Rss@dailykos.com (kerry Eleveld) · Monday, May 09, 2016, 5:57 pm
After years of lecturing everyone about right and wrong and “family values” and attempting to statutorily impose their own beliefs on America, Christian fundamentalists are now shocked to find out that they’ve been abandoned by pretty much everyone, including the Republican party. Katie Zezima reports on fundie dysphoria in the wake of Donald Trump’s ascension to titular head of the Republican party.
“In a sense, we feel abandoned by our party,” [Pastor Gary] Fuller said. “There’s nobody left.”
Fuller and other conservatives whose voting decisions are guided by their Christian faith find themselves dismayed and adrift now that Trump has wrested control of the Republican Party. It is a sentiment that reaches from the small, aluminum-sided church with a large white cross on its front that Fuller and his wife built on the Nebraska plains to the highest levels of American religious life. Even progressive Christians — evangelicals and Catholics, among others — who don’t necessarily vote Republican are alarmed that Trump is attracting many voters who call themselves religious. […]
“This year the Republican Party has not just surrendered on the culture wars, they’ve joined the other side. And that’s a unique situation,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“This year” may turn out to be a gross underestimation of the cultural change that’s taking place within the GOP and America, frankly. Trump and his followers have mostly rejected the notion that they need to embrace the fundamentalist agenda in order to win and—perhaps more to the point—that winning on fundie terms is even worth it.
Ted Cruz’s failure to convert his demonization of transgender individuals into votes in Indiana wasn’t simply a local miscalculation, it was fundamental misunderstanding of where the nationwide electorate stands on LGBTQ issues. While the public is still learning about gay and transgender people, voters seem less vulnerable to “the sky is falling” messages that social conservatives employed with same-sex marriage, for instance. As a poll found this week, 57 percent of Americans oppose mandating which bathrooms transgender individuals should use and 75 percent support equal protection laws for transgender Americans in jobs, housing, and public accommodations.
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