Holy hypocrisy: Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels and the religious right

After their sleazy affair with Trump, how can Christian conservatives still pretend to be all about morality?

AMANDA MARCOTTE
01.26.2018•5:00 AM

Donald Trump is a man without any discernible redeeming qualities, but nonetheless I'm grateful for one thing he's done, without really trying: He has exposed the true nature of the Christian right. For more than a decade now, I've been diligently writing and researching, trying to build the case that the religious right is not motivated by moral values, but by hatred of women and LGBT people — and that many of them are white supremacists, to boot. And then here comes Trump, bragging about how he likes to "grab them by the pussy" and spreading racist propaganda, and sweeps up 80 percent of the white evangelical vote, more than true-believer George W. Bush got in 2004.

Prior to Trump, I was routinely mansplained at by naive liberals who insisted that religious conservatives were acting out of genuine faith, not malice. That doesn't happen any longer, and in these rough times, I try to be grateful for small favors.

For a brief, shining moment, it seemed that even Tony Perkins, the leader of the anti-choice and anti-LGBT Family Research Council, was giving up the pretense that he and his kind are motivated by moral values more than pure spite. When asked by Politico this week whether the recent revelations about Trump paying off porn actress Stormy Daniels so she'd keep quiet about their sexual encounters would discourage the supposed keepers of sexual morality from supporting Trump, Perkins said, "We kind of gave him — ‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here.'"

Perkins offered an explanation for why so many religious conservatives eagerly support Trump: "I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully." By "the bully," of course, Perkins means women and LGBT people who would like to make their own decisions about their own bodies and own lives. How he is being "bullied" by being asked to leave other people alone to live their lives as they see fit remains a mystery.

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https://www.salon.com/2018/01/26/holy-hypocrisy-donald-trump-stormy-daniels-and-the-religious-right/