Dear Pastor Jeffress,

How are you? I am fine. While I was at church yesterday, teaching children the ages of 2-11 songs about Jesus, news came out about how you said my religion was not truly Christian. This makes me sad. I believe in Christ, and I think that’s pretty much what one has to do in order to be a Christian. I’ve also been baptized by full immersion, just in case that helps any. I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and I even capitalize those words out of respect. So what is it that makes me not a Christian, but allows Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Coptic, Nestorians, Anglicans, and other denominations that aren’t yours to still fit in your definition?

It can’t be the extra books business. Yes, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price. We also have a different translation of the Bible. The Catholics have centuries of papal pronouncements that help to give form and shape to their religion. The Copts in Egypt have quite a few extra books in their New Testament, attributed to Mark, which are absent in other denominations’ Bible. The Ethiopians have even more books – their Bible is the largest of any Christian sect, and they claim it is that way because they never endured persecutions such as existed in the Roman Empire. Why, then, don’t we use their Bible? Is it because they’re Black?

Because, Pastor Jeffress, when you were pressed between choosing between either Romney or Obama – who is a Christian by your definition when Romney is not – you unequivocally supported Romney. If this isn’t racism, then it’s confusing and illogical.

How about this, Pastor Jeffress… Maybe, just maybe a group of people in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (emphasis mine) are Christians. You may not agree with everything we teach, but perhaps you would find common ground in our assertion of the divine nature of Jesus Christ, in encouraging our members to take care of each other and our neighbors in the event of disasters “even as the Savior would have done”, how we emphasize reading scriptures, daily prayer, fasting, charitable donations, and in avoiding evil influences.

According to most Protestant theology, accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal Savior is sufficient for salvation. Some will also add in the baptism protocol. That’s it. There’s nothing else in their view that’s required to be Christian. Pastor Jeffress, I’ve done all that. I’m a Christian. I’d much rather share my witness than have to explain over and over again that I have such a witness.

But, yes, Pastor Jeffress… “Mormons” are Christians.

Hope this helps,

Dean Webb

In the many years I’ve taught either US History or US Government, covering Plessy involved saying that it upheld the constitutionality of the doctrine of “separate but equal.” That’s it. As I was writing the above summary, I wanted to check on the date of the ruling and went to the Wikipedia article about it. I noticed in the article that Plessy was actually only 1/8th Black. He was 7/8th White. That means he had only one great-grandparent that was Black. If one switches “Black” out and replaces it with “Jew,” he would have been considered as part of the Volksdeutsche under Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws. Louisiana law in the 1890s held that a person’s ancestors from three generations back could condemn a man to a life as a second-class citizen.

The story about Plessy has more interesting details. Plessy boarded a Whites-only streetcar as an act of civil disobedience. He had grown up in Reconstruction-era Louisiana, with no restrictions at all based on race. There was no segregation in his world until after the federal troops left Louisiana in 1877, when Homer Plessy was 15 years old. Heck, Plessy was pretty much a white man in appearance – that’s him in the photograph at the start of this articl. He just associated with the Colored society of multicultural New Orleans.

In 1890, Louisiana passed its strict segregation laws and Plessy was part of a group that wanted to challenge those laws. Plessy wanted to challenge the laws because he felt that, as an American, everyone should get equal treatment. He could have it if he wanted, but that option wasn’t available to other people singled out by Louisiana’s draconian law. The railroad companies wanted to challenge the laws because they didn’t want to take on the expense of additional passenger cars. In 1892, Plessy bought a ticket for the streetcar, sat in the Whites-only car and, when asked if he was White, said he was only 7/8th White. In the four years the case took to get to the Supreme Court, the Court became more segregationist in its makeup and they ruled that since the streetcars for Blacks were equal to streetcars for Whites, the Louisiana laws were constitutional. Never mind that the schools and other facilities for segregated Blacks were of inferior quality: the case dealt with a streetcar, and so only the equality of streetcars was in question.

Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion:

The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to the either. … If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of voluntary consent of the individuals.

In other words, if a majority didn’t like a minority, that minority was going to receive a beatdown from that majority. The one judge that dissented, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote:

I am of opinion that the statute of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, white and black, in that state and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States.

How different would our history have been if it had been Justice Brown in the minority and Justice Harlan writing the majority opinion? We would have not had 58 years of Jim Crow segregation. We would not have had William Rehnquist, later a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, write the following down when he was a law clerk for the Supreme Court in 1952:

I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed… To the argument… that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are.

A year later, Rehnquist wrote:

The Constitution does not prevent the majority from banding together, nor does it attaint success in the effort. It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white people of the south do not like the colored people: the constitution restrains them from effecting this dislike through state action but it most assuredly did not appoint the Court as a sociological watchdog to rear up every time private discrimination raises its admittedly ugly head.

This man later was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, where he became one of the most conservative justices to sit on the bench. Had we not had that majority ruling in Plessy, would Rehnquist’s opinions have been possible? Would they have been tolerated in a Supreme Court Justice?

We live in an America where what happened, happened. We live in an America where not only was Rehnquist hostile to the idea of using the courts to roll back laws that created second-class citizens, he was also hostile to the doctrine of selective incorporation. The journalist Bob Woodward said of Rehnquist that he ruled, “with the prosecution in criminal cases, with business in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases, and with the government in speech cases.”

So what did I learn from my dalliance with the Plessy case? Civil rights for minorities did not follow an ever-upward path in America. There were times when rights were on the ascendant, and times when reactionaries pushed back. Obama’s election is by no means “The End” of the struggle for equality in the United States. Racism in America has produced conditions we may find unimaginable today – and that it can produce them again.

Well, the Senate passed a resolution that will keep the government solvent for a while, but it’s not a permanent fix. The whole thing can keep happening over and over again because the two houses of the legislature aren’t playing ball with each other in a nice way.

But what complicates things further is how the Tea Party Republicans are breaking party discipline and are instead behaving like a rebellious junior partner in a coalition government. This is real gridlock in government at a time when we need real action instead.

And though Americans don’t like Congress as a whole, most Americans like their own Congressman, even though he’s typically part of the problem in the Congress. What to do if we’re just going to re-elect the same gang? Don’t tell me the solution is to vote for the other guy or a third-party candidate. The fact is, the incumbents win their elections and they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing now or become more extreme. With that in mind, what can we do that has a serious chance of succeeding?

Let me be clear that I do not equate the two, but that I see similarities between the two. There is no formal paramilitary wing of the Tea Party, for example. (Although, there is the matter of Sarah Palin’s “hit list” that resulted in an attack on a Democratic congresswoman…) However, both movements were funded by wealthy industrialists that sought to take their grassroots anger and make it more business-friendly.

I would refer the interested reader to chapters 5 and 6 of Shirer’s excellent Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As you follow along, starting on page 135 of the PDF file, make note of the similarities.

First to be seen is the funding from industrialists, as described by Walther Funk, who later joined the NSDAP. His modern equivalent would be the Koch brothers, who have plowed extensive amounts of cash into the Tea Party to keep it from denouncing ethanol subsidies, among other things. Hitler was eager to adopt an Ayn Rand-like attitude towards business when it meant large amounts of cash would flow his way. The Tea Party is the same. When the Nazis introduced a bill in 1930 that would have made interest rates over 4% illegal, Hitler stopped that bill immediately. The Tea Party is equally quick to do the bidding of its industrial masters.

Both parties gained a great deal of popularity during hard economic times. While this is natural for populist movements, both these movements have sought to worsen conditions in order to increase their own popularity and, hence, power. The Nazis chose to start massive street battles with their political opponents, while promising strict law and order if they were elected to power. The Tea Party held the nation’s finances hostage in the debt ceiling debates, while demanding that those very finances be put in order. As a result of Tea Party intransigence, the nation’s finances took a big hit with the downgrade of our debt rating. Shirer’s description of Nazi-led parliamentary maneuvers (on p. 161 of the PDF) echo the ways in which both the Tea Party and the GOP in general have sought to rule as a minority through exploitation of rules created to facilitate legislation. They have taken those rules and twisted them into procedural weapons.

Both parties also refused to work with the majority of the people of their nations in order to impose their views upon their respective nations. The Nazis had it easiest, given the highly fragmented nature of Weimar Germany’s political parties. The Tea Party grew as a movement within the GOP and has come to dominate much of the GOP’s political discourse. The Tea Party is seen as being closely connected to the GOP base and while it cannot count on a fragmented opposition, it can count on an opposition unable to move any bills through the House without Tea Party approval. By withholding that approval, the Tea Party has effectively brought Congress’ ability to pass laws to a halt. That means the whole of America is subjected to a de facto Tea Party veto on any legislation, even though a majority of Americans oppose the Tea Party’s extremism. It’s straight out of the Nazi playbook: Gregor Strasser, one of the top Nazi leaders in 1931 said, “All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe . . . is good, very good for us…”

And what of the opposition to the Nazis and Tea Partiers? Shirer’s words about the German scene in the 1930s could easily describe the USA of the 2010s: “… too absorbed in looking after the special economic and social interests they represented to be able to bury their differences.” Dead on, I would say. “Parliamentary government had become a matter of what the Germans called Kuhhandel – cattle trading – with the parties bargaining for special advantages for the groups which elected them, and the national interests be damned.” Did Shirer have a crystal ball, or are humans that prone to such failures in representative democracies?

Both the Nazis and Tea Party movements worked with conservative political factions, with varying degrees of accommodation. In the case of the Nazis, they saw no true common purpose with the old-line conservatives and hoped to bring about a new sort of conservatism in Germany. Likewise, the Tea Party does not always play well with the rest of the Republican caucus, and has flaunted party discipline on ideological matters. There’s another similarity: the placing of ideology above all else, using it as a guide to shout down truths that would give the lie to their positions. The Nazis would hear nothing to contradict their lies about Jews and Communists: the Tea Partiers can stand no word against their position on global warming (or the lack thereof) and the free market.

Within two years of the Nazi’s big political showing in 1931, their leader was in power. If the economy doesn’t turn around soon, a Tea Partier may very well be elected to the presidency of the USA within two years of the Tea Party’s big splash in 2010. This is where differences between the Tea Party and the Nazis become critical. Hitler was not a puppet of the industrialists and they badly miscalculated in supporting him. I don’t see anyone with the same energy and drive as Hitler in the Tea Party leadership, so it’s likely that a Tea Party president would be very much like a worse(!) version of George Bush II: a plaything for the industrialists, given free hand to inflict a disastrous social and foreign policy on the nation.

Sadly, there’s one difference I wish the Tea Party had, but does not. While the Tea Party itself is not a racist movement, white supremacist groups report that they have excellent recruitment opportunities whenever the Tea Party stages a protest. That means that although the Tea Party itself does not advocate a racist agenda, its ranks are shot through with radical, racist elements.

Could a Tea Party candidate win, even if a majority of the nation was opposed to the Tea Party itself? Absolutely. If people are mad enough at Obama to either vote against him or not vote at all, a GOP led by the Tea Party could find itself in control of the White House and both branches of the legislature.

The man that had the nerve to deny federal aid to help pay for teachers is now looking for that same federal aid to help put out the fires in his state. Rick Perry. What a disappointment.

Perry, I thought you were actually going to be the guy to get Texas to secede, you were such a states’ rights kind of guy. You really stuck it to all those money-grubbing bureaucrats we call “teachers” when you told ’em to take a hike and that Washington’s dollars weren’t welcome here. Now you’ve done a 180 and gone hat in hand to the White House and begged a DEMOCRAT, of all people, for a charity handout.

Sir, you have insulted The Great State of Texas. One way or another, you have insulted the state I call home. Either you should have cared enough about the children of the state to not make them pawns in your power politics or you should stay consistent and let Bastrop burn for all your pandering, pathetic, and just plain poor so-called principles.

Perry, I hope Obama tells you “No.”

Then takes a picture of the look on your face.

Then he says, “Psych! Just kidding.” After that, he pulls out a sign and says, “There’s just one condition: you have to wear this at the next debate.” The sign reads:

I TOOK AID FROM BARACK OBAMA AND I *LIKED* IT!