The Trump transition team doesn’t want this to get out, but I got my hands on the questionnaire given to the clergy wanting to pray at his inauguration. It consists of three questions:
- Are LGBTQ people children of God?
- Does God hate the poors because they are too dumb/lazy to be rich?
- Who’s your daddy?
The only acceptable answers are:
- Firm NO.
- Firm YES.
- Firm Trump.
It turns out that a lot of people passed this test! Because, according to Christianity Today, the Trump prayer lineup is bigger than any president’s since Reagan! As in Ronald, Patron Saint of the GOP.
CT also calls it an “unusually broad and diverse clergy lineup” because they are not all Christian (there’s a rabbi!), they are not all men (there’s a woman!) and they’re not all white (there’s a black man and a Hispanic man!). Good work, everyone! Discrimination is OVER after Jan. 20, thank God!
Not included in this “broad and diverse” line up are all the Muslims praying that they don’t get hate-crimed by Trump’s supporters.
One of Trump’s chosen is Samuel Rodriguez, head of the National Christian Hispanic Leadership Conference.
Like many of the other Trump preachers, Rodriguez preaches the Gospel of Prosperity, which literally means that rich people get rich because God loves them and that poor people are, like, gross and godless and poor. Super-convenient if you want to get people who are losing their jobs to vote for a self-proclaimed billionaire who runs on a platform of taking away their health insurance. It’s what God wants!
Now you may recall that the first thing Trump did to begin his campaign was to call Mexicans rapists and threaten to deport a whole bunch of brown people, not to mention building that stupid wall. Surprise, surprise, Rodriguez did not like that very much! He called Trump out in the Wall Street Journal, and good for him!
But that was SO long ago (July 2015) and Trump has totally changed since then — in that he’s gotten worse and is increasingly more comfortable with the fact that he will never face any sort of consequences for being a racist. So obviously Rodriguez is all, “Trump is my man” now.
Why? Because the Supreme Court. Rodriguez believes that getting some right-minded folks on the court to overturn Roe v. Wade and marriage equality is more important than fighting to keep Hispanic families from getting torn apart by racist-driven immigration policy. Which sure does seem like yet another example of how evangelicals are all pro-life until you’re born, then you’re on your own!
In a September 2016 Q&A with Christian voters, Rodriguez pointed out that only Christians can save the country from terrible things like marriage equality by voting for Trump, obviously.
“Elections have consequences,” he said. “Because 25 million Christians did not vote in 2012, the institution of marriage suffered a radical transformation via the conduit of judicial and executive fiat.”
He said during that same Q&A that, “If you can’t vote for a candidate, vote for the platform, vote for the party platforms, and the party platform that best will protect your right to be a Christian and reach others with the loving, grace-filled message of Jesus Christ.”
In other words, if you can’t vote for Trump, vote for Jesus. Because the only way to Jesus is through Trump.
If claiming that Jesus is working through Donald “Grab ’Em By the Pussy” Trump doesn’t prove that right-wing evangelicals are full of shit, then nothing will.
D’Anne Witkowski is a poet, writer and comedian living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBT politics for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.