Link List: Voting Sure is Weird

Don’t vote Trump for religious liberty

Tish Harrison Warren:

The root of religious freedom amid pluralism is love for our neighbors, especially our ideological or political enemies. We cannot spend eight years supporting a president whose basic modus operandi is meanness and cruelty-- who vocally disagrees with the call to love one’s enemy--and then expect anyone to take us seriously when we ask them to respect our religious freedom.

The Priority of Peaceableness in a Disruptive Election

Craig Watts:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared, “Every true Christian is a fighting pacifist….Peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the presence of justice.” With a commitment to the priority of peaceableness we must fight against the authoritarianism that erodes democracy and subverts majority rule while it preserves narrow ethno-nationalistic interests. In keeping with our peaceable priority we need to resist the temptation to demonize those we must oppose. But that should not lessen our willingness to fight for justice as we enter the most threat-filled and consequential election season in well over one hundred years. Blood may be shed. But may it never be by our hands.

Amen.

A More Perfect Idolatry

Rosalind Hughes:

Redemption will not be found in the ballot box. May we pray not to find perdition there, either. But hope demands that we set our sights higher than that, even as, in the meantime, we do what we may to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly toward our God.

Trump’s suburban collapse costs him in Nebraska

David Siders:

[...] in 2008, Barack Obama, carrying the 2nd District, picked off one of the electoral votes, marking the first time in 44 years that a Democrat had accomplished that feat.

Stunned, Republicans in the state’s legislature re-drew the 2nd District lines to make it safer for the GOP, adding the more conservative, western suburbs of Sarpy County to the city of Omaha. Obama lost the reconfigured district to Mitt Romney in 2012, and Trump carried it narrowly four years later.

Cool, cool, cool. Why is this still happening? Why is this legal?

Amy Coney Barrett on climate change: "I would not say I have firm views on it.”

Eric Holthaus pretty accurately summarized my democracy wishlist:

This whole thing makes it clear that democracy as we know it in the United States is broken.

We need radical reforms to democracy to move quickly on the climate emergency and act with justice for the rights of people whose voices have been silenced for too long.

Automatic voter registration.

Removing the filibuster from the Senate.

An end to gerrymandering.

An expanded Supreme Court.

Abolishing the Electoral College.

Guaranteed representation in Congress for tribal Nations.

Statehood for DC and every US territory.

All of these would restore and strengthen voting rights for people of color and folks on the front lines of climate change. None of these actions should be controversial.

I'd also add instant-runoff voting.