“Dr. James Dobson Is Supporting Trump for the Most Bizarre Reason Possible”
Twenty years ago, when my son was a toddler, I was standing in the elevator with him. Have to say, he was just about the most adorable child you could possibly imagine. At one point, while he was still a baby, he did indeed look exactly like the Gerber baby. Curly blond hair, large blue eyes, etc. I would constantly be told by passersby, “What a cute little boy!”
So he and I were standing there, minding our own business, when the doors opened and a woman got in. I don’t remember much about her; my general impression was that she was attractive and possibly in her forties. Nothing too distinctive about her.
1) those who are voting for Trump in order to stop Clinton,
and
2) those who are voting for Clinton in order to stop Trump,
and
3) those who are voting some kind of third party in protest against either candidate.
This was from a nice woman I met during the intermission of a concert last week. She’d mentioned that she had spent part of her afternoon at the Democratic Party call center. I told her that I was a lifelong Republican who was voting for Hillary Clinton, we got into a discussion of the horrors of the Trump candidacy, and then she said the above. And she’s right, unfortunately. But the Trump candidacy is not a stand-alone event. It is, as has been pointed out frequently, simply the end result of a whole list of ills. If those who truly understand the appreciate the conservative point of view don’t vigorously oppose those ills, then we don’t deserve to win elections—and we won’t.
David French is an Iraq War veteran, an attorney, and a staff writer at the great conservative news outlet National Review. He is a highly-respected journalist, not a fear-mongerer. He is NeverHillary as well as NeverTrump. But because he dared to criticize the monstrosity that is the Republican nominee he has endured months of relentless online attacks with threats of actual physical violence. His family has been terrorized.
Right at or near the top of the list has to be Erick Erickson’s The Resurgent. If you’ll remember back in August I wrote a post titled “Do Your Ears Itch?” My point then was that we hear what we want to hear and so are easy targets for false teaching. Now Erickson comes along and give an example of a sound, biblical sermon being taken for a political endorsement. It’s really worse than being deceived by false teaching when you’re deceiving yourself!
Here’s the takeaway: “But Clinton does not right now have an army of Christians trying to find biblical authority to justify support for a moral cretin. Trump does.”
I can’t encourage you enough to read the whole thing. It’s not very long:
I could go through several ridiculous statements made by the Republican nominee, but none of them comes even close to his refusal to say that he would accept the results of the election. What an absolute and complete farce!
These are the words of a demagogue. They are dangerous. Trump is trying, in advance, to discredit our entire electoral process.
Out of many, many articles out there this morning about the utterly disgraceful performance last night I give you, as I always like to do, the peerless Jonah Goldberg:
“Trump’s Best Debate So Far . . . and His Worst”
And yet more evidence that the cause of Christianity is being stained by the finger-twiddling of a large swathe of evangelicals:
“The Trump Effect? A Stunning Number of Evangelicals Will Now Accept Politicians’ ‘Immoral’ Acts”
Why are you excusing behavior that you have excoriated in Democrats?
Why are you causing a stain on the cause of Christianity by making it possible for the world to paint you as an utter and complete hypocrite?
I do not understand this. I can understand people holding their noses and saying, “I just can’t vote for Hillary. I will burst into flames if I do that.” Or saying, “I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.” I don’t agree with people who say that, as anyone who reads this blog knows. I’ve made my own position abundantly clear. But I can sympathize, to a certain extent.
Longer answer: Of course not. It’s too much work. And he never intended to get this far, anyway.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how I formed my own NeverTrump stand and my decision to vote for Hillary Clinton as a way to keep Trump out of the White House. Three key pieces formed the base of the pyramid, as it were:
First, a family member said that if Trump were to be nominated that he would vote for Hillary, that he had voted for third-party candidates in the past as protest votes but that this time the risk was too great. Woa! I thought. Saying that takes some nerve in our circles. This was right at the end of March.
Can there be a clearer statement of why I’m voting the way I am? The above is from the wonderful article that I’ve posted before from the New Jersey Star-Tribune, written back in July when this sort of conservative rhetoric was not very popular. Please read the entire article if you haven’t done so.