Hobby Lobby Has Not Split “the Left”

Stupidest headline I’ve seen so far today — “How Hobby Lobby Split the Left and Set Back Gay Rights” at The Atlantic. I’m not seeing the Hobby Lobby decision split “the Left” at all. Have you?

It’s true that several gay-rights groups have withdrawn support from ENDA — the Employment Non-Discrimination Act — but their reasons are understandable. They say the bill has been so carved-out and watered down as to be useless. And they’re probably right. I’m not seeing any objections from other lefties.

What makes this article (by Molly Ball) especially pathetic is that her strongest examples of splitting on “The Left” are Third Way and Jim Wallis. Third Way is an organization of center-right trolls. And Jim Wallis is a troll, period.

Wallis fools a lot of people because he presumes to speak for the religious Left, and he’s written some books, such as God’s Politics, that spoke against the influence of extremist right-wing religion in U.S. politics. But over the years it has become plain he is no progressive himself; he just plays one on the Tee Vee.

Actual progressive religious people such as Frederick Clarkson have been calling out Wallis’s bullshit for years. Here’s just one article about Wallis out of a whole lot of others at the website Talk to Action.

In fact, here’s an interview of Wallis from Christianity Today where he plainly says he is no liberal and not part of the religious Left. He’s opposed to marriage rights and has been weaselly on reproductive rights, refusing to take a stand on the abortion issue but engaging in much winking and nodding toward the Right.

So no, just because Third Way and Jim Wallis and a few center-right Democrats are chewing their nails over the Hobby Lobby decision doesn’t mean “The Left” is split over it. It is not.

Anyone who wonders what actual progressive religion looks like are welcome to read my book, btw.