Republicans have been demeaning the American community for decades.  They’re dishonest, mean and stingy, and openly disdain almost every generous trait we cherish.  They’re the opposite of faithful or godly that way.  Republicans seem to hate women, especially their reproductive options, and are terrified of anything like sexual choice.  They drive middle-income people into poverty while defunding anti-poverty programs.  Republicans applaud racist goons while ignoring judicial bias that crushes categories of people.  They are deliberately cruel to the most vulnerable of us.  Are the GOP the new party of the rich white incel rebellion?  I know they’re the least American, and certainly the least godly party.  Republicans see anything soft like charity and generosity as an odd weakness that any right-thinking person eventually discards as the ideas of a child.  They’re the new rich white-nationalist incel rebellion.

Wildly, Republican love to pretend that all their faults are virtues.  It’s deeply annoying to listen to them.  Any real man, they insist, is just the same as them, and if you disagree, you’re not a real man.  They’re not PC, and they scoff at ‘snowflakes’ who wonder at the obvious nastiness.  Republicans are not #BlackLivesMatter and remain proud of their immunity to all the evidence.  Republicans aren’t #MeToo either.  What true man would take seriously a bunch of angry women who can’t be trusted?  I’m sure older Republicans are snorting “Damn feminists!” from their plush leather chairs.

Earlier today, Attorney General Jeffery Sessions announced that it will now be the official policy of the United States to separate children from their parents every time they apply for asylum in the US.  They’ve been doing it secretly for weeks.  Although they lied about that when activists challenged ICE about it, they later admitted having pulled hundreds of children from their families.

I’m stuck on that last one.  ICE agents — US law enforcement officers — have routinely pulled screaming children out of their confused parents’ arms and sent them to foster facilities in distant states.  When questioned, they lied about it.  Why would they do something that cruel to helpless children and their parents?  The Trump Administration did it because it was cruel.  They think that’s the good part, and they like it so much, the Trump administration declared that it as the official US policy.  This is the new Republican morality.

Hard to forget that it was the Republican party that tortured prisoners of war America had captured.  They still believe in torture.

Republicans remain proud of their self-characterized ‘pragmatic’ approach to life.  And in their telling, the only people who disagree with Republican fear-mongering, race-baiting, xenophobic bias, and now openly evil behavior against refugees aren’t real men, just those girly men who hate their country and who should go somewhere like France.

Republicans have an odd relationship with wealth.  They’re the party of money and power.  Ask about someone’s worth, and they’ll answer in dollars.  Republicans swear fealty to the working class, but they were fine watching a huge swath of middle-class people being driven into poverty by abusive loans.  They say they feel sad and made unhappy faces, but did nothing so long as their financiers reaped the benefits.  Actually, that’s not right.  The Republican party blocked all the regulations that might have protected people from the 2007 meltdown, and successfully blocked all the efforts to mitigate the harm after everything crashed.  They even objected to anything that might make the resulting disaster less painful.  This wasn’t benign neglect; Republicans actively blocked efforts to help ordinary people not lose their homes.

To create the complete package, Republicans have become the party of modern racism.  Yes, lots of Republicans aren’t racists.  And it’s hard to pin specific people down on it.  Almost nobody wants to admits to being racist, after all.  But when you do racist things (refugee bans, voter suppression, pardoning criminal racists) for racist reasons (saying refugees are killers, drug dealers, and rapists) against all the actual evidence (super-low crime rates and high productivity), then you know?  You might be a racist.  And if you support racist things, even if you insist it’s only because they’re Republicans, then you could still be a racist.

I’m still freaked out by the Republican froth over anything remotely sexual, especially their violent attempts to control women’s reproduction.  It’s hard not to see the parallels with the Insel Rebellion.  And we have to watch Republicans swear they don’t have a war against women’s health at the same time they’re tearing out every piece of reproductive health care they can touch.  Nope, no connection there!

Republicans openly hate the poor.  Paul Ryan, the proverbial thinking Republican, has hated welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security with an Ayn Randian fervor ever since he was in college.  His loathing wasn’t ideological; it was Ryan’s self-described passion.  So Ryan detests any and every anti-poverty program.  How can you hate, say, food support for the hungry?  You’ll have to ask him.  But he represents the Tea Party wing of the GOP reasonably well.

Why?  When I look, the Republican answer runs shallow.  They sued to love saying it’s all about the deficit.  We can’t afford all that stuff, they said to us solemnly.  We’re going to go broke!  Greece, I tell you, Greece!  And then they voted for that gigantic tax break for rich people and corporations, including another tax holiday for their offshore profits, jacking the deficit up through the roof.  So much for that fancy lie.  (Not that any true modern Republican stops lying just because they got caught.)

Charity is another awful thing Republicans hate.  They removed most of the tax benefits for charity in that boondoggle tax cut thingie.  Legal support for poor people?  Oh, no!!  Gotta go!  They cut funds for public defenders, support for legal programs, anything that might shift power away from the powerful.  Why?  We need the money!  Although Republicans still managed to consistently cut the taxes for rich people and big, profitable corporations.  Maybe their god favors the rich?

So, Republicans want to afflict the weak and the poor and pull food from the hungry.  Disabled?  Slacker!  Get to work!  No help for the indigent, either.  Worthless poor!  Refugees?  Immigrants?  Rapists and MS-13 thugs.  And all those public schools?  Just wasted tax dollars.  All the right people send their children to private school anyway.  Fair and equal housing?  Republicans pulled the very idea out of the HUD mission statement.  Redlining doesn’t affect anyone they care about.

Jeeze.  Let me step back.  I wrote this post to talk about religious values.  Swear to god, although I say that as an atheist.  Sounds weird, I know, but bear with me.  While I don’t believe in god, I strongly believe in many of the religious people I’ve met.  I know many men and women of strong faith and many moral and honorable people.  Many (most?) of them are better and nicer than I am (not that it’s a hard bar to pass).  I honor and support them and what they do.

Although our parents raised us in the church, I don’t worship any god, his next-of-kin, special ghosts, or even any charismatic archangels.  Never believed that part of the story.  But the Christian values they teach in church?  I believe those moral and ethical ideas are mostly OK.  When I read the Quran, my impression of Islam was the same.  Both religions talk about peace, love, harmony, charity, generosity, humility, justice, service, and all of those other good things.  Not that Christian values are easy, because they’re tough to do right.  I fail a lot.  Still, they are values that seem both correct, and useful for all of us.  Those ideas are part of the core of the American sensibility.

I’ve talked to people in other countries about the US.  Before the Trump administration, they saw America as a beacon of hope.  They knew we don’t always deal perfectly with our endemic problems like poverty, but we wanted to.  We thought that we should deal with problems that other countries simply accepted.  America was inspiring because we didn’t give up.  I don’t know what people think about us now, but I know Trump and the Republicans have damaged us in ways we can’t easily fix.

The modern Republican party represents exactly none of what makes us good.  They aren’t generous, they aren’t humble, they actively foment wars large and small, they steal and cheat, they denigrate charity and generosity, they confound inconvenient justice, and they seem at best baffled by the idea of service.  Well, Republicans understand service enough to exploit the military, police, fire departments, and any other group that votes reliably Republican.  “We Support our Troops!” But when Trump attacked veterans who were trans, immigrant, or undocumented, I didn’t see that horde of oh-so-patriotic Republicans standing up for those American Veterans.

Republicans are always shrilly wrapping themselves in the flag.  I try not to be too bothered as they talk about American values as if patriotism was their private possession, for them and them only to judge.  It’s just words.  But we all get to watch Republicans Gerrymander districts, suppress minority voting, lean every playing field, and do whatever other dirty tricks they can use to rig the system against open American values.

So yes, I think the Republican party is morally pinched, sour and stingy.  I think they’re racist xenophobes.  I think they’re liars and, frequently, criminals.  And I mean that in the worst way.

I’m surprised at some of the Republican supporters, but especially Evangelicals.  I cannot stand Evangelicals who turn a blind eye to Trump’s obvious sins.  “No, Trump isn’t a saint, but he votes for Christian goals, and that justifies our continued support.”  Except that Trump and his Republican party don’t vote for Christian values, they vote against them, regularly and often.  Miss that point?

Republicans do vote reliably to stop abortion, contraception, reproductive health care.  Maybe being able to control women’s sexuality is what they really want?  Republicans also vote against equal rights in voting, representation, housing, job access, education, or financial options.  So maybe it’s about keeping brown people in their place, too?  And Republicans open discriminate against LGBT issues.  By golly, no gay wedding cakes for them!  I do see a lot of Republican racism, trans terror and simple misogyny reflected in Evangelical dog-whistles.  Maybe it’s a combo deal.

So, have Republicans become the party of the rich people’s white-nationalist incel rebellion?  I do wonder.  I also know lots of Republicans who deny this, but you know?  They only deny it in private.  In public, almost every Republican toes the line of Republican dogma, strictly and fervently.  Even the worst self-destructive nonsense gets a pass.  I don’t care what you tell people on background, if you’re not standing up, then you’re the problem.