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Chrissy Stroop
Chrissy Stroop @C_Stroop

Writer #WithAPhD in Russian history. Co-editor of Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church and co-host of @crossroads_pod. Coined the #EmptyThePews hashtag

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@C_Stroop's best Twitter threads

Chrissy Stroop
Chrissy Stroop
@C_Stroop •
1. It’s easy to dismiss bills so extreme they won’t pass even in Ohio, but dismissal is the wrong approach. This bill, which prescribed the death penalty for the made up “crime” of “aggravated abortion murder,” has 19 co-sponsors in a state House of 99 members. #EmptyThePews h
2. It also requires doctors to perform a medically impossible procedure. And 1/5 of Ohio’s state representatives are sponsors. Here’s why it matters that a bill this extreme has this much backing and is generating this much press: it shifts the Overton window. #FridayThoughts
3. The Overton window is a technical term used by political scientists to refer to what is currently within the realm of political possibility. Things that fall outside it are not part of serious political and social discourse and so have no real possibility of becoming policy.
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Chrissy Stroop
Chrissy Stroop
@C_Stroop •
Sobering analysis. Soviet and post-Soviet Kremlin policy has been made in conjunction with the notion that there’s no real democracy, only useful manipulated appearances. As with the Right at home, Putin gains power by undermining faith in the very possibility of good government
And in post-Soviet Russia, like here in these United States, theocracy and kleptocracy are bosom companions. Without Bolshevism for ideological legitimacy, the cynical former KGB officer Putin turned to the church. It’s effective. #SundayMorning #Resist https://www.playboy.com/read/pat-robertson-s-truth-or-why-kleptocracy-and-theocracy-make-good-bedfellows
Cynical kleptocrats work to undermine faith in democratic institutions not only in their home countries, but elsewhere too. It makes it easier to gain influence and wealth. As with the American Right’s “starve the beast” tactic, the strategy runs on self-fulfilling prophecies.
+ 11 more tweets
Chrissy Stroop
Chrissy Stroop
@C_Stroop •
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1. Comparing “killing 310,000 Democrats & freeing their Black slaves” to “freeing babies alive from the womb” is the weirdest civil war threat I’ve seen from the Right. But I’d be remiss not to point out that right-wing Christian ideologues do regularly draw a direct line here.
2. Christian Right gaslighting often takes the form of claiming the legacy of historical victories everyone now agrees are good things (and taming their radicalism in the process—see white evangelicals quoting Martin Luther King, for example). But it gets weirder. #EmptyThePews
3. Right-wing Christians love to claim they’d have been on the right side of history w/o ever having to question or challenge their own privilege in any way. Thus they assert a parallel between freeing slaves and fighting Hitler on the one hand, and opposing abortion on the other
+ 13 more tweets
Chrissy Stroop
Chrissy Stroop
@C_Stroop •
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I'm excited to be a part of this! NYC, November 16. What @AmishFoundation is doing to fight for the right of U.S. children to a decent education, uninhibited by the ideological biases of radical religious parents, is so important. #WednesdayThoughts #EmptyThePews ht
@AmishFoundation Except for kindergarten and half of sixth grade, I was subjected to a far-right, indoctrinating Christian school elementary and secondary education. Young earth creationism. Right-wing politics being the only way to be Christian. Yet I got the elite version, so could get out.
@AmishFoundation That is, I had the intellectual skills necessary to test well, to excel in college at Ball State, and, with my high GPA and record of awards and achievements there, to go on to graduate school at Stanford. Yet I'm still unpacking the trauma from my #ChristianAltFacts education.
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