The Twin Republican Obsessions

And guess where they come from?

Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, 2017, Anthony Crider, CC by 2.0

Race and sexuality.

At first these two words seem to have no connection. But ask yourself why both were woven into the racist "chivalry" that the Confederacy cobbled together from Sir Walter Scott's novels and tales of German nobility — or why race and sexuality were invariably connected in lynchings of Black men accused of talking to white women. Ask yourself why — long after slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow — there were still laws on the books against miscegenation. Ask yourself why racial purity and misogyny are so abundant in far-right groups.

Now ask yourself why men like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz were so fixated upon and could so easily segue between race and sexuality when they tried to put the first Black woman ever nominated to the Supreme Court "in her place."

Republicans, in their heart of hearts, their dream of dreams, relish the power that white slave masters exercised over people who their slave laws decreed were property — some whose wombs they made property through sexual violence. Slave owners' wives were property as well, and woe to a woman who cast an admiring, or simply a kind, glance at a Black man.

Male white ownership and control of both race and sexuality was implicit in slavery. The use of religion to establish the "proper place" for both women and Blacks was also implicit. As a system of production by slaves optimized by the production of more slaves, slavery had no use for unproductive sex and relied on selective bible readings which condemned homosexuality.

You don't have to be a scholar to read for yourself some of the perversions of scripture Southern clergymen came up with to justify slavery. Apologists for the “peculiar institution” were just as prolific as abolitionists. Project Gutenberg has a great (and free) collection you can access online.

In one Gutenberg collection entitled "Cotton is King" Mississippi clergyman E.N. Elliott defended slavery by denying it had anything to do with ownership of human bodies; no, he wrote, it involved a relationship established by God.

But many such defenses of slavery were equally bizarre or inhuman. S.A. Cartwright MD, writing in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, stated with absolute certainty that "the physiological fact that negroes consume less oxygen indicates the superior wisdom of the precepts [enslavement] taught in the Bible regarding those people."

As to beating slaves, "You hear of the poor negroes [...] being beaten with many stripes by their masters and overseers. But owing to the fact that they consume less oxygen than white people, and the other physical differences founded on difference of structure" … well, they can hardly feel it, Cartwright concluded.

The denial of Black humanity was echoed by Chancellor Harper of South Carolina, who wrote, "Will those who regard slavery as immoral, or crime in itself, tell us that man was not intended for civilization, but to roam the earth as a biped brute?"

Intentionally or not, Harper spilled the beans on the real reason that slavery existed — simple Capitalist greed. In fact, Marx couldn’t have expressed it any better:

"Property—the accumulation of capital, as it is commonly called—is the first element of civilization. But to accumulate, or to use capital to any considerable extent, the combination of labor is necessary. In early stages of society, when people are thinly scattered over an extensive territory, the labor necessary to extensive works cannot be commanded. Men are independent of each other. Having the command of abundance of land, no one will submit to be employed in the service of his neighbor. No one, therefore, can employ more capital than he can use with his own hands, or those of his family, nor have an income much beyond the necessaries of life. There can, therefore, be little leisure for intellectual pursuits, or means of acquiring the comforts or elegancies of life. It is hardly necessary to say, however, that if a man has the command of slaves, he may combine labor, and use capital to any required extent, and therefore accumulate wealth."

Dr. [of Theology] Anthea Butler, in her great little book "White Evangelical Racism," describes the long history of misuse of religion to justify slavery. She acknowledges the diversity and complexity of white Evangelicals, noting that some later participated in the Civil Rights movement.

But when Republicans pushed their "Southern strategy" and wooed formerly Democratic white Evangelicals with dog-whistles — if not overt racist appeals — the seduction was too easy. Republicans were offering white Evangelicals something they had long desired — political power.

In an interview with Religion & Politics, Butler explained, "It’s not just that the movement is led by a bunch of white guys. It’s that there is a cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive. I try to show, from Billy Graham onward, how this inherent whiteness works, often by way of color blindness. Officially, evangelicalism claims to be committed to a series of beliefs and values that are higher than and so uninvested in questions of race, and yet their political conservatism really seems to limit their tolerance for non-white input, even from peers and leaders who share their belief system."

Butler links white paternalism in the home, on the plantation, and in American foreign policy: "In the Reconstruction period, the 'Religion of the Lost Cause' lamented the end of slavery and asserted that Black people were inferior. The missionary movement asserted that foreigners were 'heathen' in need of civilization, which was invariably couched in white expressions of Christianity."

As white Christian Nationalist assaults on secular society mount, it is not surprising that almost all involve the twin Republican obsessions of race and sexuality. Ground zero today is the nation's schools, where Republicans attack diversity curriculum and district efforts to make schools safe and welcoming places for gay and trans students.

January 6th should have been a wake-up call, but we are failing to take the threat that white Christian Nationalism poses to democracy seriously. Within a generation the Republican Party has become an openly proto-fascist political organization based on white Christian Nationalism. Republican political institutions like CPAC openly flirt with European fascists. Many of its members are white supremacists who make no effort to conceal their neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi sympathies.

And why should they? This is exactly what Republicans now stand for.