2024 presidential and state level elections center on the so-called “cultural war” issues of God, Gays, Gates, and Guns (all connected to fears of invasion).
May 8, 2024 by Warren Blumenfeld
Within the patriarchal, Christian, white supremacist overarching structure that has perennially held power in the United States since colonial times, the issues that hold the highest sway among dominant group members, even more than “it’s the economy stupid,” in the 2024 presidential and state level elections center on the so-called “cultural war” issues of God, Gays, Gates, and Guns (all connected to fears of invasion).
God: Christians as “Innocent” and “Pure”
What is occurring around the country, as increasing numbers of school districts are clamping down on students access to books and other curricular and library resources on topics such as sexuality, gender identity, race, and the “hard” history of the United States all conforms directly with major foundational principles of patriarchal Christian white supremacy.
Speaking in December 2022 on a progressive political panel titled “Straight White American Jesus” in Denver, focusing on the topic white Christian nationalism in the United States, speakers talked of major components of Christian nationalism, specifically the “innocence” in history, and the “purity culture.”
Sara Moslener, a lecturer in religion at Central Michigan University, asserted that concepts of “innocence” and “purity culture” are often located in white Christian nationalism, stemming from colonial history when whiteness was coupled with freedom and innocence.
“The innocence that is connected to white racial identity has been a … delusion that has worked really well in giving white people a sense of specialness, a sense of ‘we have something in common with one another’,” she said. “There is this sense that we are innocent of all of these things, and white Christian nationalism says: well, this was all part of God’s plan.”
So, bringing up some of the “hard” history of the United States, for example, white racism, challenges this notion of “white innocence,” while restricting or banning these discussions in the schools and in businesses theoretically avoids a potential narcissistic injury to white people.
Moslener continued by explaining the concept of “purity culture,” taken from conservative evangelical Christianity that opposes abortion rights, homosexuality, transgender identities, and adheres to traditional gender roles and sexual abstinence before marriage for women. She claimed that this is also foundational to Christian nationalism. This “purity culture” is mainly about “evangelicals gaining political power.”
“White Christian Nationalism is steeped in myths of national innocence and this idea that the founding of the United States was a God-anointed beginning,” Moslener said. And this is connected as a movement by a unified commitment to a social order of a shared theology of family, and a shared perception of gender roles, sexuality, and gender expression.
Katherine Stewart, an investigative journalist and author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, who was also on the panel said of Christian nationalism,
“It’s not a single religion, it’s both an ideology – a set of ideas — and it’s also a political movement – an organized quest for power.”
Allowing free and age-appropriate discussions, however, of the “hard” history connected to race and racism unmasks this Christian nationalist myth of “white innocence.” And free and age-appropriate discussions of topics around sexuality and gender knocks out of the water the propagation of their invention of some sort of Christian “purity culture” destined by God.
These laws are nothing less than the means to the goal of further establishing a patriarchal Christian white nationalist power structure in the United States.
Gays (Lesbians, Gay Males, Bisexuals, Transgender, Queer)
What is patriarchy!?
According to social scientist, Allan Johnson,
“A society is patriarchal to the degree that it is male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. It also involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women. Patriarchy is male-dominated in that positions of authority — political, economic, legal, religious, educational, military, domestic – are generally reserved for men.”
Cisgender, white, heterosexual, Christian males grow up in the United States with the understanding – consciously or in more nuanced and subconscious ways – that they hold the power, in fact, they are entitled to maintain and restrict this power from others.
This cisgender, white, heterosexual Christian male power structure has further constructed an internal hierarchy of power and privilege, a norm of masculinity.
Atop this hierarchy we find the so-called “Alpha” male: the assumed “leader of the pack,” the dominant male, the independent self-sustaining male.
Below the Alpha sits the “Beta” male: seen as weaker in courage and independence, as unremarkable, careful to avoid risk and confrontation. Beta males lack the physical presence, charisma, and confidence of the Alpha male. They are seen as the followers.
“Omaga” males are often loners who do not fit into the Alpha/Beta typology. They may be more introverted, shy, or socially uncomfortable.
Feminist theory teaches us that within a patriarchal society, males are awarded with the powerful outward objectifying and colonizing male gaze: the act of viewing women as sexual objects for the edification of the heterosexual cisgender male.
Gay, bisexual, and pansexual men confound and challenge the direction of the male gaze, possibly back onto, and thereby threatening to, cisgender heterosexual males, who sometimes react violently. Within the patriarchal power structure, gay, bisexual, and pansexual males are often understood as traitors or conspirators by turning the powerful gaze around, and by abandoning their power to sexually objectify women.
While cisgender heterosexual males may fantasize imagining women sexually responding to one another, lesbians, bisexual, and pansexual women challenge the colonizing male gaze. Holding sexual attraction over males often does not add to their degree of self-worth and to their potential for partnership. In a sense, then, they too are often understood as traitors or conspirators to the sex/gender status quo.
Feminists formed a new wave in the fight for women’s suffrage against a high tide of obstructionism within a patriarchal system of male domination and misogyny, and an attitude that the enfranchisement of women would destroy Christianity and civilization itself.
History is replete with groups and individuals facing colossal odds for simply expressing their truth, and for that, they were often forced to pay the ultimate price. Governments and powerful individuals have devised ways of silencing opposition for the purpose of maintaining and extending its control and domination.
They commit genocide upon the true human liberators, the profits, the visionaries who advocate for a just and free world. These visionaries, who were persecuted in their own time, have achieved not only exoneration, but more importantly, have become venerated as the visionaries they truly are.
Trans people have exposed the truth regarding the alterability of we call “gender” as a social construction, one which our society ascribes to each of us as it assigns us a sex at birth.
The process of “transitioning,” of confirming the gender you know to be yours, undermines the foundation of the patriarchy, which centers on the notion of fixed, invariable, inimical, unalterable genders according to the binary notion of male versus female: as “opposite” sexes.
With the label “female” assigned at birth, society forces us to follow its “feminine script,” and with “male” assigned at birth, we are handed our “masculine” script to act out. As scripts are given to actors in a play, gender role scripts were also written long before any of us entered the stage of life. In fact, they have little connection with our nature, beliefs, interests, and values.
If we challenge the director by refusing to follow our lines, and when we tell the truth about this human lie about fixed and unalterable genders, the director (patriarchal societies) doles out harsh, often fatal punishments.
Members of trans communities often suffer the consequences of other truth tellers of the past. Nearly every two days, a person is killed somewhere in the world for expressing gender nonconformity. The vast majority of murders are trans women of color.
Murderers of trans people react in extreme and fanatical ways at the direction of the larger coercive societal battalions bent on destroying all signs of gender transgression in young and old alike in the maintenance of gender scripts.
Most of us function as conscious or unconscious co-directors in this drama each time we enforce gender-role conformity onto others, and each time we relinquish our critical consciousness by failing to rewrite or destroy the scripts in ways that operate integrally for us.
Those who bully in society and filtered into the schools often fulfill the social “function” of establishing and reinforcing the socially constructed scripts handed to them when they enter the performance.
Within a patriarchal society that transmits distorted gender extremes:How dare gay men think of coming on to me sexually, a cisgender heterosexual male?
How dare women demand their reproductive freedoms, which would reduce or even take away my making the decision whether to carry or abort my genetic offspring?
How dare transmen even think about taking the privileges by transitioning that I have “earned” from birth?
How dare transwomen relinquish male privilege and betray their gender (read as betraying patriarchy itself)?
In Wisconsin on Tuesday, April 4, at one of his presidential campaign stops – infrequent since he spends much of his time defending himself in several criminal and civil court cases – Donald Trump lambasted President Biden for issuing a White House proclamation on Sunday, March 31 as the annual International Trans Day of Visibility, which coincidentally fell on Easter Sunday this year.
Though Biden has repeatedly issued this proclamation in each year of this presidency, Trump nonetheless claimed some sort of Christian persecution by protesting:
“What the h— was Biden thinking when he declared Easter Sunday to be trans visibility day?” Trump shouted, to loud boos and thumbs down signs from the audience. “Such total disrespect to Christians.”
Trump predicted that he would win the presidential election and promised his acolytes that “November 5th [election day] is going to be called something else,” he said. “Christian visibility day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before.” The crowd responded, of course, with wild applause.
Laws are built upon and reflect the society in which they are meant to affect. Our patriarchal Christian white supremacist individualistic society opposes and inhibits the development of universal health care, opposes women’s reproductive freedoms, encourages the inequities in salaries between men and women, establishes and maintains the massive development of wealth for a very few while encouraging the enormous financial disparities between the very rich and everyone else, and I could continue to give examples.
Throughout history, examples abound of male domination over the rights and lives of women and girls.Men denied women the vote until women fought hard and demanded the rights of political enfranchisement, though women in some countries today still are restricted from voting;
strictly enforced gender-based social roles mandated without choice that women’s only option was to remain in the home to undertake cleaning and childcare duties;
women were and continue to be by far the primary target of harassment, abuse, physical assault, and rape by men;
women were and remain locked out of many professions;
rules required that women teachers relinquish their jobs after marriage;
in fact, the institution of marriage itself was structured on a foundation of male domination with men serving as the so-called “head of the household” and taking on sole ownership of all property thereby restricting these rights from women.
In other words, women and LGBTQ people have been constructed as second-class and even third-class citizens. Through it all, women and LGBTQ people as individuals and groups have challenged the inequities and have pushed back against patriarchal constraints.
Gates: Closed to Immigrants
Donald Trump, from the time he first descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential run in 2015 continually demeaned, stereotyped, and scapegoated immigrants, especially Muslims and Latinx people. He initially stated:
“The US has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems,” he said. “[Mexico is] sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”
Not soon after his election, Trump ordered children of undocumented immigrants taken from their parents and placed into dehumanizing and horrifying cages
After two of President Trump’s travel bans from majority Muslim countries were struck down in the courts, on June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court approved Trump’s September 2017 travel ban into the U.S. from 5 majority Muslim countries: Somalia, Iran, Libya, Yemen, & Syria, plus North Korea and senior government officials from Venezuela.
In Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Hawaii, et al., by a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that “The [Trump] Proclamation is squarely within the scope of Presidential authority,” on national security grounds.
In an Oval Office meeting, Jan. 11, 2018, Trump became frustrated with legislators when they proposed restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration plan. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway.
Trump eventually enlarged his dehumanizing representations to include all people of Latin America. As President, in his January 19, 2019 White House speech on immigration, he continued attempting to metamorphose people desperate for a better way of life for themselves and their families into deranged and dangerous rapists, gang members, human traffickers, and drug smugglers out to subvert good Americans (read as white people).
The facts, though, contradict Trump’s hateful descriptions of immigrants in his divide and conquer strategy to instill fear in his supports.
In his current campaign to recapture the White House, Trump asserted that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Actually, undocumented immigrants are filling many of the gaps in the economy by working jobs that U.S. citizens do not want to fill. They are paying taxes, raising children, and most believe in the American Dream that they can build better lives for themselves and their families.
They are not “poisoning the blood of our country,” as Trump stated by echoing Hitler and Mussolini, but instead, they are risking their lives and spilling their blood to protect this country.
Guns
I understand why many people oppose and resist common sense firearms regulations.
Regulations on firearms challenge the hegemonic promises of a patriarchal system based on notions of Alpha male hypermasculinity with the qualities taken to the extreme of control, domination over others and the environment, competitiveness, autonomy, rugged individualism, strength, toughness, forcefulness, and decisiveness, and, of course, never having to ask for help or assistance.
Concepts of cooperation and community responsibility are pushed to the sidelines and discarded. Ultimately, unless we change from an Individualistic to a more Cooperative society, the United States is destined to fail, not from external threats, but from within.
Forms of Alpha male hypermasculinity require the promotion and use of firearms to keep at bay the intensive psychosocial compulsive fear and dread of penetration from bullets, from male homosexuals’ gaze, from the female gaze since the patriarchy promises males the right to the aggressive outward gaze, the right of objectification and penetration of “others.”
Male dominance is maintained by its relative invisibility (though for many of us, it stands as blatantly obvious), and with this relative invisibility, privilege and power escapes analysis and scrutiny, interrogation and confrontation by many.
Cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, white male dominance is perceived as unremarkable or “normal,” and when anyone poses a challenge or attempts to reveal its true impact and significance, those in the dominant group brand them as “subversive” or even “accuse” them of being “reverse discrimination.”
White cisgender heterosexual Christians are claiming they are the objects of oppression, which is used by members of the dominant ruling class to reverse civil rights gains from past decades, including Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in educational and business institutions.
Public Religion Research Institute poll found:
“44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.”
Throughout this year until the November 7 elections, watch how this discussion of anti-white oppression continues and expands under the political agenda of God, Gays, Gates, and Guns.
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