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Everything Counts in Large Amounts (1)

23rd January 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

(Content warning: brief mention of the R-word)

A graphic saying, “Everything Counts in Large Amounts: Why Good Usage, Inclusive Language, and Typography Matter.”

My positions on standard English, inclusive language, and good typography stem from the same principle: consideration and empathy for readers. These principles underlie everything I do: editing my colleagues’ writing to make it more effective, writing plain-language summaries of research articles, using layout and design to reinforce ideas in people’s minds, and listening to community members to learn how they want to be described. In this two-part series, I’ll discuss why these principles matter. The first part focuses on standard English and inclusive language; the next one will focus on typography.


Standard English and the Anti-Peever Club

Informative writing intended for general audiences, such as policy briefs and newspaper articles, should be written in standard English. Although they may understand some forms of nonstandard English, people are less likely to be confused, annoyed, or distracted by standard spelling, punctuation, word choice, and grammar. Regrettably, some people—let’s call them anti-peevers—claim that that most usage recommendations are pointless. (Anti-peevers often describe themselves as “descriptivists,” but descriptive linguistics is a method, not an ideology. Anti-peeverism is assuredly ideological; it’s a form of linguistic populism, not neutral descriptivism.) These linguistic populists imply or say outright that New Yorker articles and YouTube comments about chemtrails are equally “right.”

Admittedly, many usage pundits do err by declaring certain usages objectively wrong. Some declarations are based on long-discredited “rules,” such as the injunctions against split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions. The continued resistance to the hypothetical singular they is excessively pedantic, as is American editors’ tendency to lop the S off towards. Anti-peevers are right to spurn these “rules,” but reasonable prescriptivists reject them, too.

Some anti-peevers will go even further by using or defending nonstandard expressions like alot, alright, irregardless, I could care less, and anyways. Some disputed usages, such as the singular they, deserve to be defended, but the self-contradictory irregardless and I could care less don’t address the need for clear or inclusive language. Even the anti-peevers’ beloved alright1 doesn’t add much clarity: all right is ambiguous regardless of its spelling. Alright and irregardless mean the same things as all right and regardless but are more likely to annoy and distract for no good reason. The singular they, on the other hand, allows for more flexible and inclusive language.

Contrarian posturing is not the same as fighting oppression. Sometimes it’s flashing a membership card: “I’m part of the Anti-Peever Club! I don’t care about good usage, and you shouldn’t, either!” At other times, it’s little more than trolling. The nonstandard forms anti-peevers defend, like anyways and I could care less, are not associated with any particular class, culture, or race; they’re slangy expressions that shouldn’t appear in writing outside dialogue or Facebook posts. (And some of them, such as alot and alright, are just misspellings that should be avoided altogether.). Defending African American Vernacular English and gender-inclusive language is laudable, but anti-peevers’ promotion of widely reviled forms is more juvenile than it is liberative. It is the verbal equivalent of teenagers deliberately choosing outfits that their parents hate: “You’re not the boss of me!” Anti-peevers use language change as a shield against criticism, but the nonstandard expressions they promote are not new. Anti-peevers from generations past have made similar arguments to their modern counterparts, often about the same words.

When anti-peevers defend such misbegotten forms as alot and alright, they insult writers’ intelligence, too: it’s no great feat to put a space between a and lot, or all and right. Although these errors are indeed common, mere frequency does not justify their use: after all, plenty of people use it’s for its. Anti-peevers also make excuses for the parlous state of writing education throughout the English-speaking world. Most people who use alot and alright don’t know any better. This isn’t their fault—it’s the fault of the education system—but mass ignorance isn’t an excuse for allowing errors and nonstandard variants to appear in edited writing apart from the creative liberties used in fiction, some forms of narrative nonfiction, and poetry. People who care—copyeditors and publishers—set the standards, not YouTube commenters, and our adherence to standard forms allows readers to focus on the message, not writers’ perceived errors. When anti-peevers invoke “common usage,” it’s important to consider whose usage they’re talking about. Are they talking about people who care about language and its use, or are they talking about people who don’t write or edit for a living and don’t particularly care? Why should we focus on those who don’t care, rather than those who do? After all, we’re the ones who will notice.

Linguistic research should be nonjudgmental, but in the real world, people do care about how others write and speak. Using nonstandard language in professional or formal settings has real-world consequences, and we all have to eat. Typos, misspellings, poorly chosen words, and punctuation errors, including disputed spellings such as miniscule for minuscule, pull readers out of your writing. It’s hard to focus when your is used for you’re, apostrophes are used to make words plural, and definitely is repeatedly spelled definately. People may know what you mean when you write apple’s for sale, but many will notice that you misused an apostrophe and take you less seriously because of it.

In “Making Peace in the Language Wars,” the lexicographer and usage pundit Bryan Garner writes: “This doctrine relieves English teachers of the responsibility to teach standard English. And it dooms us all to the dialect of the households in which we’ve grown up. One result is rigidified social strata. After all, you’re unlikely to gain any responsible position—such as that of a linguistics professor—if you can’t speak and write standard English. So much for egalitarianism.”2

Garner is right—anti-peeverism is less progressive than it is libertarian, more “I’m all right, Jack” or “I’ve got mine, screw you” than “you do you.” Most anti-peevers know the rules of standard English, even if they don’t follow many of them. It is a bitter irony that the self-proclaimed defenders of popular speech are frequently white people from upper-middle-class backgrounds who have never suffered the indignity of linguistic discrimination. In a particularly egregious example of anti-peever libertarianism, Oliver Kamm, a journalist and the Oxford-educated scion of a publishing family, wrote Accidence Will Happen, a permissive “guide” to English usage that gives the seal of approval to several nonstandard usages, including a few of my bêtes noires. Those of us who came from less exalted backgrounds may have fewer excuses to use nonstandard variants lest we be thought uneducated. I did not grow up in a professional middle-class or upper-middle-class family. I work with words and ideas; my parents and grandparents did not. Kamm, however, is happy to climb the professional ladder and pull it up behind him.

The Trouble with Noninclusive Language

Anti-peevers aren’t the only ones who disdain the importance of usage recommendations. Thoughtless prescriptivists will defend noninclusive language as ardently as anti-peevers defend I could care less and irregardless: hearing impaired, people with autism, the generic he. I use “noninclusive language” to refer to any terms that are biased against, outright offensive to, or rejected by marginalised people. To be clear, dismantling misogyny, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and other kinds of discrimination does not start or end with language; nevertheless, changes in language often occur alongside changes in attitudes toward marginalised groups. Using inclusive language shows consideration for the people you describe.

Slurs are an example of noninclusive language, but less obvious examples also exist. For example, deaf people and people with hearing loss usually prefer deaf, Deaf, hard of hearing, or people with hearing loss, not hearing impaired, and many autistic people prefer autistic or person on the autism spectrum, not person with autism and person with autism spectrum disorder. Activists with intellectual disabilities and their allies have long deplored the use of retarded and mental retardation. More recently, anti-weight-bias advocates have highlighted the problems with some of the words used to describe larger people, especially one that starts with an O and rhymes with “fleece.” Although these medical terms may not be used with the same malicious intent as outright slurs, their continued use implies that the outsiders’ views take precedence over those of insiders.

Like the anti-peevers who are enamoured of irregardless and I could care less, defenders of noninclusive language care more about their agenda than they do their readers, especially if the readers belong to the groups they discuss. Like anti-peevers, defenders of noninclusive language will often cite common usage: “That’s what everybody says, anyway.” “You know what I mean!” “Who made you the Language Police?” “It’s a free country!” “But doctors use it, so it’s OK!” Again, it’s important to ask yourself, “whose common usage?” What is their agenda? How do they feel about gender, race, disability, culture, or religion? Of course people have the right to say and write whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean they should. Common usage isn’t always the best usage.

Anti-peevers who—rightly—oppose noninclusive language are less destructive than prescriptivist defenders of noninclusive language, but both groups contradict their stated ideals. Anti-peevers do recommend, and prescriptivists do explain, and sometimes their recommendations and explanations are annoying at best and outright toxic at worst.

Drop people with autism and hearing impaired, unless the person you’re writing about insists on them. Use autistic people, people on the autism spectrum, and hard of hearing: those who care will notice your consideration, and those who do not won’t see the difference anyway.

  1. What is it with these people and misspelling all right, anyway? Their constant advocacy of alright makes me even less likely to accept it. ↩
  2. Garner, B.A. (2016). “Making Peace in the Language Wars,” in Garner’s Modern English Usage, p. xxxvi. New York: Oxford University Press. ↩

Filed Under: Autism, Disability, English Usage, Gender, Language, Queer Identity/Experiences

Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry

9th November 2018 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live or must be second-class citizens by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

  • Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
  • Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

  • Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
  • Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
  • Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
  • Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
  • Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

Filed Under: Disability, Gender, Philosophy, Politics and Policy, Queer Identity/Experiences, Race and Racism, Religion and Spirituality, Sociological Hyperawareness

Plain-language philosophy: Epistemic injustice

20th June 2018 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

This post is part of a series of posts in which I’ll attempt to translate philosophical ideas into understandable language to reach a wider audience. I firmly believe that big ideas are, or should be, open to everyone.

Everyone can learn things about themselves. They also have the right to learn more things in a way that works for them. Unfortunately, some people think that because of who some people are, they either can’t know themselves well or don’t have the right to learn new things about themselves or the world around them. In 2007, Miranda Fricker wrote a book, Epistemic Injustice, about how people ignore others’ knowledge and prevent them from getting more knowledge easily. Epistemic is a fancy word referring to how we know things, how we learn, and how we see others’ knowledge. Epistemic injustice means that people don’t respect your knowledge because of who you are. It also means that because of who you are, people don’t give you the tools for you to gather knowledge for yourself. This happens to people who experience discrimination or have less power in society, like women, people of colour, people with disabilities, immigrants and LGBTQ people.

Here are some examples of how people encounter epistemic injustice:

  • Students with disabilities can deal with epistemic injustice because they are not given a good education that helps them learn more about the world in ways they can understand. At school, people learn important strategies for communicating with other people, gathering learning, and communicating that knowledge. When people don’t learn those skills, it is harder to talk about what you are going through and what you need. Some people think wrongly that people with disabilities can’t use these tools effectively.
  • Some people may not take women’s complaints about sexual abuse or harassment seriously. This means that the people who abused or harassed them won’t get caught and will keep hurting the women who complained. Some people think that women don’t know when they’re being mistreated and that they’re overreacting when they are. This is unfair because women can tell when they are being treated badly and have the right to have their boundaries respected.
  • Poor people often go to schools that don’t get much money. Because there isn’t enough money to pay teachers or get good textbooks, students may not learn as much. They won’t have the tools to explain their experiences as well as people with better educations.
  • Doctors may not take people of colour seriously when they tell doctors about their problems, like pain or illness. This can be very dangerous because not treating people’s pain or illnesses can kill them or put them in danger. These doctors think that people of colour cannot know how they are feeling, but white people can. This is racist. People of colour can know themselves just as well as white people can.

The problem with epistemic injustice is that it makes it more difficult for people to communicate and advocate for their rights. When you’re not being listened to or don’t have ways to talk about what you need, it’s hard to have those needs met. This means that you may not have the healthcare, education, housing, relationships, laws and policies, or services you deserve. As activists, we should work to make sure that people are listened to so we can get what we need. Everyone deserves to be included in the community, and part of that means listening to them and giving them the tools to talk about what they need to be included.

References

Fricker, M (2007). Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Filed Under: Disability, Easy-Read Articles, Gender, Philosophy, Race and Racism

Taxpayers First!

30th October 2017 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

…Or why Trump’s budget, DACA repeal, trans military service ban and ‘health care’ plan come from the same ethos

CW: Trump, eugenics, Nazism/Hitler, classism, disablism, racism, anti-trans discrimination

Over the past nine months of his illegitimate presidency, Donald Trump has systematically targeted marginalised people under the classist, disablist, eugenicist principle that certain people cost too much. The idea that disabled and chronically ill people’s healthcare costs too much spawned the numerous failed Congressional Trumpcare bills and Trump’s executive order gutting the Affordable Care Act. Trump justified banning transgender people from serving in the US military through the claim that the cost of trans people’s care was a ‘tremendous burden’. When the Trump regime attempted to rescind DACA, the implication was the lives of undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country at a young age cost too much. The proposed Republican budget, which Trump has touted repeatedly on Twitter and elsewhere, implies that the lives of rich people are more valuable than those of poor, working-class or middle-class people. We’re all nutzlose Fresser, useless eaters.

[An edited version of the pro-eugenics 'Neues Volk' Nazi advertisement that says 'Steuerzahler Zuerst: das neue Budget der republikanischen Partei', or 'Taxpayers First: the new Republican Party budget. I made this back in May back when the Republicans' budget was posted online.]
[An edited version of the pro-eugenics ‘Neues Volk’ Nazi advertisement that says ‘Steuerzahler Zuerst: das neue Budget der republikanischen Partei’, or ‘Taxpayers First: the new Republican Party budget. I made this back in May back when the Republicans’ budget was posted online.]
Trump’s policies recall those of repressive governments whose entire goal is to inflict harm on vulnerable people. The Nazis come to mind, though I’m speaking of the early Nazi years, not the more recognisable late regime that fell in 1945. Remember that the Nazis didn’t start off with death camps like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka. They started off by instituting policies that ostensibly allowed people they thought inferior to live, but that restricted their ability to participate in public life. When they did start killing people, again, they didn’t start with Auschwitz. Hitler’s first killing campaign was Aktion T-4, the ‘euthanasia’ programme that targeted people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Hitler targeted ‘degenerate’ art and research like Magnus Hirschfeld’s transgender studies. The Nazis slowly stripped Jews of their civil rights before Hitler sent them to death camps.

A set of US posters promoting eugenics. Many of them combine racism along with disablism.

In turn, the Nazis picked up many of their ideas about eugenics from precedents set in the United States. There’s a long American tradition of persecuting disabled people. American eugenicists used IQ tests to segregate, sterilise and marginalise people considered disabled according to their test results. Lengthy genealogies of ‘degenerate’ families like the Jukes and Kallikaks connected disability to crime and poverty. Pro-eugenics posters claimed that disabled people cost too much to keep alive. Sterilisation of people deemed intellectually disabled was upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v Bell.

Trump may not think of things in strictly ideological terms, but he has surrounded himself by people who certainly do.

  • Trump has affiliated himself with white nationalists, some of whom I’ll list here – Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions and others. He has also associated with Religious Right ideologues like Jerry Falwell Jr, Paula White and James Dobson. These right-wing Christians come from a variety of theological positions. Some are classic hard-line fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists, whereas others are prosperity preachers. All of them, however, advocate against the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people. Many of Trump’s anti-trans policies are drawn straight from the playbook laid out by the Family Research Council, a Religious Right lobbying organisation and hate group.
  • Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller, all current or former official White House advisers, are ideological fascists. Fascism exists in ideological contraposition to disability rights. Fascism values the strong and disparages those they consider weak.
  • Mike Pence is an extremist evangelical Christian. Right-wing evangelicals like Pence believe that people who do not follow their religion’s strictures deserve to suffer. Pence may not be as shouty as Trump or as blatant as Bannon, but he is dangerous and needs to be watched. When listing out the dangerous people who increase the danger the Trumpocalypse presents, never forget Mike Pence.
  • Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, is an Ayn Rand devotee who would prop up Hitler himself if he could still slash benefits for poor and disabled people. Ayn Rand’s philosophy valued strength over weakness, and thought that people she found weak didn’t deserve to live. Though Rand wouldn’t have called herself a Nazi, many of her thoughts on poverty and disability are compatible with fascist ideology. Ryan’s transatlantic analogue is Iain Duncan Smith, the UK Member of Parliament and former Secretary for Work and Pensions who oversaw draconian budget cuts that caused the death and suffering of many British disabled people. Like Pence, Ryan knows how to couch his hatred of vulnerable people in socially acceptable rhetoric, but he’s just as dangerous as Trump is.
  • Attorney General Jeff Sessions is on record as claiming that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is a burdensome imposition on teachers. He has also scaled back disability rights enforcement in comparison to Barack Obama’s Attorneys General, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. He has also pushed Trump to withdraw Obama-era guidance on trans protections in schools. As a Republican senator he consistently supported the needs of the rich, white and powerful over the needs of vulnerable people. Sessions is a predator. He’s more affable than Trump, but Sessions’ zeal in reversing the strides made under the Obama administration reveals the danger he presents.
  • Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch – a Trump appointee – also has a record of minimising and restricting the rights of marginalised people, including disabled people and LGBTQ+ people.
  • The House Freedom Caucus is full of Tea Party Republicans. Like Ryan, Freedom Caucus members are fixated on tax cuts and benefit cuts.

Related Reading:

  • Kit Mead’s Paginated Thoughts blog often discusses the history of disability, eugenics and bioethics.
  • At Shakesville, Melissa McEwan has written extensively about Mike Pence’s toxic history as a governor, congressman and vice president.
  • @EbThen on Twitter has tweeted quite a bit about the Nazis’ T4 programme and the American inspiration for many Nazi atrocities.

Filed Under: Disability, Gender, Politics (United States), Politics and Policy, Race and Racism, The Trumpocalypse

Evangelical Authoritarians and their Angry God (cw: religious abuse, rape, incest, anti-LGBTQ discrimination)

27th December 2016 by Finn Gardiner 1 Comment

For people who don’t understand how the evangelical, usually Protestant, far-right exerts its influence on conservative Republican politics: let me explain, from the perspective of a social scientist and as a survivor of an evangelical Republican household who held these kinds of beliefs. If you’re unfamiliar with how authoritarian evangelicalism works, it seems utterly ludicrous that Republican politicians continue to pursue their anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ political agenda despite increasing public opposition. Marriage equality and legal abortion enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, but Republicans continue to oppose it steadfastly.

The God of these evangelicals is an authoritarian God who brooks no dissent from the party line. People who disagree with them are members of The World, working to advance Satan’s mission and subvert the will of God. Politics is not merely about competing policies and legislative priorities; it’s spiritual warfare. When conservative Christians battle against marriage equality, transgender rights or abortion, they literally believe that they are using political positions to battle against Satan and his legions of demons. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: if you don’t follow your denomination’s rules exactly, you’re going to hell. Permanent separation from God and his kingdom, and eternal torture as punishment. They’re inculcated with a visceral fear of going to hell, and they don’t want you to go there either. This results in conservative evangelicals encouraging theology and public policy that mandates conformity to their moral and social code, or ostracism for those who don’t. Persuasion isn’t enough for authoritarians. They want you – and the rest of society – to comply. It’s like the Borg from Star Trek; they want you to be assimilated.

Acts 10:34, a Bible passage often misused by conservative evangelicals to justify their position, states that ‘God is not a respecter of persons’. Within a more progressive Christian practice, God’s not being a ‘respecter of persons’ means rejecting partisanship, ethnocentrism and humanity’s foibles: our pettiness, our need for approval instead of doing what is right for those around us, our selfishness, our wantonness, our indifference to others’ suffering. For authoritarian Christians, however, this passage means rejecting the humane in favour of the inhumane in the name of God.

Evangelical Protestant preachers also teach that salvation comes not from good works, but through unalloyed faith in Jesus. It doesn’t matter whether you hide away in a gilded tower, hoarding wealth and treating poor people with disdain, or if you devote your life to helping your community. What matters ultimately is your devotion to Christ. Good works are encouraged by some evangelicals, but they are secondary. Naturally, devotion to Christ means adherence to all the legalistic rules that the authoritarian right considers necessary for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s easy to support laws that starve poor and disabled people when acts of decency are secondary.

This is why Republican governors like Mike Pence and Pat McCrory push through regressive laws attacking reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights in their states, or why the Republican National Committee produced the most anti-LGBTQ platform in their history during the 2016 Republican National Convention, or why Republican politicians like the supposedly ‘moderate’ Marco Rubio and John Kasich support abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest. They literally do not care about equal protection. Caring about equality means that they reject authoritarian Christianity. Worldly stakes don’t matter in comparison. They won’t budge because they’ve been conditioned to believe that changing their minds about marriage equality, abortion or trans rights means that they’re going to be roasting in hell after they die. This is why authoritarian conservative evangelicalism is so dangerous: it promotes social inequality and discrimination under the guise of devotion to a loving God, and it inoculates itself against dissent by promising eternal torture to everyone who strays away from the straight and narrow.

Filed Under: Activism and Advocacy, Gender, Politics (United States), Queer Identity/Experiences, Religion and Spirituality

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I write about a wide variety of topics, including, but not limited to, philosophy, politics, culture, disability, race, technology, policy, advocacy and activism.

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