While the Republican Party holds itself out as the guardian of "American values" - as do the Christofascists who control much of the GOP's policies - when one looks at the consequences of the GOP's policies and agenda, the picture is pretty ugly. Among the consequences/fruits are racism, religious extremism and bigotry, poverty, obesity and incarceration (this latter one is tied to the first, racism). Yes, some of these problems are historic ones, but over all decent Americans over time have sought to lessen their impact and poisonous consequences. That changed when the Christofascists hijacked the GOP. A piece in the Daily Kos looks at these ill fruits. Here are excerpts:
Evangelical Christians and their willingness to force their beliefs on the rest of us through vociferous political activism and promotion of Biblically based public policies are a huge problem for the future of the planet. . . . . They believe all other religions are false; that science is only good so long as it doesn't contradict a literal interpretation of the Bible, that the Constitution is a Christian document and all non-believers are going to hell. Therefore they vote faithfully for candidates who will govern accordingly. Republicans and even some Republican-lite Democrats, are only too willing to pander to this constituency.The GP and evangelical Christians are toxic to the nation's future. Their dominance and any deference they receive needs to end.
The GOP's leveraging of white evangelicals into Republican votes fits right in to the divide and conquer playbook of the Southern Strategy, which was designed and implemented 40 years ago by Richard Nixon. This strategy of stoking the fires of ignorance and racism has delivered the southern states to the Republicans ever since.
An internet search of pretty much any demographic data regarding the South, quickly reveals the harm this Southern Strategy has inflicted upon the region. In addition to being highly religious, racist and Republican, the region also suffers the blight of poverty, obesity, incarceration, and almost any other social malady you care to type into your browser. Of course these maladies exist in the other states, some in high ratios, but none rival the depth and intensity of the southern infection.
Evangelicals and racists have walked hand-in-hand for over two centuries. The region has had a strongly entrenched evangelical movement since the nation's founding, long before being referred to as the Bible Belt by American journalist and social commentator H L Mencken in 1924.
While the practice of Christianity, unlike racism, has redeeming qualities the evangelical practitioners have often been complicit in the holy blessing of slavery, lynching and institutional discrimination. Slaveholders justified slavery by citing the Bible: "slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5), or "tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect" (Titus 2:9).
The former Party of Lincoln has had its grips on the South since 1968 and no doubt owns the abject misery of the region. The maps and graphs below the fold reveal in stunning visual relief the desperate circumstances in which many of the citizens of the former Confederacy find themselves.
1. Southern states are the most religious: Earlier this month, Gallup released a survey based on more than 175,000 interviews that asked residents of each state how often they attend a weekly religious service. What they found was that the most religious states were in the South, which was home to all but one of the top 12.
2. Southern states are the most evangelical: Evangelical Christians are the base of the Republican party and of that group the Southern Baptists are the dominant sect in the region.
3. Southern states have the most racist residents: Analysts at Floating Sheep, a website run by a group of independent cyber-geography researchers, found there was a spike of racist tweets on Twitter during and after President Obama’s 2012 re-election.
4. Southern states are controlled by Republicans: The Republican Party is the chef that stirs the pot of racism and evangelical religiosity in the south, and as you can see, where those ingredients are strong so is the GOP. This is no accident. This is the insidious result of "The Southern Strategy".
5. Southern states have the lowest wages: In 2010, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas had the largest share of people earning sub-povery wages, EPI [Economic Policy Institute] found.
6. Southern states are the most impoverished: This is an obvious side effect of low wages.
7. Southern states have the highest food stamp usage of any region: An obvious side effect of poverty. In fact, contrary to what Republicans would like you to think, of the 32 states that receive more federal dollars than they contribute, 27 of them are controlled by Republicans, which includes 15 southern states. (Ref:AATTP)
8. Southern states have the highest rates of teen pregnancy: Also contrary to what the teen-mother-shaming Republicans want you to believe, teen pregnancies do not cause poverty, rather poverty causes teen pregnancy. Teens who get pregnant tend to come from more disadvantaged families than those who do not become pregnant. Moreover, among pregnant teens, those who choose abortion tend to be more advantaged than those who opt to carry the baby to term.
9. Southern states have the highest rates of obesity: Obesity is a risk for all groups of Americans, but is especially high among Americans with the lowest levels of education and the highest poverty rates
10. Southern states have higher rates of heart disease and stroke: Studies have consistently shown that people with low incomes and less education generally have higher rates of heart disease than their more-educated, higher-income counterparts.
11. Southern states have higher rates of cancer mortality: According to Dr. Samuel Broder, former director of the National Cancer Institute, "Poverty is a carcinogen". Research cited in the annual Cancer Facts and Figures 2011 released by the American Cancer Society, showed that poverty rivals both tobacco and obesity as a carcinogen.
14. Southern states have the highest rates of incarceration: Since the 1980s the attitude of many law and order types has been lock 'em up and throw away the key, "three strikes and you're out" that will solve the problem. But actually this policy of increased incarceration has actually exacerbated the problem of poverty, which has been shown to be the root of so many other miserable statistics.
The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities.
“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”
Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.
There are non-southern states that pop in and out of the list of misery to be sure, some even controlled at least in part by Democrats. But the pattern is clear. This is no coincidence. These are the states that consistently show up either at the top of a bad category or at the bottom of a good one. These are the consequences of sustained Republican control.
Democratic leaders have not forcefully called out the GOP for their Southern Strategy and faith-based idiocy, possibly fearing offending moderate Christians. Well it is time to start offending people. Democrats need to put Republicans on the defensive by pounding on the disastrous results of Republican policies over and over and over again, instead of getting drawn into false equivalency debates on Sunday morning talk shows.
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Acknowledging my own biases, it's also worth noting that generally children in the former slave states of the Confederacy are more likely to be born under-weight than the average of other children in the United States, to have their parents' marriages marred by divorce, and to die younger than the average of other American children. This latter may be due in part to the fact that people in the former slave states are generally more likely to have been involved in violent crime than is the average American, as perpetrator or as victim.
Correlation is, of course, not the same as causation, but it seems that the prayers of residents of the states most infested by Christianist fundamentalists have been answered by more hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, droughts and the like than
are residents of states who don't make nuisances of themselves, let alone by calling for bad things to happen to people whom they don't like.
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