At this point I think everything has been said about the debate, but not everyone has had a chance to say it. This is my chance, but I’m just going to go with my three favorite quotes from and about the evening:
- On whether after nine years of promising a better health care plan than Obamacare, does Donald Trump have a better plan? “I have concepts of a plan,” he said. I’m trying that out at work.
- CNN’s Abby Phillip on ABC’s fact-checking Donald Trump more than Vice President Harris: “Just fyi: when there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact checking,”
- And, because kids still have a language of their own, Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) posted, “My kid just said ‘Kamala is eating’ which I presume is good.”
There won’t be enough new polls out until next week to know how much the debate changed things, but my bold prediction is that the election will still look very close. Most people have already made up their minds and see what they want to see in a debate like that. The Electoral College will be decided on the margins, so vote and if you can, vote early.
That brings me to another reminder that we have information for people who need to register to vote, find their polling place, or get an absentee ballot. Feel free to send our Secular America Votes page around; we don’t mind. New data from Pew Research shows that Protestants favor Trump 61-37 (thanks to the evangelicals), Catholics favor Trump 52-47, but the “religiously unaffiliated” favor Harris 68-28. Let’s get out the vote.
Last time here when I covered the Democratic Convention I should have mentioned that the Center for Freethought Equality had a booth there and they spread the word about electing secular Americans to office. CFE is an arm of our coalition partner the American Humanist Association, which happens to be holding their annual conference online this weekend! I’m pretty sure they would still let you register. It’s online so it’s not a lot.
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Speaking of secular elected officials, Britain’s new Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, is an atheist. His Labour Party won a decisive victory in July ending 14 years of Conservative rule. You can read Britain Has Elected the Most Godless Parliament in History here, which says 40 percent of Members of Parliament chose a secular declaration over a religious oath when being sworn in. This is right in line with the 38 percent of the British population that identifies as nonreligious. There’s just far less stigma attached to it over there when they go to vote.
Over here we have to contend with senators like Josh Hawley of Missouri who wrote yet another pro-Christian nationalism screed. This is dangerous. A new study finds that in states where representatives publicly support Christian nationalism there is more violence against religious minorities. Hawley's The Christian Nationalism We Need tries to make the case for Republicans being more family friendly instead of business friendly, but also we need to inscribe In God We Trust on every public building. He writes off “the Left” with "The crisis of our time springs from the left’s determination to destroy the loves that unite us, to replace God, home, and work with the religion of the trans flag.”
Hawley got 58 percent of the Missouri vote in 2018. He seems likely to run for President someday. The Secular Coalition is sending him a letter, which I’ll post next time, telling him why he’s embarrassing himself and endangering others.
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