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Friendly Atheist:

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants everyone to know her state is finally #1 in something. Not crime. They’re 48th in that. Not health care. They’re #47. Infrastructure? Nope. They’re #41. It sure as hell isn’t education, where they’re #36. But they’re #1 when it comes to “Religious Liberty”… at least according to a right-wing Christian group looking for attention.

[Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders today announced Arkansas ranks #1 in the nation for religious liberty according to the First Liberty Institute’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy’s (CRCD) Religious Liberty in the States (RLS) index. Arkansas earned a score of 89.2%, becoming one of only two states to receive the index’s first-ever “excellent” rating. “Religious liberty is America’s First Freedom, and Arkansas is leading the nation in protecting it,” said Governor Sanders. “Our rights come from God, not government, and every American should be free to live according to their faith and conscience. We’ll continue defending that freedom and ensuring the Natural State remains the best place in the country to live, work, and worship.”]

It is downright comical that, even with the #1 ranking, Arkansas could still only pull off a B+. Also funny? New York was ranked last by the right-wing group, which Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ought to wear as a badge of honor, given where the ranking is coming from. The conservative group says the rankings were calculated by evaluating “50 legal protections across 20 safeguards… to support religious freedom in daily life from education and healthcare to family law, economic activity, and religious practice.” To put that another way, if your religion is allowed to override civil rights protections for groups of people you hate, you’re rewarded for it. Same rule applies if your religion is allowed to ignore all the things that generally benefit society For example, First Liberty explains, Christian judges in Arkansas are allowed cite their faith in defense of discriminating against same-sex couples.

That bill, the ACLU noted, also allows taxpayer-funded faith-based adoption and foster agencies to discriminate against gay people and “undermine[s] nondiscrimination standards in education, licensing, and accreditation.” They added that the bill played on the unfounded fear that religious groups would be forced to violate their beliefs, “something that has never happened in the decade since marriage equality became law.” HB 1615 also lets private business owners—bakers, florists, photographers, etc.— discriminate against LGBTQ customers. They can refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple even if they would sell the same cake to a straight one. First Liberty says these “protections” save businesses from “being forced to participate in wedding ceremonies” against their will… as if the caterer at a wedding holds the same importance as the maid of honor. These are the things Arkansas is being rewarded for. Among the other things First Liberty considered in their rankings?

Are clergy members allowed to keep pedophiles’ secrets a secret if they learn about them through the act of Confession? (Requiring them to be mandated reporters in those cases, which would help the victims, is considered a bad thing among conservatives.)

Are houses of worship are allowed to spread a disease during a pandemic? (Conservatives threw a hissy fit when churches were prohibited from opening their doors for large services during the pre-vaccine COVID days. This was done to prevent the spread of an airborne disease because churches, unlike, say, grocery stores, are spaces where people talk and sing and spread germs in close proximity.)

Do public schools let unvaccinated students enroll? (Herd immunity only works if enough people are vaccinated, which is why no one should be exempt from vaccines unless there’s a medical reason for it, but anti-science conservatives think vaccines should be optional.)

Can employees avoid joining a union if they have a religious objection to it? (Conservatives want to decrease the power of those unions, thereby allowing businesses to take advantage of their employees, so any excuse to avoid paying union dues is considered a win.)

[...] As I’ve written before, Sanders, much like her father, isn’t interested in merely blurring the line between church and state. She doesn’t believe such a line exists at all. She thinks her beliefs are state-sanctioned truths while everyone else’s beliefs are merely fiction. That violates the law she swore to uphold. By the way, Arkansas remains one of a handful of states where, at least on paper, the state constitution literally prohibits atheists from holding office: Article 19, Section 1 says “No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any Court.” It’s unenforceable thanks to the U.S. Constitution, but it’s still on the books in what we’re told is the greatest state for religious liberty. The legislature could begin the process to take that law off the books if they wanted to… but Republicans aren’t interested in doing anything to actually protect religious freedom for non-Christians. The bottom line is that this ranking is a joke. It doesn’t measure “religious liberty” in any meaningful sense of the phrase. It measures how thoroughly a state has embraced the policy wishlist of the Christian Right. If lawmakers let conservative Christians discriminate against LGBTQ people, weaken public health protections, funnel taxpayer money to religious institutions, and inject Christianity into public schools, they rack up points.

If a state actually treats all religions—and those of us with no religion—equally under the law, it gets punished. Muslims don’t get invited into this vision of religious liberty. Neither do atheists, Jews, Hindus, Catholics, or even Christians who reject her brand of conservative evangelical politics.

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

President Donald Trump’s latest attack on American democracy relies on an old tactic. Throughout his second administration — and even dating back to his first — Trump appointees have laundered documents they claim prove Democratic and “deep state” malfeasance through credulous right-wing outlets, counting on MAGA media to amplify their conspiracy theories and hoping that mainstream outlets would pick them up as well. Now they’re applying the same playbook to election denial. On Thursday night, Trump plans to use a White House address to relitigate his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. While details are sparse, reports suggest he could use declassified intelligence documents to accuse China and Venezuela of election interference and target the 2020 Senate elections in Georgia. Allies in the election denial community have suggested such claims could be used as a "predicate" to declare a “national emergency” that would justify an executive order implementing voter suppression policies by fiat.  Right-wing journalist John Solomon and Trump crony Bill Pulte, recently installed by the president at the White House and as acting director of national intelligence, respectively, are reportedly leading the effort to scrounge up the documents Trump will use to make his case — and taking those records out of context to support his conspiracy theories (“They try to put bits and pieces together and then make these conclusions,” one administration official told MS NOW). 

Such duplicitous methods are necessary because the 2020 election’s security has been litigated over and over again, with the intelligence community under Trump’s auspices finding “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect” of the voting process and the attorney general he appointed, William Barr, stating in December 2020 that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” But MAGA hacks like Benny Johnson and Steve Bannon are already frothing at the mouth over the speech, promising that it will bring about “doomsday for the deep state” and “change the direction of politics.”

The salvo Trump and his administration are telegraphing is incredibly dangerous — but it is simply the election denial version of what they’ve previously tried to do to delegitimize the federal probes of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump’s retention of classified documents, and his role in the January 6 insurrection, among other cases. I previously described this tactic as the Trump administration’s "chum cycle".

[...] It’s unclear whether the Trump administration officials furiously trying to generate these scandals are deliberately lying about the contents of the documents they declassify, or if they are themselves so steeped in MAGA media conspiracy theories that they are predisposed to run with the most deranged and purportedly damning interpretations of otherwise innocuous records (Gabbard, Grenell, and Patel all had right-wing media careers of their own before joining the federal government). What’s clear is that the “chum cycle” tactic relies on the credulousness of right-wing media to launder the documents, run with the administration’s overwrought claims, and saturate the MAGA base’s news environment with furious denunciations and calls for retribution.  And when you combine that Trumpist propaganda apparatus with a Trump administration shorn of guardrails and a MAGA base predisposed to believe that the president is so popular that only fraud can explain Republican defeats — and then use Trump himself to apply the tactic to election denial — the potential for disaster becomes explosive. 

Donald Trump brings the “chum cycle” tactics to election denialism, and its purpose is to launder lies for the MAGA media to froth at.

See Also:

MMFA: Misinformer John Solomon, who reportedly pushed for Trump’s prime-time speech, has spent months claiming China interfered in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden

Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s so-called border czar, blamed Democrats for recent incidents in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents killed civilians. He called on the party to stop criticizing the administration’s racist immigration policies. “This all comes back to the Dems, who are telling people, ‘Don’t comply with ICE,’” Homan said in an appearance Wednesday night on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.” Naturally, this is a lie. Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been informing immigrant communities of their rights under the Constitution, which limits the ability of law enforcement to enter private property. Homan also complained about Ocasio-Cortez doing this last February and brought up the congresswoman’s actions in his new Fox appearance. Continuing his rant, Homan said, “I’m scared to death that one of these days, our ICE officers aren’t going to be quick enough. The bad guys are going to be quicker. And I’m going to hand another folded flag to a spouse or a child.”

“It all goes back to the Dems, who want to continue to attack ICE and tell people to evade them, tell people ‘Don’t comply,’ tell people to resist and tell people ICE isn’t real law enforcement agency. You and I talked about this a year and a half ago, Laura. I said if the hateful rhetoric didn’t stop, there would be bloodshed. And I’m saying it right now: There’s still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted,” Homan concluded.

Thomas Homan whines about Democrats rightly criticizing ICE’s terroristic activities.

From the 07.17.2026 edition of FNC's The Ingraham Angle:

Marco Rubio is a pussy!