An Episcopal priest in New York City declared that Jesus is “transgender” and told the congregation that if they deny this, they are denying the “divinity” of Christ.
Reverend Flourish Klink, who considers herself a transgender nonbinary individual, made the outlandish assertions during a recent sermon at Christ & St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.
“God is non-binary. God is non-binary, but I’m going to go further than that, and I’m going to say God is actually also trans,” Klink said. “And now let’s get on the same page here. When we trans people are born, folks assign us a gender based on what they see. Then, when we’re old enough, we realize that that wasn’t right, and we’re not in our deepest selves the gender that everybody thought we were.”
On a side note I was reading William Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Colony today and it’s really funny to see that even as early as the 1600’s not only did the various protest denominations not get along but the Puritans in Holland who had fled England were not getting along with the Puritans who remained in England as the Papal envoy in Holland put it at the time: (translated from the Italian).
The Puritans are also tolerated—those even purer and more rigid Calvinists who refuse to acknowledge any authority—including the Puritans from England who frequent Holland and the other United Provinces for the sake of trade. Almost all the English Puritans in Amsterdam are there for the same reason, and some likewise reside in the city of Middelburg in Zeeland for commercial purposes. Thus, from every part—indeed, from every corner—of the United Provinces, one hears their sectarian clamor.
This is human nature, once you decide you know best you don’t just decide you know better than the church, you decide you know better than everyone else.
That Grand Old Army [of the Potomac] did performed many heroic acts but never in its history did it do a more devoted service than vote for Abraham Lincoln.
Unknown Soldier quoted by Ken Burns in The Civil War Episode Seven Host Hallowed Ground 1990
After the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the fall of the Mississippi river to the North the Confederate Armies were no longer capable of major offensive actions against the North. This was punctuated by the defeat of Braxton Bragg who failed to follow up on his victory at Chickamauga by seizing Chattanooga giving time for Grant to take over the armies there and defeat him and force his retreat back into Georgia & his relief.
With overwhelming forces the plan of the North was for Grant as general in chief accompanying the Army of the Potomac under Meade going after Lee & Richmond and with Sherman commanding the Army of the Tennessee going after Joe Johnston & Atlanta.
This was a problem for Jefferson Davis and the South. Both Union Armies were at least a half again larger than the Confederate Forces, they were well supplied by a United States whose industrial and agricultural sectors were expanding. Meanwhile the Union blockade was squeezing the South, inflation was rampant and despite interior lines the pressures from both advancing armies combined with raids on infrastructure were creating a supply crisis. The discontent on the home front meant that the government itself was in danger
It was true that daring raiders such as the CSS Alabama at sea and the genius of General Nathan Bedford Forest cavalry on land gave the North grief neither was sufficient to do more than annoy the forces of the Union Army or dent their trade and while Johnston was an excellent general and Lee, despite his defeat at Gettysburg was rightfully considered a military genius they simply weren’t strong enough to destroy the Armies converging on them.
Davis had one card left to play. The election of 1864 was coming and with the war was not popular. If the Democrats which has a large peace faction could manage to unseat Lincoln who was committed to conducting the war to the point of victory, the South could win diplomatically what they were incapable of winning militarily, and such an electoral defeat of the GOP might even bring France or England on board diplomatically to end the war.
Thus is was the job for Lee and Johnston to do all they could to slow the advances of Grant and Sherman making sure it was costly in terms of time and lives to put the Democrats in power who would be amiable to the end of the war, even if it meant a defeat for the Union while expelling the hated Lincoln from the scene.
162 years later Iran and the Democrats have the exact same game plan.
Iran has been creative in their use of drones in order to try and overwhelm US capabilities and to strike (with aid & intelligence from Russia & China) bases in the middle east and the Houthi’s moves against the Saudi’s can drive the price of gas up but in the end Iran can only resupply by land and very slowly, they can’t sell their oil to get hard cash, their tankers which are not being blockaded find themselves venerable to the US navy at sea. What’s left of their air force is currently on the ground in Pakistan to avoid destruction, their navy HAS been destroyed & their army dare not move against US bases in the area for fear of being desiccated, that is even if they could manage the logistics to move, supply and feed their forces.
For all their loud talk and big treats they are unable to do much to wit:
The Islamic regime of Iran warned Israel that if it touched Ali al-Taher in Lebanon, it would trigger an immediate ballistic-missile response.
On September 10, 2026, Israel destroyed Hezbollah’s terror tunnel network at Ali al-Taher in southern Lebanon.
Four days later no missiles are heading to Israel, which is just as well as Israel are much less reluctant to hit Iranian targets in Iran as we are and could even decide to go after the Houthis (although I suspect they will make the Saudi’s ask for the help or to sign the Abraham Accords before they do). Iran can basically hunker down and take it, but they can do one other thing, STALL.
Iran knows there is an American election in less than 60 days. Iran also knows that Democrats hate Donald Trump much more than they love America (at least among the minority of Democrats who do according to pols). They know that the Democrat left will do all they can to have the war end in an American defeat & will advance propaganda to that effect. If they can keep the price of gas high enough and create enough economic cost they hope to cause President Trump to end the stranglehold on the nation giving them a chance to rebuild. It will take years to do so, but that’s better than the Islamic republic falling.
In 1864 the Army of the Potomac had a ton of votes and despite the Democrat nominee being their beloved first commander who treated them well they voted enmasse for Abraham Lincoln and came from people all over the nation. In my city of Fitchburg which was still a town at the time of the war, a book on Fitchburg’s service members needed many many pages to list them all. They knew what they were fighting for
Today those in the service & who have served know what Iran is and who the enemy is, but they are a tiny minority of the country.
So it will be up to the non-serving members of the public, if Iran will be more successful than the Confederates.
May we as a nation have the wisdom to see things as they are.
Today’s book quote tackles a fact that people 100 & 500 & 700 years ago knew but has recently been re-written by those who wish the west to fail.
The huge response to [Pope Blessed] Urban’s [II] call at the council of Clermont is even more amazing when considering the cost to go on Crusade—for a knight, four to five times his annual income. Although some modern critics assert that the Crusades were focused on the accumulation of wealth, the historical record shows that the vast majority of those who took the cross suffered financial hardship as result. The certainly did not profit from it. In order to finance such an expensive undertaking many knights and their extended family sold or mortgaged their land and possessions.(emphasis mine)
I have seen the history of the crusades re-written during my lifetime and it’s always been a bit of a shock how fast the generation who thought they knew better than their parents decided to play games with history to justify their rejection of the heroes who kept violent Islam at bay.
It’s no coincidence that those same times are now allying with said Islam in order to secure political power that their numbers can’t justify.
Today on X I noted this post from a very excellent Cynical Publius
Interestingly, the more Republican the South became, the less racist it became, wholly and utterly disproving the myth of the "Party Switch."
In reality, what happened was that the racist Southern Democrats died off and were replaced by their anti-racist Republican children and… https://t.co/gVGJVlwXyW
When I saw this tweet I instantly remembered my post where I researched all of this however that was one of the posts that disappeared when I started having major blog problems (we’ll talk about the why’s for those troubles some other times) but I spent an hour or two researching & found a tweet linking to the post & was able to find the updated and bumped version from 2020.
As this lie about the south suddenly changing side with LBJ is Gospel to the left to this day rather than simply reinserting it into the sport when it was first posted I figured it deserved a full new post so here is it, unseen for years my data on when the southern states actually went GOP.
(Note, this post was originally posted on Aug 17th 2017. However the subject came up during my appearance on fault lines radio this morning so I thought I’d repost and bump it so listeners could see the actual post and data I was referring to.)
If you are even slightly a leftist such as the folks I covered on the Boston Common this weekend one of the things that you believe without question is that the only reason why the GOP has control of legislatures in the south is because of a backlash over the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965. This has been an article of faith for years and it’s quite handy when you want to explain away uncomfortable electoral defeats. Why woo voters when you can simply cry “racism”.
It’s an easy to sell argument, after all the pre 1964 south was called the solid south for a reason. Through 1892 no former slave state (including border states) voted for a GOP presidential candidate. No state of the old confederacy voted GOP post reconstruction till Tennessee voted Harding 1920. Through 1955 when the fight for civil rights started looming large the GOP only managed to take states in the old confederacy two more times once when Eisenhower after winning World War to managed to take Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia and once in the Herbert Hoover landslide of 1928 that added North Carolina to that list.
But the real power of the Democrats in the south wasn’t in presidential elections where they were outnumbered. It was in the state legislatures, where, with the exception of Missouri which was pretty competitive in the first half of the 20th century A republican speaker of the House in the old south and most of the old slave states (I’m missing data for Delaware) just didn’t exist.
And then came Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson
In 1957 Johnson in an effort “sanitize” himself on civil rights for a presidential run pushed through the first civil rights bill post reconstruction. When he became president after JFK’s murder in 1963 he managed to get the Civil Rights act of 1964 passed doing so with only 8 votes from the old confederacy in the house and none in the senate, he followed that up with the Voting Rights act in 1965 and declaring that he would secure the black vote for Democrats for the next 2 centuries (although he used somewhat different phrasing describing the black vote, employing a word rhyming with “trigger”).
It is at this point that according to our friends on the left that the old solid racist south (including many of the slave holding border states) decided to abandon the Democrat party and started voting GOP
However there is one problem that stands in the way of that argument: The facts.
As Tip O’Neill once said all politics is local and nothing better reflects the feelings of a local electorate than a vote for a state legislator. So if the left’s meme is to be believed it shouldn’t have taken more than a few two year election cycles for a combination of mass defections and outraged old racists to fill the south with GOP speakers in their houses. So let’s take a look at a chart that lists all the old slaveholding states and see how quickly those racist southerners and old segregationists managed to flip their states to their new favorite party.
[table id=1 ]
As you can see when the data is presented the left’s article of faith runs smack dab of a factual cliff.
With the exception of a two year period of in Tennessee when a democrat defector gave the GOP the house for one term, No state of the old confederacy elected a GOP house until 1995 and even with that happened in North and South Carolina, North Carolina flipped back to the Democrats the very next election and stayed there until 2011.
Of those states only one other (Florida) joined South Carolina as a solid GOP state in the 20th century five of the states flipped this decade. And think about it. If you believe our friends on the left then Alabama the state where Martin Luther King wrote is famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Mississippi the state where the famous case of the murder of civil rights workers dramatized in the film Mississippi Burning took place in the 60’s were so apparently so outraged over the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights act and LBJ that their voters they waited nearly 2 1/2 generations to vote GOP.
That’s simply not credible.
Now as this is such an article faith for our Democrat friends they will sooner imagine armies of ancient segregationists bussed from Nursing Homes on election day each years than believe the data.
Because there is a much more credible explanation as to why the left is losing the South that’s staring them in the face but that’s a post for later this week.
Update: Heard back from the Delaware legislative librarian 9/21. She was out on Friday but when she got back she kindly provided me both house and senate info from 1965 to present that I’ve used to update my table. Many Thanks
