a woman who is in a *Catholic* hospital, there's a good chance that the mother dies. This is what happened in the case @Faizal_Ali was referring to. Hence my point about Catholic market share.
Addendum: Further links on Republican anti-Islam sentiment & paranoia: