Category: Vaccines

Black Trumpkin pastor in Virginia brags about issuing 17,000 religious exemptions from vaccines

Posted on by Darrell Lucus

It may seem that the Republican Party is willing to condone racism. After all, Donald Trump still has the GOP very much in his thrall, despite his penchant for blowing racist yacht horns—like calling Democratic lawmakers “savages” when he was attacking a Latina, two Black people, a Palestinian, and two Jews. But the GOP is okay with people of color—just as long as they’re line-drawing conservatives. Take the word of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is of the mind that people of color “can go anywhere”—but “you just need to be conservative, not liberal.”

While Graham was referring specifically to people of color in his state of South Carolina, I suspect that the kind of Black politician he has in mind is Leon Benjamin, a Black pastor from Richmond, Virginia. Two years ago, Benjamin challenged incumbent Democrat Don McEachin in the commonwealth’s Fourth Congressional District—and got his head handed to him, 61-38. He’s back for a rematch in 2022 even though he’s running in territory that is even bluer than its predecessor. But that hasn’t dissuaded Benjamin from going full-on deplorable. How deplorable, you ask?

He’s openly bragging about doling out religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

I first noticed Benjamin late last month. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch caught him speaking at the Phoenix edition of the Reawaken America Tour, a right-wing conference organized by podcaster Clay Clark and co-sponsored by Charisma magazine. At that gathering, Benjamin took a swipe at pastors who guide their flocks to wear masks and get vaccinated, calling them “false prophets” and more.

MAGA pastor and GOP congressional candidate Leon Benjamin declares that any Christian leader who supports COVID vaccines or the wearing of masks is a false prophet: "God would never cover the mouth of a true prophet!" pic.twitter.com/O7N75u1fvC

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) January 21, 2022

I did a little more digging, and discovered that his full speech was even worse. Benjamin revealed that his church, New Life Harvest Church in Richmond—where he is founder and “bishop”—is offering forms for religious exemptions from vaccine mandates. In my book, this makes Benjamin no different from a drug dealer. But to do so when he almost certainly knows that hospitals are gasping under the weight of the omicron surge? 

Well, it turns out that such considerations haven’t mattered to Benjamin for some time. His Twitter account features this pinned tweet:

The Democrat Party has become the party of division & governmental control. It is no longer the party of great leaders like JFK or MLK. The time to restore our faith in God, not the government is NOW. Support me ➡️ https://t.co/Gfdc58tZ5g pic.twitter.com/SVWatrIDY3

— Leon Benjamin (@Leon4Congress) January 10, 2022

At first glance, this is a typical treatise of why Benjamin identifies as a line-drawing Black conservative. He claims, with a straight face, that the Democrats have strayed from the vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, people whom he considered role models as a kid. And now he has have prostrated himself before a guy who is basically a Dixiecrat, a guy who has spent his political life trampling on JFK and Dr. King’s vision? 

At around the two-minute mark, Benjamin goes from mere deplorable to dangerous. He openly brags that he has written over 17,000 religious exemptions against vaccine mandates. He frames this as protecting “religious liberty” and “freedom of choice.”

The video had me close to screaming and cursing—a reaction that is normally reserved for outrages from Donald Trump. Benjamin has to know that hospitals in the Richmond area, and in the nation as a whole, are being stretched close to their breaking point due to unvaccinated people filling up beds with severe cases of COVID-19. He has to know that one of the biggest reasons that we’re in the third year of this pandemic is that not enough people are vaccinated to protect the elderly, the high-risk, the immunocompromised, and those who can’t (rather than won’t) be vaccinated.

For instance, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and former Secretary of State Colin Powell died of COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. Why? He had multiple myeloma, which attacked his white blood cells and left his immune system weakened, even while vaccinated. Powell was thus dependent on those around him to be vaccinated. Unfortunately, people like Benjamin are making that task more difficult. Benjamin, according to his campaign biography, is a Navy veteran. It's a safe bet that he considers Powell a role model, as do a lot of Black servicemen of his generation. Has he considered, even for a minute, that exemptions like these may have left Powell exposed?

And if you’re worried about freedom, “Pastor,” what about the right of people to not get sick from a deadly virus? Or the rights of hospital workers and other people on the front lines of this virus? Moreover, would you rather see us in a repeat of the stay-at-home orders of the spring of 2020? If you got your self-absorbed head out of your self-absorbed ass, you’d realize that. You’re certainly smart enough to realize it, with your engineering degrees from Virginia Union University and the University of Virginia.

Benjamin is up against nearly impossible odds in November. As a result of redistricting, he’s now running in a district with a Cook Partisan Voting Index (PVI) of D+16; the old VA-04 had a PVI of D+10. Even if he wasn’t running as a full-on deplorable, he would need literally everything to break right for him in order to win. Taking his current line, he’s on a death mission. Moreover, a recent poll from Public Policy Polling shows that newly inaugurated Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s rollback of COVID-19 restrictions is backfiring—and bigly. Virginians actually favor mask and vaccine mandates by double-digit margins. 

So why sound the alarm about a guy who is basically a sacrificial lamb? Well, Benjamin is positioning himself to be something of a voice for Black Trumpkins. That makes it all the more important to turn the hot lights on him.

It’s also personal for me, since I came close to sounding a lot like him. Many of you know that in my freshman year at the University of North Carolina, I was suckered into joining a hypercharismatic and borderline cultish campus ministry. While it was the only even remotely racially integrated Christian group on campus at the time, the Black folks in that bunch made Clarence Thomas sound socialist—just like Benjamin does now. I look back on this a quarter-century later, and realize that had I not been able to hold out, I probably would have sounded a lot like this guy. Just thinking that I might have been joining Benjamin in his COVID foolishness—despite how much this virus has ravaged people of color—makes me shudder.

Even federal judges are referencing far-right conspiracy theories to overturn our laws

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

It should be noted, yet again, that being an actual, bonafide judge in the United States of America requires no qualifications whatsoever. You either are appointed as a judge or win an election to become one, and the rest is filler to be worked out by whoever's been tasked with updating the webpages. They say anybody in America can grow up to be president, but that is obviously a lie. But anyone can grow up to be a judge in America. Louie Gohmert was a judge.

Being a judge is in fact one of the few occupations in America that does not require you to even have a head. Unfortunate roller coaster accident? Got too close to Dick Cheney during a hunting trip? No problem. You can still write opinions. Years before his untimely death, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia outsourced all his important opinions to a family of grumpy squirrels that had taken up residence in his attic and nobody noticed or said a damn thing about it.

In a Friday night news dump, a California judge issued a ruling announcing that the state's assault weapon ban, in place since 1989, was unconstitutional because reasons. It caused a stir primarily for using language that sounded conspicuously like what the National Rifle Association and American militia groups have long been spouting in their newsletters and pamphlets, and mostly for Judge Roger Benitez's comparison of weapons designed explicitly for mass murder to a "Swiss Army Knife." An AR-15 rifle "is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment," Benitez said in his ruling. Whether he had his pants on while writing that sentence is unknown; whether he cribbed it exactly from a gun manufacturer's ad is ... probably worth exploring.

That is not, however, the only bit of bizarre editorializing in the ruling. Judge HasAHead also took it upon himself to opine that assault weapons actually are far less dangerous than ... the COVID-19 vaccine. "The evidence described so far proves that the 'harm' of an assault rifle being used in a mass shooting is an infinitesimally rare event. More people have died from the Covid-19 vaccine than mass shootings in California."

If I were head dictator of judgeships this one would be off the bench in five seconds flat for putting the "harm" of assault-rifle-assisted mass shootings in scare quotes, but I ain't and he's not. The part that's getting more heat is that U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez appears to be flat-out lying in that second sentence, and that’s us saying it nicely.

The Washington Post fact-checks Benitez on this one, but to anyone who does not live entirely inside Tucker Carlson's inflamed colon the problem here should be obvious. The number of people who are believed to have died from the COVID-19 vaccine is, at this time, approximately zero. There has been some very public speculation as to whether some of the vaccines might cause an extremely rare form of blood clot, one that may have killed three people in this country after millions and millions of doses, but the data is not conclusive and the clots seem to appear in the unvaccinated general population at roughly similar rates.

Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to be a regular occurrence in California, just as they are elsewhere. Even if you presume all three deaths suspected of being vaccine linked were indeed caused by a vaccine, it's not even close.

All we can assume here is that this particular judge is referring to far-right conspiracy theories about the vaccine from the dark nether regions of the American political psyche. It's possible we can attribute the blatant factual error to Fox News and to Tucker Carlson's white nationalist conspiracy show, but the suggestion that lifesaving, normality-saving vaccines are killing people in greater numbers than AR-15s does feels more like something plucked more directly from the Q crowd, from frothing far-right militias, or both.

Unfortunately, there's no particular recourse for this sort of judicial conspiracy peddling. For particularly grotesque behavior on the bench, the House and Senate can remove a federal judge via impeachment, but that is reserved for only the most egregious of cases and "is factually wrong when issuing weirdly premised opinions" isn't it. This is why, in fact, the Republican-held Senate was so obsessive in filling as many judicial vacancies as possible with hard-right ideologues while blocking nominees from a Democratic administration: stuff the benches with hard-right conspiracy theorists, hard-right conspiracy theories become the stuff that governs us. The judge's ruling is absolutely certain to be appealed, but the Supreme Court is itching to undo a century of laws itself and will probably not let the unending goofiness of this written opinion stop it from writing a more dignified goofy version that scrubs out the most embarrassing parts.

So far, though, there's been no ruling from hard-right judges declaring that making fun of bad judicial opinions kills more people each year than AR-15 "freedom bringers" do, so we can at least point and shake our heads here. Maybe it's cathartic. Maybe it's whistling past the graveyard.