Month: April 2017

Responding To San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor

~ lucianojoshuagonzalez ~ Leave a comment

As a few of my fellow writers have noted Ivy Taylor the mayor of San Antonio is in hot water after she made a stunningly unintelligent claim about what causes poverty. If you’ve yet to see the clip you can find it here. The statement begins at one hour and eight minutes in (in case you’re curious if you heard it in a snippet it wasn’t edited, it’s that bad).

 

A Brief Contextualization Of Mayor Ivy Taylor:

Ivy Taylor is known for courting controversy even on issues her own party (she’s a registered Democrat) has taken clear stances on. She refused to condemn Trump’s travel ban, she was booed during a prayer for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting due to her track record on LGTBQIA issues. Her booing came after statements Ivy Taylor made in 2015 about the “waste of time” of a nondiscrimination ordinance she voted against in 2013 (which passed without her assistance anyway). Even when she takes the right stance, such as Taylor’s outspoken opposition to Texas’s own “bathroom bill“, was for economic reasons and not for simple moral ones.

What Ivy Taylor Gets Wrong:

I’m going to start this off by stating that this is insulting to poor people independent of their religious beliefs. It’s insulting because of the clear implication that if you suffer from generational poverty there’s something wrong with your family and quite possibly with you. Additionally if you live in San Antonio and are someone who has suffered from generational poverty while also being Christian, this should be even more insulting to you than it is to atheists because it could be interpreted as her saying that you aren’t a true Christian.

Are atheists and agnostics generally poverty stricken? Research seems to indicate that though some atheists and agnostics are affected by poverty the majority of us aren’t, and according to blind statistics we are less likely to be poverty-stricken than most of the various types of Christians that exist in significant numbers in the United States. One solid example of this is research from the Pew Research Center which breaks down the percentages of various religious stances by household income and showcases that in the cases of atheists and agnostics only 24% and 22% respectively of households are poverty stricken. What’s weird about this though is that Texas’s poverty rate has outstripped the U.S. poverty rate for decades according to Politifact, and Texas is the 11th most religious state which goes to show that Christianity cannot be a crucial factor in deterring generational poverty.

It’s challenging to try and quantify such a silly claim. However at this point there’s enough research out there to understand that the idea that Christianity is a valid tool to overcome poverty is not based in reality. If that was the case then research like that of the Pew Research Center wouldn’t show that only two types of Christians typically have more wealth than atheists, and agnostics, (and also that only 5 types of Christians out of 19 surveyed are more resistant to poverty in the context of blind statistics) and the Episcopal Church and the United States Presbyterian Church wouldn’t be below the Jews and the Hindus in terms of wealth accumulation and below them in addition to being below atheists and agnostics in terms of preventing poverty. Additionally Christianity by itself is clearly not a tool to use to avoid becoming a divorcee or to not be a situation where one gets an abortion. It’s important that I state that none of these things make people broken, as Ivy Taylor seems to think they do given her statements, but these are things that are tied to poverty and in none of them is being a Christian and thus “having a relationship with the creator” advantageous. Therefore we can and should dismiss Ivy Taylor’s claim.

If Mrs. Ivy Taylor was attempting to pander to the audience (the person who asked the question was with the Christian Coalition) I hope it didn’t work. But if she sincerely believes her claim she has to be one of the most incredibly out of touch democratic politicians I’ve had the displeasure of seeing making headlines and drawing the ire of both secular bloggers and even local newspapers. Hopefully she’ll learn from this mistake and not repeat it again in the future.

Thanks to “Leaders” Like Michael Shermer…

Aside ~ ~ Dr. Juhem Navarro-Rivera ~ 4 Comments

…the Religious Right runs circles (politically) around secular Americans.

In a new piece in Politico Magazine, skeptic Michael Shermer shows that his skepticism is limited to religion and pseudoscience. In other aspects of life, such as politics, he delves into conspiracy theory. Basically, Shermer thinks evangelicals are getting conned by Trump (they are, but not because of the reasons he thinkss).

Trump was elected president despite being the least religious major candidate in the 2016 field. Looked at this way, Trump isn’t the evangelicals’ savior. He’s just another data point in America’s long march away from religion.

Of course, this assumes that evangelicals voted for Trump because he was one of their own. They voted for him because he is:

  1. A Republican. As Pew shows, white evangelicals have been a core constituency of the GOP for a long time. They just voted for the candidate representing the party they prefer (and against the candidate they totally hate).
  2. A racist. A recent analysis of the American National Election Study by Prof. Thomas Wood who found that:

Since 1988, we’ve never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions. The biggest movement was among those who voted for the Democrat, who were far less likely to agree with attitudes coded as more racially biased.

Nineteen eighty eight was the year of the infamous “Willie Horton” and “Revolving Door” ads. The GOP had not been as explicitly racist in its appeals for nearly two decades. But the Obama presidency and Latinx and Asian-American presence have reignited a nativist streak in the GOP not seen since the 1924 immigration quotas law.

His use of the phrase “evangelicals” is telling. Shermer, who is not a very sensitive fellow on issues of race, doesn’t call Trump’s religious base for what it is: white and evangelical. The vast majority of blacks are evangelical, and they didn’t vote for Trump. The polling firm Latino Decisions found in its election eve poll that 60 percent of “born again” Latinx (Latinx evangélicos) voted for Clinton. These data show that Trump’s appeal to “evangelicals” was mostly limited to white ones.

Aside from pushing the “Trump is a closeted secular” conspiracy, Shermer sounds naive in his approach to politics and totally ignorant of American history. He’s politically naive as he ignores the reasons for why the Religious Right is so powerful.

The Religious Right emerged as a force in American politics not because it was pandered to, but because it made it an effort to get politicians to pay attention to them. Or by becoming politicians themselves. Shermer expects that because there’s a large number of secular Americans now, politicians will automatically seek our votes. They won’t, as I have explained before.

Amazingly, for a man who rails against identity politics, he seems fine with claiming victory for secularism because the President is not that religious (according to Shermer). Cheerleading the victory of a megalomaniac, sexist, racist con man is fine as long as it can serve as a f-u to religious American voters. Thankfully, not all of us have such low standards in our identity politics.