Marty Essen: Republican Party shows total disregard for honesty
When Donald Trump wishes to defend his bigotry, he calls people of color “racists.” When U.S. Sen. Steve Daines wishes to defend whatever he’s working on for the wealthy, he calls those who oppose him “radical.” And when State Sen. Fred Thomas wishes to return the U.S. Census to the way it was in 1950 (what is it with Republicans and their obsession with regressing our country to the 1950s?), he accuses the left of telling the Democratic base what to think.
Regarding Thomas’s accusation, isn’t that how normal political parties work? People of related views get together, discuss the issues, and ultimately develop a platform. I guess in his world —where Fox News tells both his party’s base and his president what to think —that might seem like a foreign concept.
While hypocrisy and Republicanism go together like the NRA and mass shootings, the real problem with today’s GOP is their total disregard for honesty. Sure, all political parties manipulate events to their advantage, but Republicans have stopped even trying to use truth as an anchor. This can be traced back to when they discovered that they could use the abortion issue to hoodwink a significant number of Christians into voting for them, and it culminated spectacularly with a Republican president who has told more than 11,000 lies in less than three years in office.
And for those Christians who just became offended by my previous paragraph: Please note that God never spoke directly against abortions in the Bible, and he even gave a recipe for inducing them in Numbers 5:11-31 (translations, including the New International Version and the Common English Bible, blatantly use the word “miscarry”). Yes, Republicans counted on you not reading the difficult portions of the Bible—and their assumption was correct.
Unfortunately, Republican lies can lead directly to deaths. For instance, they would love people to think that godlessness, video games, and mental illness are behind America’s mass shooting epidemic, when they know that countries without mass shooting problems also have their share of nonbelievers, video gamers, and people with psychiatric disorders. If they were honest, they’d acknowledge that countries like Australia have stopped mass shootings with effective gun regulations and buy-back programs.
In a recent op-ed, Fred Thomas mocked Democrats for believing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that we had just twelve years left to fight global warming. Aside from the fact that AOC made it clear that she wasn’t being literal, no one really knows how much longer we have to act on global warming. After all, we humans have never actually killed a planet before. With the potential delayed cascade effects brought on by what we have done, the damage might already be irreversible. But one thing is for sure: Republicans have sided with greed, and even mocked those concerned about global warming, going all the way back to the time when Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof.
Had those unscrupulous politicians not spent nearly 40 years obstructing progress that could have managed our climate crises, Earth might very well be on the road to recovery. What was that about Republicans being “pro-life”?
If Republican values are so great, their politicians shouldn’t have to lie about them. Instead they should just be straight with America and say their number one goal is to make the rich richer, they love guns more than people, and the fact that they got a significant number of Christians to vote in the presidential election for a bigot who is the antithesis of Jesus only proves that there’s a sucker born every minute.
Marty Essen is a college speaker and the multi-award-winning author of four books. His recent novels, “Time Is Irreverent” and “Time Is Irreverent 2: Jesus Christ, Not Again!” satirize the relationship between conservative Christians and Republicans.