Christianity in bad decline

 Major league baseball is too woke for Rudolph Giuliani.  He claims to be boycotting Yankee games over the team's support for Black Lives Matter.  (The nearly hundred-dollar price of a ticket is probably just as significant.  Now that he's just another disgraced ex-lawyer there's no reason to comp him.)  He also demands that real Americans avoid the Dodgers because they allowed the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to participate in Pride Night.  "The Dodgers have decided to declare war on Christianity," he snarled.  Trailing Arizona by four games, they probably have other things to think about.  (OANN's Jack Posobiec held an exorcism outside the stadium but the Sisters collected their Community Hero award anyway.)

Today in the Washington Post you can read an excerpt from Rachel L. Swarns's book The 272:  The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church.  It tells the story of the people who were sold in 1838 by the Jesuit order to pay for Georgetown College (now University).  Clearly Swarns has also declared war on Christianity (the Post did long ago) and her book will not be purchased by school libraries in the places that need most to read it.

To its credit, the university has created the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation to support restitution and other programs to assist descendants of the original 272 enslaved people sold to planters in Louisiana.  It has been criticized for lacking transparency and for failing to identify all who may qualify, but it's a start.  This should be remembered when rushing to defend the indefensible.

The noisiest Christians continue to be those who exercise the greatest cruelty.  Already in Georgia it is illegal to give water or food to people forced to stand in line for hours in order to vote.  Needless to say Texas has gone one better:  the "Death Star Bill" takes effect September 1, providing "statewide consistency" in local regulations.  For some reason this consistency requires curtailing housing and environmental protections, and even mandated hourly water breaks for construction workers.  Texas already leads the nation in worker deaths due to heat, so it's not clear what Abbott hopes to achieve.  Perhaps he will follow Iowa and Arkansas in repealing child labor laws so they can die, too.

But there's plenty of cruelty in the private sector, too.  Bohemian Grove, the secretive retreat for the ultra rich and their tame Supreme Court justices, is being sued by employees for such abuses as sixteen-hour workdays without breaks, unpaid overtime and less-than-minimum wages, and falsified records.  Apparently the help can't even make phone calls from the "camps," a network of luxurious facilities in the forest near San Francisco.  And there's no tipping.  The appeal of these jobs eludes me.

Was Fathers Day invented by greeting card companies?  Not really.  According to the Internet, bottomless well of information, it began in 1908 when a West Virginia church commemorated 385 men who had died the previous year in a coal mine explosion.  A year later Sonoro Louise Smart Dodd took it up as a tribute to her father, who raised six children on his own in Spokane, Washington.  For a time American television was chock full of wise fake dads, none more beloved than Cliff Huxtable, the OB-GYN who always had time to sit on his couch dispensing warmth.  So it's perhaps appropriate that nine more women are suing him for sexual assault in Nevada.  So popular was the show that it's still being rerun on those nameless cable stations that come with your subscription.  Enjoy.