Tag: Religion

South Carolina: Slavery, Sedition, and Now State Sanctioned Anti-Semitism

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The Trump administration is considering whether to grant a South Carolina request that would effectively allow faith-based foster care agencies in the state the ability to deny Jewish parents from fostering children in its network. The argument, from the state and from the agency, is that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act should not force a Protestant group to work with Jewish people if it violates a tenet of their faith.

The case being made by South Carolina is an extension of the debate around RFRA, which is more commonly associated with discrimination against LGBTQ people, but by no means applies exclusively to that group.

If granted, the exemption would allow Miracle Hill Ministries, a Protestant social service agency working in the state’s northwest region, to continue receiving federal dollars while “recruiting Christian foster families,” which it has been doing since 1988, according to its website. That discrimination would apply not just to Jewish parents, but also to parents who are Muslim, Catholic, Unitarian, atheist, agnostic or other some other non-Protestant Christian denomination.

I’ve really had enough with how the local, state, and federal government coddle these Talibaptist whack-a-doodles.

This Crap Will Not End Well

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There has been a band of religious nuts in Israel, roughly evenly divided between Jewish and Evangilical morons, have announced (yet again) that they have bred a red heifer, which, according to them means that the 3rd temple will be rebuilt (Jews) which will lead to the end of times (Evangelicals).

This kind of sh%$ never ends well:

A Jewish group says an apparently completely red heifer has been born – the first in 2,000 years – thus fulfilling a biblical prophecy that signals the coming of the Messiah, which Christians believe will end with an apocalypse.

The birth of the potential cow of prophecy was announced by the Temple Institute, a group which says it is “dedicated to every aspect of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem.” “On the 17th day of Elul, 5778, [August 28, 2018], a red heifer was born in the land of Israel,” the group wrote on its Facebook page.

The organization says that the female baby cow foreshadows the construction of the Third Temple in Jerusalem, heralding the arrival of the Jewish Messiah. Evangelical Christian theologians also believe the construction of the Third Temple will lead to Judgment Day.

………

The Temple Institute began its Raise a Red Heifer breeding program back in 2015 with the express goal of producing the heifer of prophecy, which would be required to meet a number of requirements, chief among which being that the calf be entirely red and “without blemish.”

**Facepalm**

Yes, We All Need to Apologize to Sinead O’Connor

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I actually saw this live, and was completely clueless

When she tore up a picture of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in protest of church abuse, some of which she was the personal target of, she got a LOT of grief.

Now, people are recognizing that she was right and justified, Even in her native Ireland:

Her declaration back in 1992 that the Catholic Church was rotten to its core and pedophile priests and their enablers were the real enemy was true.

It caused a massive worldwide reaction when she tore up a picture of the then Pope on Saturday Night Live in October 1992 and declared, “Fight the real enemy.”

We now know that the pedophile scandals were rampant during the era of Pope John Paul, who chose to turn a blind eye. O’Connor was calling out the right person.

Before Spotlight, before the worst of the American and Irish church scandals, O’Connor called it right and only got abuse in return.

The enemy has become very obvious since then. The revelation that a Pennsylvania grand jury found that more than 1,000 children in six dioceses there had been molested by 300 Catholic priests over the past 70 years while successive church officials covered it up is truly shocking.

The scandal, which has been going on for decades, and the coverup, which was particularly ferocious under John Paul II, has proven her right.

A Shande Far Di Goyim

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There is an investigation in New York state over allegations that Orthodox Yeshivas (Jewish religious schools) are not providing an adequate education.

Specifically, there are allegations that these schools are not providing an adequate education on required secular subjects like math, science, history, English, etc.

About half of the Yeshivas have refused entry to inspectors:

Three years after the city launched an investigation into whether certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools were providing an adequate education in secular subjects, it revealed on Thursday that it had made little progress. In a letter to the state’s Education Department seeking guidance, Richard A. Carranza, New York City schools chancellor, acknowledged that investigators had managed to visit only half the schools involved.

The inquiry began in the summer of 2015, when a group of parents, former students and former teachers at yeshivas told the city that 39 schools were not sufficiently teaching subjects, like math, science, and English, leaving students ill-prepared for adulthood. The Education Department then launched an investigation of 30 of the schools, after determining the others were either no longer operating or did not fall under its jurisdiction.

As part of its investigation, the Education Department interviewed some of the parents and students who brought the complaint, who had experience at 11 schools. Most of those interviewed said the boys schools taught math and English for at most 90 minutes a day until boys turned 13, at which point secular instruction stopped. Some said attendance during secular instruction was voluntary. And while occasional science experiments might be done in class, they said there was no science curriculum. New York state law requires that nonpublic schools provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to that of public schools.

Education officials also made announced visits to the schools, but, they said, 15 yeshivas did not allow them inside. “The D.O.E. has made repeated attempts to gain access to the schools,” Mr. Carranza said in the letter. “The long delay in scheduling visits to this group of 15 schools is a serious concern.”

Naftuli Moster, founder of Young Advocates for Fair Education, a vocal critic of secular education at the yeshivas, said in a statement, “It is disappointing, but not surprising, that nearly half of the schools to be investigated refused entry to the Department of Education. Reading between the lines, it’s hard not to conclude there is both a lack of secular instruction going on in these schools and that these schools believe they are above the law.”

………

Fifteen of the schools, he [NY Mayor Bill de Blasio] said, “welcomed us in, participated in an ongoing dialogue, made a number of changes, and according to our educational leaders, are doing well, and/or are making additional changes to do better. There’s another 15 that would not allow D.O.E. officials in the door and that, to me, is not an acceptable state of affairs.”

Let me leave you with Pirkei Avot 4:7, “Rabbi Tzadok used to say: Do not make the Torah a crown with which to aggrandize yourself, nor use it as a spade with which to dig.”

A Right Wing Freakout that is Completely Wrong

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They are freaking out over a court ruling in the UK.

The court recognized that a decades long Islamic marriage was covered by British law, and so the civil divorce laws apply, meaning that the husband cannot just leave, and keep everything:

A high court judge has decided that a couple’s Islamic marriage falls within the scope of English matrimonial law, in a ruling that could have implications for thousands of Muslims in the UK.

Nasreen Akhter wanted to divorce Mohammed Shabaz Khan, her husband of 20 years, but he blocked it, arguing that the couple were not married under English law.

Akhter and Khan underwent a religious marriage ceremony, known as a nikah, conducted by an imam in 1998.

This year Akhter, a solicitor, petitioned for divorce, saying the nikah constituted a valid marriage. Khan, a businessman, wanted to prevent Akhtar from bringing a case for a divorce settlement to court, and said they were married only under sharia or Islamic law.

In a written ruling, Mr Justice Williams, who heard the case in the family division of the high court in London, concluded that the marriage fell within the scope of the 1973 Matrimonial Causes Act.

He said the marriage was void under section 11 of the act because it was “entered into in disregard of certain requirements as to the formation of marriage. It is therefore a void marriage and the wife is entitled to a decree of nullity.”

………

Previous cases involving nikah marriages have concluded that they were legally non-existent, meaning spouses had no redress to the courts for a division of matrimonial assets such as the family home and spouse’s pension if a marriage broke down.

Hazel Wright, a family law specialist at Hunters Solicitors, said the ruling had “given heart to many who otherwise suffer discrimination”. She said it was vital for Akhter that the “English divorce court rule in her favour, that the marriage should be recognised as void and not a non-marriage. Otherwise she would not have any rights to make any financial claims for herself.”

This seems to be a fairly anodyne story:  The court has reviewed religious divorces, and determined that women don’t lose their rights.

But the flying monkeys of the right wing, upon hearing that the law of the land trumps religious law, as been screaming “High Court Recognises Shariah Law in Divorce Case in UK Legal First!!!!”

Yes, that is the actual headline from Breitbart, but no link, because ……… Well ……… Breitbart.

Frank Impresses Me Again

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Pope Francis has changed Catholic Church teaching to fully reject the death penalty, the Vatican announced Thursday, saying it would work to abolish capital punishment worldwide.

The revision to several sentences of the catechism, the compendium of Catholic beliefs, has the potential to recast debates around the world on how to handle those accused of the most heinous crimes. It adds a new wrinkle to the question of what it means to be pro-life — particularly in the United States, where Catholics who support the death penalty sit on the Supreme Court and govern states that permit executions. At the same time, it will test the church’s ability to influence with a moral authority weakened by decades of sex abuse scandals.

The church’s updated teaching describes capital punishment as “inadmissible” and an attack on the “dignity of the person.” Previously, the church allowed for the death penalty in very rare cases, only as a means of “defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

Francis has for years been a vocal critic of the death penalty, calling it an “inhuman measure.” The Argentine pontiff has pointed to the church’s stance on the death penalty as evidence of how the Vatican can evolve: The church for centuries permitted executions, but in 1997, John Paul II dramatically narrowed the standards for when the punishment was permissible.

Francis’s latest move places the issue toward the forefront of his own efforts to overhaul and modernize the Roman Catholic Church’s approach to social justice.

“There is no doubt the pope wants politicians to pay attention to this,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, an advocacy group in Washington. “He is not just speaking internally. The pope wants to elevate this as a definitive pro-life issue.”

The full political significance of the new teaching stands to emerge slowly, as priests and bishops speak more clearly about the death penalty to planet’s 1.2 billion Catholics. But in part because the practice has already been abolished in most countries with large Catholic populations — including throughout the European Union and across nearly all of South America — the United States is among the places where the shift could have the greatest consequence.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Catholic, presides over the state that carries out the highest number of executions. Several states have recently opened new discussions about abolishing the punishment. And in New Hampshire, one of the most heavily Catholic states, Gov. Chris Sununu in June vetoed a legislature-backed repeal of the death penalty, saying he didn’t want to send a message that the worst criminals might be “guaranteed leniency.”

The fact that Abbott or Sunnunu get jammed up over the politics of this is just icing on the cake.

The Jihad Against Plastic Bags (Literally)

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Al Shabab, the Islamist terrorist group, has banned plastic bags:

Over the years, the Shabab, a terrorist group in East Africa that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, have banned music, cinemas, satellite dishes and humanitarian organizations.

This week, they added a new item to the prohibited list: plastic bags.

Residents of areas controlled by the terrorist group, which operates out of Somalia, will no longer be able to use plastic bags, out of respect for the environment.

The announcement — by a group better known for suicide attacks that have killed and maimed thousands — prompted a flurry of mocking memes on the internet, some calling the Shabab the first eco-friendly terrorist organization.

The statement banning the use of plastic bags was published on Somalimemo.net, a pro-Shabab website that is believed to be run by the terrorist group’s media office. The website aired an audio recording from Mohammed Abu Abdullah, the Shabab’s governor in the Jubaland region, who said that plastic bags “pose a serious threat to the well-being of humans and animals alike,” a statement that was repeated in a Twitter message posted on a Shabab-associated account.

This real.

This is the New York Times, not the Onion.

Truth be told though, the difference is increasingly hard to discern.

Today is the Worst Day Ever

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I don’t mean this personally, but rather on a far broader level.

It’s the 9th of Av (Tisha B’Av) on the Jewish calendar.

It’s kind of the Spinal Tap drummer of Jewish history.

Here is a sample of its greatest “hits”:

  • The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
  • The destruction of the 1st Temple.
  • The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
  • The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
  • The Romans plowed the temple mount.
  • The start of the 1st Crusade. (You see it as a coming together of Christendom. I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
  • The expulsion of Jews from England.
  • The expulsion of Jews from France.
  • The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
  • Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
  • Formal approval of the “Final Solution” by the Nazis in 1941.
  • Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

About F%$#ing Time

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The Knesset has passed a new law which closes Israel’s doors to husbands who make their wives an agunah, refusing to give her a bill of divorce. The Conference of European Rabbis was behind the initiative, which has now been passed into law, barring recalcitrant husbands from seeking refuge in Israel.

If a beis din in The Diaspora has labels a man a recalcitrant husband, not only will be barred from entering the country, but he will be detained by authorities at the airport as a deterrence towards compelling him to release his wife from an unwanted marriage.

There is a peculiarity in Jewish law that a divorce has to be executed by the man, by giving a get, and if there is a civil divorce, the man is free to remarry and his children would not be a mamzer, which creates major complications for the child, while the wife’s children would be.*

As such, in many divorces, the man, either as a tactic, or just because they are an asshole, will refuse to give a get.

This problem is considered serious enough that Maimonides issued a ruling that it was acceptable to beat the husband to convince him to give the wife a get, so the move by the Israeli parliament is the least that they could have done.

It’s actually more complicated

This is Just Flat Out Racist

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Not a surprise, given that the Netanyahu government has made appeals to bigotry central to their politics, but the latest ruling refusing to recognize Ugandan Jews is particularly reprehensible:

After years of deliberations, the Israeli Interior Ministry has resolved not to grant recognition to the Jewish community of Uganda, Haaretz has learned.

Its decision was revealed in a response to the first and only request thus far by a member of the 2,000-strong Ugandan Abayudaya community, who sought to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return.

The response, obtained by Haaretz, notes that the applicant’s “conversion is not recognized for the purpose of receiving status in Israel” and that, therefore, he must leave the country by June 14 or risk deportation.

When Haaretz asked the ministry about its decision, a spokesperson said, “This is a matter of principle regarding conversions in this community – it is not about one specific applicant.”

………

The application was submitted by Kibita Yosef, who has been living on Ketura – a kibbutz affiliated with the Conservative movement – over the past year.

The response said that Yosef is entitled to challenge the decision in the High Court of Justice.

Converts are eligible to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return, regardless of what movement they are affiliated with, provided they come from recognized Jewish communities. But through its response, the ministry clarified that it does not regard the Abayudaya as a recognized Jewish community.

The Abayudaya began practicing Judaism about 100 years ago, but were only officially converted in recent years. The Jewish Agency considers them to be a recognized Jewish community, but the Interior Ministry has the final say on such matters.

………

Last December, a member of the community, who had been accepted into a program at the Conservative yeshiva in Jerusalem, was detained upon arrival at the airport and deported the following morning. The incident sparked international rage and accusations of racism.

Yet another reason why I want that corrupt hate-monger (Netanyahu) out of Israeli politics forever.

I Love This

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It appears that the denizens of Silicon Valley are experiencing some butt hurt because a popular pastor in the area has described their world as an, “Elitist den of hate.”

Truth hurts, don’t it?

These are people who make their money from regulatory arbitrage and government subsidies (patent, copyright, not having to pay sales tax, etc), collude to hold down worker wages, bust unions, etc.

No sympathy from me:

A Silicon Valley pastor has resigned from his church after calling the city of Palo Alto an “elitist sh%$t den of hate” and criticizing the hypocrisy of “social justice” activism in the region.

Gregory Stevens confirmed on Monday that he had stepped down from the First Baptist church of Palo Alto, an LGBT-inclusive congregation, after his personal tweets calling out the contradictions of wealthy liberals in northern California surfaced at a recent council hearing.

In emails to the Guardian, the 28-year-old minister detailed his “exasperation” with Palo Alto, a city in the heart of the technology industry, surrounded by severe income inequality and poverty.

“I believe Palo Alto is a ghetto of wealth, power, and elitist liberalism by proxy, meaning that many community members claim to want to fight for social justice issues, but that desire doesn’t translate into action,” Stevens wrote, lamenting that it was impossible for low-income people to live in the city. “The insane wealth inequality and the ignorance toward actual social justice is absolutely terrifying.” He later added: “The tech industry is motivated by endless profit, elite status, rampant greed, and the myth that their technologies are somehow always improving the world.”

………

The underlying messages to Stevens’ tweets, however, touched on continuing tension in Silicon Valley, where some of the world’s wealthiest companies and entrepreneurs have pledged to better the world through innovations, yet working-class families and poor residents struggle to afford the most basic necessities. The region has one of the worst homelessness crises in the country and a huge shortage of affordable housing, forcing tens of thousands of low-income workers to commute more than 50 miles to work.

………

He argued that the church’s rich neighbors could afford to “feed and house” all the homeless people in Palo Alto and surrounding cities, but instead focused on passing laws that further criminalized this population, encouraging police to harass those sleeping outside or in cars. The city had also made it hard for the church to provide meals for the homeless by requiring costly permits, he said.

………

But Palo Alto, he said, “wanted nothing to do with actual justice and was more interested in guarding their enclave of power and wealth”, adding: “If the wealth inequalities are not addressed, any talk about climate change, homelessness, and migrant rights is in vain.”

I agree with him completely, and I would apply it more generally to the hyper-wealthy throughout the west, particularly the US.

The world has become an increasingly brutal and hypocritical place.

You Should Have Thought about That before You Sold Your Soul to the Devil, You Contemptible Tools

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As Jon Stewart Said, Go F%$# Yourself

It appears that white Evangelical leaders are having major butt-hurt because the general public is realizing that they sold their souls to Donald Trump to feed their need to hate Muslims, Jews, Brown People, the LGBT, and Unitarians.

If you don’t want to be called a hypocrite, it starts with not actually being a hypocrite:

About 50 top leaders of major evangelical institutions will attend an invitation-only gathering this week to discuss the future and the “soul” of evangelicalism at a time when many of them are concerned their faith group has become tainted by its association with divisive politics under President Trump. It runs Monday and Tuesday.

 The diverse group, which includes nationally known pastors such as Tim Keller and A.R. Bernard, is expected to include leaders of major ministries, denominations, colleges and seminaries. The gathering will take place at Wheaton College, an evangelical college outside of Chicago, according to organizer Doug Birdsall, honorary chair of Lausanne, an international movement of evangelicals.

 The gathering, which has been in the works for several months and was discussed at evangelist Billy Graham’s funeral last month, will take place before the expected meeting of a separate group of evangelicals who advise, defend and praise Trump. Those leaders, which include members of Trump’s informal advisory council, are considering convening at Trump International Hotel in Washington in June.

 ………

 “When you Google evangelicals, you get Trump,” Birdsall said. “When people say what does it mean to be an evangelical, people don’t say evangelism or the gospel. There’s a grotesque caricature of what it means to be an evangelical.”

These folks, even if they did not explicitly support Trump, they have been willfully blind to the fact that their most prominent compatriots alibiing for a man with the moral ugliness of Dorian Gray.

This is not a PR issue.  This is an issue of your own moral failings.

You have laid down with dogs, and woken up with fleas.

Do Not Make the Torah into a Crown with Which to Aggrandize Yourself or a Spade with Which to Dig*

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The state of affairs in New York Yeshivas is scandalous, with many children not receiving even the most basic secular education.

In a New York Times OP/ED Shulem Deen talks about the real world consequences of this:

Last Friday, as observant Jews hurried with last-minute preparations for Passover, one Orthodox Jew was in Albany, holding up the New York State budget. He was insisting that this roughly $168 billion package include a special provision that would allow religious schools to meet the state’s educational requirements by using their long hours of religious instruction.

In recent years, education activists, among them former Hasidic yeshiva graduates, have pushed aggressively to bring the yeshivas into compliance with the state’s education laws. Simcha Felder, the state senator from Brooklyn who represents the heavily ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Borough Park and Midwood, was on a mission to get legal permission for the state to turn a blind eye to the near-absence of secular instruction in many yeshivas. The upshot? Tens of thousands of children would continue to graduate without the most basic skills.

I know about the cost. I was one of those kids.

………

During my senior year of high school, a common sight in our study hall was of students learning to sign their names in English, practicing for their marriage license. For many, it was the first time writing their names in anything but Yiddish or Hebrew.

When I was in my 20s, already a father of three, I had no marketable skills, despite 18 years of schooling. I could rely only on an ill-paid position as a teacher of religious studies at the local boys’ yeshiva, which required no special training or certification. As our family grew steadily — birth control, or even basic sexual education, wasn’t part of the curriculum — my then-wife and I struggled, even with food stamps, Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers, which are officially factored into the budgets of many of New York’s Hasidic families.

I remember feeling both shame and anger. Shame for being unable to provide for those who relied on me. Anger at those responsible for educating me who had failed me so colossally.

A woman I know works as a physician at Maimonides Medical Center, in heavily Hasidic Borough Park in Brooklyn, and often sees adult male patients who can barely communicate to her what ails them. “It’s not just that they’re like immigrants, barely able to speak the language,” she told me. “It’s also a lack of knowledge of basic physiology. They can barely name their own body parts.”

………

According to New York State law, nonpublic schools are required to offer a curriculum that is “substantially equivalent” to that of public schools. But when it comes to Hasidic yeshivas, this law has gone unenforced for decades. The result is a community crippled by poverty and a systemic reliance on government funding for virtually all aspects of life.

………

According to a report by Yaffed, or Young Advocates for Fair Education, an organization that advocates for improved general studies in Hasidic yeshivas, an estimated 59 percent of Hasidic households are poor or near-poor. According to United States Census figures, the all-Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, an hour north of New York City, is the poorest in the country, with median family income less than $18,000.

………

Knowing all of this, it takes a special kind of audacity on Mr. Felder’s part to successfully strong-arm the state’s highest legislative body to legally deprive his own constituents’ children of an education and a future. Some might call this chutzpah. In Borough Park, it would be more properly called a Chillul Hashem: a desecration of God’s name.

I think that Deen does a fantastic job of describing the real world consequences that salutary neglect has had on the Orthodox Jewish community, but, unsurprisingly given that it is an editorial in the
Times, he does not go into the deeper theological issues beyond calling this state of affairs a Chillul Hashem.

I would argue that the current state of affairs in places like Kiryas Joel is more than a disservice to the members of the community and the taxpayers of New York, I would argue that it is in direct opposition to the basic tenets of Judaism.

The scriptural quote in the title of this post, is just one such example, and the behavior of these leaders constitutes both self-aggrandizement and an attempt to make the study of Torah remunerative, largely by gaming the state welfare system, which is clearly prohibited.

There is more to it than that though:  A Jew is REQUIRED to engage the world in order to make it a better place, to be, “A light unto the nations.”† (Or LaGoyim)

More generally, we as Jews are placed on this broken world to mend it. This is frequently called Tikkun Olam.

In order to fix this world, one has to understand it on some level beyond that of signing one’s name on a wedding license or application for food stamps.

One needs to do more that take from society, one has to give back to society.

This is more than a Chillul Hashem, is is a Shanda fur die Goyim.  Their behavior shames the whole Jewish community.

*Perkei Avote, Ch. 4:3.
†“I the LORD have called unto you in righteousness, and have taken hold of your hand, and submitted you as the people’s covenant, as a light unto the nations” Isaiah 42:6, among others.

A Mulligan? Seriously?

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Tony Perkins, Christofascist President of the Family Research Council, an SPLC designated hate group, has announced that he is giving Donald Trump a “Mulligan’ on cheating on his pregnant wife with a porn star:

Donald Trump is still the answer to many conservative evangelical leaders’ prayers. Or at least to their continuing grievances.

They embrace Trump the policymaker, despite being uneasy about Trump as a man, says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a prominent evangelical activist group.

Perkins knows about Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who claimed, in a 2011 interview, that in 2006 she had sex with Trump four months after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. He knows of the reports that Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford) was paid off to keep the affair quiet in the waning weeks of the 2016 election. He knows about the cursing, the lewdness and the litany of questionable behavior over the past year of Trump’s life or the 70 that came before it.

“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Perkins told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

Weigh a paid-off porn star against being the first president to address the March for Life live via video feed, and a lot of evangelical leaders insist they can still walk away happy

Hypocrisy much?

What a Surprise

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That Jewish lawyer that Kayla Moore invoked to defend her husband, Roy Moore from accusations of anti Semitism is not Jewish:

Kayla Moore, the wife of failed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, has revealed the identity of the Jewish attorney she cited to defend her husband from anti-Semitism charges — and that attorney is a Christian.

The identity of the lawyer was the subject of intense curiosity in the Jewish community ever since Kayla Moore proclaimed at a campaign rally last month, “One of our attorneys is a Jew.”

Moore told local news website AL.com on Thursday that she was referring to Martin Wishnatsky, a staff lawyer at the Foundation for Moral Law, which she runs.

………

Wishnatsky, who got a doctorate in political science from Harvard University in 1975, says that he accepted Jesus Christ as the son of God two years later. He first started exploring Mormonism, but later distanced himself from it; he went on to write a book called “Mormonism: A Latter Day Deception.” He now identifies as a Messianic Jew.

………

After two decades in North Dakota, Wishnatsky went on to graduate from law school at Liberty University before clerking for Roy Moore in the Alabama Supreme Court, then working for the Moores’ foundation, where he writes friend-of-the-court briefs.

Wishnatsky’s personal website includes links to poetry, books and legal briefs he has written, as well as coverage of his exploits in church musical performances, talent show competitions and community theater.

………

Kayla Moore had also said last month that she and her husband “have very close friends that are Jewish and rabbis and we also fellowship with them.” According to Southern Jewish Life magazine, she was referring to leaders at Beth Hallel, a Messianic Jewish congregation in Birmingham.

What a surprise. 

She’s either lying through her teeth, or has no conception as to what Judaism is.