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The Sunday NEW YORKTIMEScarried - on Page One, just below the masthead - what I regard as an extremely significant article about people of faith, from the Left, getting involved, as never before since the 1960s, in our nation's politics. The catalyst, of course, is President Trump, who enjoyed overwhelming Christian evangelical support, despite his personal life.

The problem for the "Religious Left", if that's what we should call this movement: It's much, much more diverse than the Christian Right. To a point, diversity can be a strength, but it can also lead to hopeless divisions which can handicap a movement as a potent political force. Then, there's the question of whether the highly secularized Left can make common cause with those animated by spiritual concerns. [As this article notes, President Obama at least tried outreach to evangelicals; Hillary Clinton snubbed them, rejecting interview requests from evangelical media outlets.]

A powerful quotation from Reverend Jim Wallis, founder of the SOJOURNERS community and magazine: "The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence."

Also, surely religious liberals/progressives don't want to ape the Christian Right anyway. Younger voters are far more secular than older voters, and arguably, the Christian Right has helped drive them away. And younger people who DO believe, such as younger evangelical Christians, don't exactly fall into the orbit of the Reverend Franklin Graham, an ardent Trump supporter.

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This article touches on the continuing polarizing effect of the abortion issue. Voters who largely agree with progressives on social justice, climate change, etc., just can't vote for a party with an absolutist abortion rights position. Plus, many mainstream Democratic politicians - in part, to protect themselves from Republican attacks as being "too soft" on crime and national defense - are often indistinguishable from most Republicans in supporting capital punishment, robust military spending, etc.

This leads to a pointnotfully treated in this article: The fully consistent, pro-life, "seamless garment" position (anti-abortion, but with a generous social safety net; anti-capital punishment; anti-war, but not necessarily fully pacifist; pro-social justice; pro-environmental) is represented inneither major U.S. political party,nor in any third party. Neither a U.S. Supreme Court stacked with liberal/progressive justices,nora high court stacked with strict, conservative "constructionists", i.e., Antonin Scalia wannabes, will interpret the Constitution in this direction. Not a single Delaware statewide official,norany member of the Delaware General Assembly, has shown such an inclination. [I'm open to someone who could persuade me otherwise!] Doubtless, this reflects a hard cold assessment of what voters seem towant. But in the looming battle between religious rightists and religious liberals/progressives, a third group will remain consistently in flux in our politics, spiritually divided between Republicans and Democrats, frequently alienated from both, plus all the third parties. Political limbo on earth.

Again, from the SundayNewYorkTimes....

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Time for Religious Liberals/Progressives to break the Religious Right's Grip on the nation's "moral" agenda? - WDEL 1150AM (blog)

Memo to London-based liberals: not everyone shares your point of view. Some people brace yourself for this have different opinions to yours. Amazing, I know. But true. So please dial down your hysteria about the DUP. Because I know you think it makes you look super-tolerant to bash the supposed rednecks and religious fruitcakes of Northern Ireland whove never attended a gay wedding or made a donation to Greenpeace, but it of course does the opposite it exposes your own intolerance.

The furyover the DUP is reaching fever pitch. Once it hadbeen revealed that May would be working with the DUP, people were out in force to mock and sneer at these religious fundamentalists and climate-change deniers the greatest thoughtcrime of our era who are antsy about gay marriage and opposed to the legalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland. This party doesnt even believe in dinosaurs, guffawed internet wags, after it was revealed that some DUP members hold creationist views.

Some even took to the streets of Westminster yesterday to rage against the DUP. A few hundred impeccably right-on young people carried placards branding the DUP anti-gay, anti-women, anti-green. (It amazes, and terrifies, me that being critical of the politics of environmentalism is now casually put alongside homophobia and misogyny as an unspeakable evil. Thats pretty fundamentalist too, no?) One protesters comment summed up the flimsiness of the fury. I didnt know who the DUP were, I had to Google them,he said. From Googling a party to railing against it in the space of minutes: the modern mindset summed up.

In cosying up to the assorted bigots that make up the DUP, May has created a situation that echoes The Handmaids Tale, said one columnist. People are sharing memes of May meeting the DUP dressed as one of the women from the Channel 4 production of The Handmaids Tale. Yes, really, they think that because this party isnt pro-choice and doesnt love gay marriage then its basically the Sons of Jacob from Margaret Atwoods dystopian tale, threatening to reduce women to slaves of men.

Everyone needs to calm down. For two reasons. First because the DUPs views are relatively common in Ireland and, I dare say, in many parts of Britain. Look, I know this is inconvenient, and youd prefer it if everyone in the country was a carbon copy of you and your lovely friends, but some people out there are religious. They have traditional views. They think marriage should be between a man and a woman and they think abortion is morally wrong. They arent evil. They arent fundamentalists. They just dont agree with you. And the second reason everyone needs to calm down is because theres not a smidgen of a chance that the DUPs attitudes on something like abortion which is still outlawed in Northern Ireland will spread through Britain courtesy of May and her desperation to hold on to power. Indeed, DUP sources have confirmed that they have no interest in including controversial social issues such as gay marriage or abortion in any deal.

Why has there been a meltdown over the DUP if its social views pose no threat whatsoever to mainland British laws? Because thosepeople always looking for an outlet for theiroutsized sense of moral superiority cannot resist the temptation to pontificate against Others. Against deplorables, in Hillarys words. Against the backward. Against lets not sugar-coat it the inferior. They need this. Its the means through which they assert their moral perfection. Theres an ironically religious bent to it all: my views are next to godliness and those people those climate-change-denying, gay-marriage-questioning heretics must not be allowed to breath the same political air as me.

And all the while we have Labourites like Jeremy Corbyn mixing with Islamist groups that share all these same social views, except in an even more extreme form. Yet the people beating the streets over the DUP say nothing. What a double standard.

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Intolerant liberals have a new target: the DUP - Spectator.co.uk (blog)

Katha Pollitt is sick of hearing that liberals have to be less condescending toward Trump voters.

[H]eres my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschilds subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-statersthat distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall. . .

Pollitt is responding to recent work by Michael Tomasky, Joan Williams, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and many unnamed others. Everyone she names is a liberal writing for the benefit of other liberals. They are offering advice to their fellows about how to win more elections without reconsidering their agendas. And theyre doing it because liberals dont control the White House, the Congress, or most governorships and state legislatures.

Im sure if I searched for it I could find op-eds urging Trump voters to have more empathy for other peoplefor example, empathy for illegal immigrantson moral grounds. (Nobody is asking them to be less condescending. I dont think even someone with Pollitts polemical gifts could build a column around the idea that red-state righties are just as condescending as blue-state progressives; hence the switch to discussing empathy.) But the reason theres not a genre urging red staters to greater empathy for political profit seems obvious enough.

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The Corner - National Review

Charlie Daniels: What Would Happen If Liberals Got the World They Wanted Here on Earth? CNSNews.com I sometimes wonder how the mainstream media, judicial system, sanctuary cities and liberal politicians would fare in the kind of world they are trying to bring about: a world without borders, a world without morals, a socialist society ruled by an all ...

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Charlie Daniels: What Would Happen If Liberals Got the World They Wanted Here on Earth? - CNSNews.com

Suzanne Legault, Information Commissioner of Canada, isn't impressed with the Liberal record so far. Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

For the second year in a row, a Canadian prime minister attended the annual parliamentary press gallery dinner, and for the second year in a row, Justin Trudeau was charming and funny. Clearly, the man is accessible, in contrast to the previous prime minister, who avoided such events with fierce determination.

But as with many things Trudeau, symbolic shows of openness havent entirely been matched by the actions of his no-longer-new government. Days after the merriment among journalists and their political guests, Canadas information commissioner released her annual report on government accessibility and its as grim as it was under that last prime minister.

Suzanne Legault talks of the hopeful tone that accompanied the election of the Liberals in late 2015. Promises to unlock government that is, actually share information in a reasonable manner with taxpayers abounded early among the Trudeau team, and ministerial mandate letters urged openness from federal departments. Treasury Board president Scott Brison even put out a directive saying federal agencies should be open by default. But, concludes Legault in her new report, The year is ending with a shadow of disinterest on behalf of the government.

Our investigations reveal, once again, that the (Access to Information) Act is being used as a shield against transparency and is failing to meet its policy objective to foster accountability and trust in our government. She notes the ongoing culture of secrecy within the public service, adding that the Clerk of the Privy Council, the highest ranking bureaucrat, has given his troops no direction on transparency.

Why should Canadians care? After all, in the shadow of the Trump administrations perpetual crises, or the mess that faces Britons, Canadas chronic case of bureaucratic sphincter-tightening and childish government message control seem minor problems.

Theyre not. Youre entitled to a full accounting of how your tax dollars are used and so are businesses, academics, artists, scientists, homemakers and anyone who uses the federal Access to Information Act to try to pry loose information we should, frankly, all be able to get just by asking for it. Instead, the access law is repeatedly abused, with Orwellian glee, to withhold answers from Canadians.

For instance, Legaults office investigated the deletion of emails by an employee at Shared Services Canada. That agency, you may recall, has run into all manner of trouble trying to update the governments IT systems, while spending vast swaths of your money. Under the information act, the agency got a request for all SSC emails that mentioned the Liberal party since it had taken office. An employee duly forward 12 pages for processing, but it turned out that almost 400 pages of emails were deleted after the agency received the formal request for the information. That sounds like someone breaking the law, and the case had gone to the attorney general.

In another instance, the RCMP was asked, using the access act, for communications around its decision not to conduct a perjury probe of one of the officers who testified before a commission on the death of Robert Dziekanski, the Polish immigrant who was tasered and died at Vancouver Airport in 2007. The information commissioners investigation of why no records were released to the person requesting them turned up the amazing discovery that the RCMP didnt have any. This is a serious gap in the historical record of a tragic case that has a high level of public interest, a gap that raises accountability issues within the RCMP, Legaults report notes.

The lapses go on: lags in making information available about SNC-Lavalins overbillings of government, for instance; problems with Canada Post not explaining why some people arent getting their mail; the refusal by a government agency to release a harmless map; even attempts to withhold historical documents from 1918 by Library and Archives Canada.

Legaults data show things are not improving under the Liberals. The prime minister may be good at dinner speeches that make him look accessible. But real action on transparency? Not so much.

Christina Spencer is the Citizens editorial pages editor.

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Spencer: So much for more open government under the Liberals - Ottawa Citizen