Op-ed: Society will march past desperate attempts to hold power
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In the Aug. 22 edition of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel, we were once again subjected to a hate-filled screed of misinformation from White Christian nationalist State Sen. Mike Azinger. While these delusional rantings are hardly deserving of reply, I would hate to see this nonsense spewed into the ether without retort.
Azinger repeatedly refers to so-called "Natural Law" in his piece, which is amusing considering that his rantings show he hasn't the slightest concept of nature's laws. Science tells us that modern humans, Homo Sapiens (I'm sure that wording makes Azinger uncomfortable), evolved around 300,000 years ago. We shared an ancestor with other great apes (contrary to the ideas that those like Azinger like to ape, which suggest we evolved directly from apes), which is why we share 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, for example. We are governed, like all living things, by the laws of physics. Nature's laws do not dictate culture, the structures of societies and civilizations, or for that matter the existence of deities like Azinger's very unimaginative and hateful god; these are the constructs of bipedal mammals with very high-level cognitive functioning, aka us.
Azinger mentions a Washington Post reporter who attended a Pride event with her young children wherein a parade float with "kinksters" displayed sexual flamboyance. Interesting. Azinger has expressed his disbelief in the seriousness of a global pandemic responsible for 627,843 U.S. deaths as I write (and counting) and expressed his support for parents who refuse to mask and/or vaccinate their children, but apparently some kids witnessing toned-down eroticism is a bridge too far. Shouldn't that be a parental choice issue, Mike?
Of course, Azinger would be remiss the year before his next election not to mention Critical Race Theory. A collegiate-level theory of race relations and structures in U.S. history and today is such a hot-button issue among the unhinged right that Fox News may have called Azinger up and complained if he failed to mention it. Folks like Azinger who loved to toss around the word "snowflake" in the Trump years are very upset that schools might teach accurate history about the 400 years of African slavery in the Americas and their impact on our culture, economy, politics, and society and their institutions and structures today. Marxism, Azinger calls it. There's that scary McCarthyite buzzword that will rile up his base! Once again, he shows virtually no understanding of a favored "ism."
We'll have Soviet-like gulags in the U.S. if we teach CRT, says Azinger. Our freedoms! Our liberties! I guess it's the socialist in me that fails to see how teaching accurate and complete U.S. history and its effects today leads to authoritarian dystopia. Now, an insurrectionist coup attempt, like the one on Jan. 6 that Azinger was in D.C. for, that's how you get authoritarian dictatorship!
Azinger offered some reading material, so I will as well. I strongly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me;" Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist;" "Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019" edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain; Heather McGhee's "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together;" and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States." I recommend that last book as a sort of fill-in-the-blanks on our founding generations and their treatment of Indigenous Americans.
As a Christian nationalist, Azinger has a vision for the U.S. of Christian theocracy, which he gained, at least in part, at an unaccredited college in Indiana best known for faculty-lead sexual assault. Because our 21st Century society refuses to conform to texts written by 44 men over 1,600 years between 2,000 and 5,000 years ago in another part of the world and arbitrarily made canon by still other men much later (aka the Bible), he calls it a failure. But ours is a modern, secular constitutional democratic-republic and, much to Azinger's dismay, folks like him are fast becoming irrelevant -- desperately clinging to whatever power they can on their way to demographic demise and history's dustbin. This is a future I look forward to with great hope and joy.
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Eric Engle is a non-theist and secular activist living in Parkersburg.