“We did not serve in the Marine Corps to go fight Vladimir Putin because he didn’t believe in transgender rights.”
Here it is, right here in this little comment by J. D. Vance: the key to the otherwise puzzling willingness of conservative white Christians in the US, who consider themselves strong patriots, to follow Trump’s lead in sympathizing with KGB master Vladimir Putin in preference to the interests of our own country, our NATO allies, and Ukraine: they perceive that Putin shares their own negative attitude toward, and willingness to sponsor public/governmental persecution of, LGBTQ people.
I remember well that during my more naive days I was fascinated by rumors that Putin might be a Christian. One of us! Well, then, that would put everything in an entirely different light! I came to realize that the form of Christianity that Putin favored was the establishment Russian Orthodoxy that had for many decades been an utterly compromised and complicit partner of the Soviet regime and was perfectly willing to play the same role vis-à-vis Putin’s corrupt fascist oligarchy.
Meanwhile, however, the white American-Christian nationalists who believe that government regulation is so much better a strategy for making abortion rarer than changing hearts and improving the lot of women and children that they are willing to support the criminally sociopathic, anti-American, world-wrecking Donald Trump over standard American politicians were coming to realize that Putin is with them in their conviction that everyone is really heterosexual and those who for inexplicably perverse reasons pretend otherwise should be deprived of their civil rights and, if possible, their lives.
It really does all boil down to panicked determination that any politician who either cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Putin) endorses the use of government power to enforce traditional moral constructions of every issue related to human sexuality is deserving of every Christian’s support regardless of his speech and behavior on every other issue.
Note that to get on these people’s enemies list you do not have to actively promote either abortion or the dreaded and fundamentally fictive “homosexual agenda.” You merely have to reject their determination that government-sponsored coercion is better than trying to understand and improve the hated deviants’ lot in life in an authentically pro-life manner.
(For what it’s worth: I see this vital difference between the abortion question and the LGBTQ question: Abortion is an evil that should and can be minimized, if not eliminated, but appropriate political intervention. But the fact that some people really are gay, transgendered, etc., is just that: a fact. The dinosaur fossils are real, and millions of years old; and diverse gender identities are real; and if your theology can’t deal with these facts, you need to improve your theology. All truth is God’s truth, and lies are never God’s truth.)
Anyway, this is the monomania that anti-democratic forces now know they can use to enlist white American-Christian help in destroying constitutional democracy in the USA (and Ukraine and anywhere else).
The people who reduce the Trump-Biden choice to anti-abortion versus pro-abortion are victims and perpetrators of the same malignant fallacy as those who reduce the Russia-Ukraine situation to anti-transgender-rights to pro-transgender-rights. They also tend to be the same people.
Verba Sparsa 