If the very text of the Declaration of Indpendence, being read out on the Fourth of July, sounds to you like a propoganda attack against your guy in the White House, then I submit the problem is with your guy in  the White House.  Not with the Declaration of Independence, and not with the people reading, tweeting, or otherwise broadcasting it.

I realise an article really ought to be longer, but frankly, what else is there to say about the fact that the document that is the very foundation and initiation of America’s existence could be denounced as liberal propoganda and trash?

Except of course, that it has happened before.  During the time of Joseph McCarthy, a journalist used the opening sentences of the Declaration as a petition, and tried to find signatures for it.  Many did.  Others denounced it as a communist screed, while still others feared they might be denounced if they put their names to such sentiments.  And McCarthy himself?  Praised these reactions.

Is there any clearer proof about how little so many on the Right understand the patriotism they like to go on about?

It couldn’t come as any surprise to readers of this blog, that its contributors want more cool stories about women.  Not exactly fewer stories about men, but stories less… automatically about men, and fewer men shoved into stories that should be about women.

Which brings me to Agents of SHIELD.  Spcifically the third season episode, 4722 Hours.  Context, for anyone as embarrassingly behind on the show as me, at the end of the second season one of the characters – forensic biologist Jemma Simmons – was sucked through a portal to a distant planet.  Early in the third season, after six months, the rest of the team manage to predict another opening of the portal and retrieve her.  Following her return, Simmons is is traumatised on just about every level:  her body is readjusting to different gravity and oxygen levels, normal light levels now hurt her eyes, sudden noises panic her, she has nightmares about being hunted.  Hardly surprising; alone on an alien planet for six months and all that.  More surprising is that she starts examining the remains of the destroyed portal, insisting they have to go back to the planet.

We find out why that is in 4722 Hours, the episode detailing Simmons’s time on the planet.  Namely, that she was only alone for the first few weeks, before running into Will, a man who’d been sent through the portal many years before.  Unlike Simmons, Will’s mission was deliberate, and supplied with some decent equipment.  Will helps her survive.  They make a parallel prediction of when and where the portal will open again, which is why she’s close enough to it for the rest of the cast to find her.  The two of them fall for each other.  And in the end Will goes after the monster haunting the planet, to give Simmons time to reach the portal.  Back on Earth, Simmons wants to return and save him; her on-the-cusp-of-boyfriend Fitz, when he learns about Will, gets gung ho about saving him too, despite warnings from one of the other guys that this could lead to a bizarre love triangle.

And my reaction was, what a damn waste.

Don’t get me wrong.  Will wasn’t a bad character, just a bit bland.  And there are other plot reasons why there had to be previous travellers to the planet, and why Simmons had to remain intent on researching the portal.  But we’d been primed for a few episodes for a story about how the ostensibly least badass member of the team had survived alone on an alien planet for months – and it turns out that for most of that time she’d had company, been eating from a table and sleeping in a bed – it was the guy she met who’d spent years alone there.  Meanwhile, the quest to save Will became about how great Fitz was for trying to save a possible romantic rival.  Ultimately, it was like Simmons’s biggest story had been handed off to two guys.

Consider this instead:  Will’s mission happened, but he is long dead.  Simmons finds the remains of his camp and gear – and perhaps a diary (hell, as alone as she’d be, a diary might represent enough connection to another person that she’d still credit that person for saving her).  She survives alone, using what she’s found – dodges the monster alone – finds the portal alone.  When she’s back on Earth, she’s traumatised enough to be obsessed with the remains of the portal, to reassure herself that it definitely is destroyed.  Or – having discovered that there were previous travellers – with assuring herself that there aren’t any other portals out there, and this can’t happen to anyone else.  Everything that has to be there still would be, but Simmons would be back at the centre of that arc where she should be – and 4722 Hours itself would be all about showing Simmons pushed further than she could ever have imagined she could survive, plus actress Elizabeth Henstridge getting a huge solo workout.

I guess I’m not making a deep point here.  It’s not exactly big news that stories about women frequently have men jammed into them in such a way as to take them over.  Just that this episode and surrounding arc serves as a really clear example of it – and an equally clear example of how the changes needed to make it better are so often frustratingly small.

Denial, starring Rachel Weisz, is – narrowly – about the 1996 libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt.  More broadly, it’s about Holocaust denial, and its role in perpetuating the scars of the very crimes it seeks to obscure or excuse.  It’s only a recent release, so it must have been pitched a couple of years ago at the very least.  Which makes it one of those rare pieces of art that’s all the more topical and current when released than when it was conceived.

David Irving was a historian of, and fan of, Hitler – back in the day, he wrote extensively in defence of Hitler, and denial of the Holocaust.  Deborah Lipstadt was a historian of the Holocaust – she wrote extensively about denial, and in one of her books called Irving out for lying in grandiosely extensive terms – in response to which Irving brought a libel suit against her for defamation.  The film follows the course of the trial, and while my memory doesn’t let me swear that it gets the events exactly right, it’s pretty close.  (In particular, if anyone looks at Timothy Spall’s portayal of Irving and thinks he couldn’t have come across as so cartoonishly evil in real life, no, he could and did).

But for me, more than anything, two factors stood out.  First, the sheer blatancy of the lies.  Irving mistranslated documents, and lied about what was displayed on photographs right in front of everyone.

Second, the subject of free speech, and in particular, the number of times Lipstadt had to remind someone that this was a case Irving brought against her, not her against him.  Irving and his defenders covering the trial claimed his free speech was under attack – yet another blatant lie, as in truth he was the one trying to silence Lipstadt.  Free speech to him meant the white man getting to speak without the Jewish woman getting to answer – the white man getting to lie without the Jewish woman getting to say “you lied” – and too many found it perfectly easy to follow that script.

Ok, you knew right from the title I was going to bring up Trump in this post, didn’t you?

Denial shows us an example of the kind of script we’re faced with right now.  A script where the president-elect straight facedly claims to have won the largest electoral college vote ever, when the numbers are plain for anyone to see.  A script where a press spokesman claims the inauguaration crowds were the largest ever, when the photographs are right there.  A script where the media are liars and traitors to be silenced, when they’re reporting things we can easily confirm from the footage.  A script where truth is the province of authority rather than the province of facts.

A script where the White House gets through Holocaust Memorial Day without mentioning the Jews, and responds to this being pointed out with a screed straight from #AllLivesMatter.  (And garners praise from far-right commentators for “de-Jewing” the Holocaust).

When the makers of Denial must have pitched the film, none of this had happened.  Little of it could have seemed to be on the cards.  But it all did, and all of it right around the time the film hit the screens.  A warning about the dangers of Holocaust denial is timely, certainly at a time when the last eyewitnesses to it are nearing the ends of their lives.  But in light of current events, its warning rings all the louder.

Since Trump’s victory in the Presidential election, I’ve been seeing article after article, and post after post, and comment after comment on how we shouldn’t regard those who voted for him as racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or xenophobic, or anti-Muslim, or antisemitic, or any of the other prejudices that were on full display during his candidacy.  I saw the same things after the Brexit referendum in my own country.  At the same time, in both instances, I’ve also seen a big spike in racist attacks mere days afterwards.

But, I’m told, Trump voters hate his bigotries as much as I do, they’re just angry, or afraid, or hurting, they don’t really hate marginalised people.  But my question here is why should I care whether they do or don’t?  I’m going to adapt an observation that’s been made about rape jokes, and why they enable rape culture even if the person telling them doesn’t really support rape:

Maybe you don’t think that voting for a Nazi-wannabe candidate is the same as endorsing the bigotries he was peddling, or the same as siding with those voters of his who wholeheartedly embrace them.  Maybe you’re pissed off at “liberals” for conflating you with those assholes.  But the people who really believe that all white people deep down hate the brown pople, or that all real Americans hate Muslims?  Are the racists and the anti-Muslims – the people doing things like this.  And when you voted for their champion, you reassured them in their belief that you’re one of them.

Does that bother you?  If it doesn’t, maybe you don’t hate their views as much as you think.  And if it does, shouldn’t you be taking it up with them, rather than the liberals, or the minorities targeted by those you’ve reassured?

I have no idea what proportion of Trump’s supporters were voting his way because other problems left them angry, or afraid, or hurting.  For those who really are hurting, their problems deserve looking at.  But not because they’re Trump supporters, because they’re people who are hurting.  And it doesn’t mean it somehow shouldn’t “count” that they stood up to be counted with (literally) the KKK, or those who want to reduce women’s bodies to property, and built a platform based inextricably on multiple hatreds.

I’m sure someone will point out that this is pretty much the argument leveled at black people vs black criminals.  But the difference is that regular black people merely have the same skin colour black criminals – whereas non-bigoted Trump supporters deliberately and knowingly lent their endorsement to the bigoted ones.  And the results of that endorsement are playing out already.

So:  if you’re a Trump supporter who really wants me to understand that you’re not really like the racists, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes, anti-Muslims, and anti-semites, I say this:  I’m not the person you need to tell.  You need to tell the racists, the misogynists, and their ilk – show them they’re wrong about you, and about America – show them that you won’t condone their hate.  This week, you wasted your biggest chance to do that – so what now?  Will you look for another?  Will you take it if you find it?

And if the answer is no, then are they  truly wrong about you?

Remember that Hobby Lobby ruling, and how one of the problems listed in the dissent was how widely its precedent could allow “sincere religious belief” to be deployed as an unwarranted shield? And remember how there was a widespread no, no it just affects this one case.

(That one was already false long before this post and what this post’s about – emboldened by the HL ruling, it took only days for other companies to sue for the removal of female – always female, of course – contraception from their health plans. And even to exempt them from submitting forms to other insurers to allow female employees to see contraceptive care through other means).

But now there’s a new front. A little over a week ago, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – a sect that broke away from the Mormons when the latter went off the idea of polygamy and child-brides – found itself in court under investigation for violation of child labour laws. See here for a fuller description of the case, along with links to a lot of the deeper background.

A prominent member of the sect, Vernon Steed was called to testify, but refused on the grounds of having taken a religious vow not to discuss internal matters of the sect with outsiders. And this claim has been upheld by Utah Judge David Sam. That’s right, Judge Sam has ruled that a relgious vow exempts Steed from giving evidence pertinent to a federal investigation of child welfare – an investigation of a sect whose leader is currently in prison for the sexual assault of underaged girls he decreed to be his wives. And the HL decision was cited as the justification.

The sort of thing that many of us predicted, to a response of “oh, no, too alarmist.”

The HL decision was about four types of contraception that the company consiered abortifacients – this “sincere religious belief” was ruled to exempt them from offering these in its employee health plans. This is, this particular religious belief wasn’t like most others, because it was about something that was empirically testable. As such, their belief that these were abortifacients rather than contraceptives simply wasn’t a matter for belief – it was a matter of fact, and it was demonstrably wrong – and no amount of real or pretended sincerity can change that. And as I said, almost immediately other companies filed their own suits to push their exemptions further.

These decisions fueled two ideas dear to the Religious Right’s heart. The idea that religious belief could be used to trump empirical and demonstrable fact – that “sincere” trumps true and false. And of course the old favourite that religious belief trumps the health of female employees.

Of course, they were justified in terms of protecting unborn children. But now they’re being used to cover up the possible harm of actual, living children, not hypothetical future ones – at the very least, they’re being used to obstruct attempts to verify the children’s welfare. Moving on from empirical fact, sincere religious belief is now being allowed to trump being held accountable for how you treat children in your care – “sincere” trumping legal and illegal, or right and wrong. And of course it’s moved on from women to children, the very demographic the religious right claims to champion.

How could anyone have seriously doubted this would be the result of the Hobby Lobby decision? The slippery slope is always invoked as a danger in progressively encroaching on the powerful – but things roll down real slopes, not up. This is what a real slippery slope looks like – left unchecked, they encroach on the powerless, not the powerful.