As I wrote last week, one of the excuses the religious right offers for supporting the Toddler of the United States is that sure, he may not be a perfect person, but he’s doing god’s work. Israel’s King David was flawed but he served God; the Toddler is no different.
The trouble is, like the title of the post says, when you choose the lesser evil, you’re still choosing evil. And Christians are not supposed to choose evil.
Let me pause and say I don’t think they consider the Toddler all that flawed. When King David sent Uriah out to die in battle so he could marry Bathsheba, the prophets of Israel called him out. With the religious right, the response would more likely be “yes, the Toddler did a terrible thing but we are all sinners. He’s totally repented. And he’s still doing God’s work.” As long as he supports the classic American hierarchy — being white, male, Christian (and non-LGBTQ) or rich puts you above anyone who isn’t — murders in Minneapolis, his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, his corruption — are trivial offenses. They don’t care.
This is not some unique problem to the religious right; once you start choosing the lesser evil, it’s awfully easy to choose more and more evil. Consider American foreign policy. We overthrew multiple governments in the cold war we consider too socialist/communist/left-wing and supported many dictators —sure, Saddam Hussein or the Shah of Iran or Ferdinand Marcos (dictator in the Philippines) might be a son of a bitch but they were our son of a bitch! Once we made that decision we never objected to anything they did: murdering nuns and priests for teaching peasants to read (El Salvador), genocide (Guatemala), torture and rape of an American (Guatemala again), using poison gas on the Kurds (Iraq), murder of dissidents even in the United States (Chile).
They were supposed to be “our son of a bitch” but in practice we were theirs. Our government was apparently terrified that if we crossed them, they’d switch sides and ally with the USSR; somehow telling them “We put you in power, we can take you out” never came up (I suspect most likely our government didn’t give a crap). We compromised with evil and then we never stopped. And then many pundits and diplomats whined if we were called on it — dammit, how naive are you? We have to look out for our interests, just like any other country and that sometimes means allying with bad governments!
The flaws in this argument were 1)Looking out for number one is never a justification for screwing other people over. Finding the dividing line is a moral challenge and it’s often tougher than it looks, and 2)a lot of people can simultaneously argue the US is entitled to play hardball politics and still be treated as some kind of shining city on the hill, morally better than other countries (American exceptionalism becomes an excuse rather than a goal). Similarly some members of the religious right think they should be able to support the worst of the Toddler’s policies and still be immune to criticism — we should look up to them as our moral superiors, even if they aren’t.
This is not a unique issue to them. Lots of candidates I voted for have done morally objectionable things. While I largely dismissed criticism of Bill Clinton’s sex life in the 1990s — in the fire-hose of right-wing bullshit, it seemed like more bullshit — at a minimum he sexually harassed some of the people under him as governor of Arkansas (I also don’t buy his recent claim he was completely unaware of the stories about Jeffrey Epstein when they knew each other, but Epstein wasn’t on anyone’s radar during Clinton’s presidency. His administration did nothing about the Diana Ortiz case in Guatemala that I mentioned above. Obama didn’t prosecute anyone for the torture scandals under W, and the drone war in his presidency killed a lot of innocent people in the Middle East.
As a member of Amnesty International I did write to both Clinton and Obama where I felt human rights were being violated. That’s a minimum baseline for taking action and did not, I should note, produce a change in either case; if there was more I should have done, I didn’t do it. If the religious right objected to the Toddler’s actions, they could speak up similarly. However, his alliance with them hinges on them kissing his ass and assuring him God loves him; if they have any objections (I doubt they do), they won’t air them.
Keeping silent is a form of hypocrisy. I know people who swore they couldn’t tolerate Bill Clinton’s adultery who pulled the lever for the Toddler quite happily. One of them informed me in 2024 that they could never vote for Kamala Harris because she’s sexually immoral. No, if you vote for the Toddler, the candidate’s sex life is not a dealbreaker (though to be fair, it can be one factor among many). Hypocrisy is not a good path for anyone to go down, particularly not Christian leaders who are supposed to aspire to a higher standard. Unfortunately, as Fred Clark said at Slacktivist (I don’t have the link handy), when asked “what does it profit you to gain the world if you lose your soul?”, many of them would conclude “I gain the world! That’s my profit … I’m sorry, what’s your point?”
As a blogger at Obsidian Wings put it some years ago, it’s easy to conclude the world is rotten, the system is rotten, and the lesser evil is the best we can hope for — or we can hold out and call on politicians and leaders to live up to the standards they set. And sometimes, when we do that, it works. Even if it doesn’t, it’s still worth trying
