The Lights Weren't On and No One Was Home

     Historically, churches have been sanctuaries since before there was Christianity. In fact, the concept goes back to the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans. When Christianity began its rise, they offered their own sanctuary laws as a means of countering the rival pagan religions. In Boston, Massachusetts, for instance, churches were a smoldering hotbed of abolitionist activity, even going as far as to offer sanctuary to escaped slaves and heavily contributing to the Underground Railroad.
     However, in 1623, James I abolished the sanctuary laws and, a century later, it was struck down for civil matters. Ergo. religious sanctuary has never truly existed in any meaningful way in the entire history of the United States. Any forbearance respecting the right of sanctuary was purely a political decision with a keen eye on optics, not a legal prohibition.
     Yet, in the popular imagination, the church still endures as a place of sanctuary, a safe haven where the afflicted and persecuted may still go for balm and solace (provided it's during the church's business hours.). Donald Trump blew all that away yesterday with his incredibly clumsy and palpably fraudulent photo op with a blast of tear gas and right wing hot air. Sanctuary! What a silly, quaint notion!

     What Trump might not have known, or cared about, was when he ordered Bill Barr to order the Capitol police to tear gas the protesters across the street, one of the victims would be the Rev. Gini Gerbasi, who is an actual Episcopal priest who works at the historic St. John's church that he decided on the fly he wanted to appropriate as the backdrop for his ridiculous photo op.
     Rev. Gerbasi was quite upset, as you can expect, in a telephone interview in which she called out Ill Douche for being the fake Christian that he is. And this was why the Archbishop of Washington DC, Wilton Gregory, slammed Trump for expanding his Christian play-acting for visiting the shrine of Saint Pope John Paul II. No doubt, the late pontiff would have been horrified by Trump using a burned-out church and his shrine for political and religious gain.
     "(B)affling and reprehensible" were the Archbishop's words.

     In another unintentional irony, in his lumbering across Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump literally walked over medical supplies like the kind he's been stealing from states, hospitals, private companies and even allied countries, supplies that were being handed out by Rev. Gerbani to assist the protesters. In other words, an ordained priest was acting in accordance with the teachings of her church. And in the commission of her humanitarian duties, she got tear gassed on the patio of her own church and chased out so a "man", for want of a better word, who has never once in his life, save for staged photo ops, ever shown the slightest evidence of Christianity could co-opt it for a few minutes for a stunt that left even other Republicans.puzzled.
     Mizz Lindsey Graham briefly raised himself on one elbow of his fainting couch to declare, “I don’t know what the point the president was trying to make. Trying to restore order is a good thing, attack on a church is a terrible thing. I don’t think it advanced the ball one way or another.” Then he declared he had the vapors and sank back down on the couch, his forearm draped over his eyes.
     So Trump is being abandoned by the church, his former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Fox "News" and a political party from which he derives all of his alleged strength. His voters will soon follow.
     But fear not, MAGAts, not all the "presidents'" allies have abandoned him, Moscow Mitch recently shot down a resolution banning the use of tear gas and rubber bullets on protesters.