Plan B Forum

I only caught bits and pieces of the LGBTQ Town Halls on CNN, and I didn't see any of Beto O'Rourke's...

Clearly Trump isn't the only one emitting an over-powering stench of political desperation...What shameless and counter-productive pandering :

Given his low and static polling, it’s hard to tell what, exactly, Beto O’Rourke hopes to accomplish by staying in the presidential race. But while his actual goal seems a bit elusive, he is increasingly playing a very specific role: the human straw man, the embodiment of every seemingly irrational conservative fear about what the left really wants.

Consider O’Rourke’s appearance at Thursday’s CNN town hall on LGBTQ issues, at which he told moderator Don Lemon that churches and other nonprofits should lose their tax exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage, a position tantamount to declaring war on Catholic parishes and evangelical congregations across the country, not to mention any number of Orthodox Jewish and Muslim groups. Lest you think I’m exaggerating, or leaving out some important nuance, here was his full exchange.

Don Lemon: Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax exempt status if they oppose same sex marriage?

O’Rourke: Yes. There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break, for anyone, any institution, any organization in America, that denies the full human rights, that denies the full civil rights, of everyone in America. So as president, we’re going to make that a priority. And we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.

O’Rourke’s comments drew a warm round of applause in the friendly room, and riled conservatives, who have spent years worrying that Democrats might try to do such a thing. Vlogger Ben Shapiro, to take just one example, suggested that religious conservatives might be forced to move out of the country or “pick up a gun” if the candidate’s plan ever came to pass. Some on the left were also critical; Atlantic writer Adam Serwer called the idea “plainly unconstitutional.”

This is not the first time O’Rourke—a politician, it should be noted, without a constituency: no district, almost no support in the polls—has promised to make conservatives’ worst nightmares come true. After adopting gun control as a marquee issue following the mass shooting in El Paso earlier this year, O’Rourke promised a mandatory gun buyback program for assault weapons, memorably telling a moderator, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.” Not long after, Trump and Republicans blamed his comments for making it harder to get a gun control deal done in Congress. (Yes, that’s a bit rich coming from the GOP, but I’ll come back to that).

These are not the only far-left positions Beto has staked out recently. He’s strongly pro reparations, for instance. But his comments about churches and guns are especially remarkable, in that he’s essentially adopting unpopular stances that Democratic politicians have spent years claiming are unfair caricatures of their actual beliefs. He is turning himself into a walking straw man, the non-fringe guy Republicans can reliably point to when they want to say: “See, the libs really do want to take your guns and shut down your churches.”

More:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... lgbtq.html

Now, I realize there are some here who would be happy to see tax exempt status yanked from all churches and other religious institutions...

A position that I vigorously and vehemently oppose (as someone said a long while back, "the power to tax is the power to destroy" and I see such taxation as a clear violation of the "free exercise" clause of the 1st Amendment. But I'll concede that's a point over which reasonable people may differ...I'm not really interested in arguing about that right now...)

But presumably we can all agree that the state cherry picking which churches may or may not receive tax exempt status based solely on their embrace of state approved positions, would be blatantly unconstitutional...

The author of the Slate article is absolutely right. Not only is Mr. 2% (a reference to O'Rourke's consistent standing in national and state polls) making himself into the Poster Boy for liberal excess with positions like this and some others he's taken, he's also tanking whatever chance he may have had of taking down John Cornyn for his Texas Senate seat...Had he taken these positions when he was running against Ted Cruz, he'd have never come as close to beating him as he did...

In his desperate attempts to gain some sort of traction by pandering to various groups, (pandering so transparent that it appears based on his poll numbers that even the members of the groups he's pandering to see it for what it is...He should ask Kirsten Gillibrand how well that approach works...) Beto is doing neither himself nor his party any favors...

And by damaging the Democratic brand in this way, he certainly isn't doing anything to benefit the existential imperative of ending Donald Trump's grip on the Presidency...(no matter who the ultimate nominee winds up being; which most certainly will not be him)

The sooner he makes a graceful (and quiet) exit from the Presidential race, the better...

Yes Beto was the glamor boy for a while but it seems he has not made any waves - except as noted above by LJ - for some months. Maybe he's going by the Trump playbook: any publicity is good publicity.

Now, I realize there are some here who would be happy to see tax exempt status yanked from all churches and other religious institutions...

Up to a point, and with some caveats, that's me. The caveats are these: as long as the church or religious institution is using the money for genuine charitable purposes - feeding the poor, providing educational opportunities, disaster relief etc - then the donations should be, as they are for all charitable efforts, tax exempt and deductible for the donor. Where I object is when the institution gets into politics. Now of course there's a connection between politics and the charitable act: I don't doubt that both you and I feel equally that the poor should eat, but we would advance different ideas about how to get to that happy state. And of what is politics? To take an obvious example, was MLK Jr.'s support of the Montgomery bus boycott, a political stance? Through the Jim Crow lens this was obviously a political activity while today's viewer (well, most of us) would see that as an expression of morality rather than politics.

I could go on but I'll cut this short. I suppose that to me there is a disconnect between

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

and "let's make religion a special case and make laws which allow religious institutions, unlike everyone else, to enjoy the fruits of civilization and democracy - roads, water supply, reasonably effective and non-toxic drugs and so on - without having to pay for them."