Donald Trump is many things, but highly ideological is not one of them. He knows what he doesn’t like: Immigrants, NAFTA, liberals, the fake news media, germs, windmills. He knows what he wants to do: Restore American manufacturing. Return white men to their natural positions of power and dominance. Make himself richer. Make himself more powerful.

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But Donald Trump, for all of his bluster and his Make America Great campaign slogan, doesn’t really have a vision for what America will be if he gets his way. There isn’t a grand, overarching plan here. There is just retribution and vibes.

More traditional and savvy Republicans, by contrast, do have clearer visions of the world they want. Those visions sometimes clash and they have evolved significantly under Trump, but today they generally include some iteration of traditional religiosity, patriarchal family formations, more power in white male hands, far fewer immigrants, and businesses that are unfettered from regulation and taxation. We see some of these ideologies show up in Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, upon which there are many different conservative fingerprints, and which is indeed very big – and very distinct from anything that might have been supported by the old GOP that claimed to care about fiscal responsibility, or at least about not torpedoing the country into enormous debt at the same moment that tariffs then no tariffs than maybe some tariffs were making the US dollar look a whole lot less reliable.

But the incoherence of Trumpism does not mean that the policies of the Trump administration aren’t shaping up to something. The are. What we’re getting from the Trump hodgepodge of sometimes-incoherent often-damaging policies is an America being made into a dumber, poorer, more isolated place.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was telling the girls in my D&D group that America’s obsession with SUVs and other stupidly large gas-guzzling cars partially stems from the rise of “metrosexuals,” men who put effort into their grooming and hygiene. You see, men needed a way to feel manly and what better way to do that than with a giant car to show how big your penis was?

It was just as fucking stupid as it sounds and the girls all rolled their eyes. But, Jesus fucking Christ, if only we could go back to the days when men were JUST that stupid and desperate to prove their masculinity. It’s so much worse now.

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Since the right figured out that preying on the deep insecurities of men was the easiest way to manipulate them, things have been going downhill at high speed. I mean, the assholes of the right have always done that to one degree or another. Fascism and misogyny are inextricably linked for a reason.

But this was something new and significantly dumber. The Nazis venerated the male physique. Fresh air. Exercise. Eat less meat. It wasn’t the worst advice you could get and if they’d stopped there, the Nazis would have been a minor footnote in history, known for their buffness. But then they got to the whole, “Kill all the Jews and gays and Blacks and and and.” Well, we know the rest of that story. We’re living through the sequel right now.

The modern version, though? Yikes. Don’t cross your legs. That’s gay. Don’t lean towards your woman in pictures. That’s weak. Tan your balls. That’s manly. Masturbating is gay because you’re having sex with yourself and you’re a dude. Also, having sex with women is gay because…reasons.

Now we have men cutting off their eyelashes. Why? Because eyelashes are just too fucking feminine. No. I am not making this up:

Videos posted to TikTok, Instagram and X in recent weeks show men braving blades very close to their eyes, in barber shops from Turkey to New Zealand, in a quest for stubby lashes. While some barbers are seen wielding buzzing electric clippers, others are freestyling with just a pair of hairdressing scissors and, hopefully, a steady hand.

…

But in today’s increasingly masculine political climate, fueled by controversial online “manosphere” figures such as Andrew Tate and tech bro jocks like Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg (who recently voiced his support for more “masculine energy” in the corporate world, telling podcaster Joe Rogan in January: “A culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits”), it is easy to see why some men are eager to repress anything about their appearance that could be construed as overtly feminine.

One of the things a cult needs to do is trap you in a bubble to separate you from the norms of society and toxic masculinity is nothing if not a cult. It’s important to note that while these manly men adore their aggression, they crumble to the floor whimpering if aggression is directed at them.

No one whines louder than an alpha male when you point out that they’re being a douchebag. Then they go from tough and stoic straight into crying victim. No one is more oppressed and victimized than a white man in Trump’s America.

Boo fucking hoo. My heart bleeds for the fragile little darlings.

Now, to be clear, unlike the vast majority of the hair on your body,1 eyelashes are not really optional. You actually do need them:

“Eyelashes are vital for both visual experience and eye health,” said Vickie Lee, a consultant ophthalmic and oculoplastic surgeon at Imperial College London, in an email interview. “As well as acting as a barrier and a trigger for the protective blink reflex, eyelashes help reduce airflow over the eyes… maintaining moisture, keeping the eyes healthy and comfortable, filtering intense sunlight, reducing glare and improving visual quality.”

Blinding yourself to own the libs is a new highwater mark is absolute stupidity, even for these fucking imbeciles. Also, I have to imagine you would look ridiculous. But this is life in a cult. It demands more and more extreme forms of obedience and sacrifice to prove you belong. We’re now at the self-mutilation stage. How long before Andrew Tate declares that having a penis makes you gay and demands men chop theirs off to prove their masculinity and devotion to the cause?

After all, the most important thing is to show those goddamn feminists and libtards who’s in charge, right!?

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 159 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Confession time: I hate Republican voters. I fucking hate them soooooo goddamn much. OK, if you’ve read more than three sentences I’ve ever written, you probably already know this. It’s not exactly a secret. I despise people who vote for Republicans.

They’re ignorant and proud of it. They’re racist and proud of it.1 They’re misogynists and proud of it. They’re anti-science and pro-war. They’re “pro-life” and anti-school lunches. They’re anti-gun regulation and pro-death penalty. But except for their hate, they believe in nothing. If Trump told them to reverse their positions on everything tomorrow, they would do it as long as they could still spew racial slurs.

I hate them more than I have ever hated anything in my entire life.

And yet, I still do not hate Republican voters as much as the Republican Party does.

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I’m dead-ass serious. For all the loathing I have for the Republican base in all their knuckle-dragging glory, my antipathy pales in comparison to the absolute unrelenting malice the Republican Party has for its own.

How can I know what’s in the black void where a Republican’s heart should be? It’s not that complicated. While I may want to put particularly odious individual Republican voters up against the wall and let a firing squad deliver justice, I do not want to kill them en masse. This is despite the fact that they do, in fact, want to kill me and mine and millions of others. I’m not interested in mass murder. I do want them all to suffer (I’ll get to what kind of suffering in a bit), but I don’t want them to die.

Can the same be said about the GOP? Oh, we know they want to kill us. The socialists and commies and feminists and “globalists” (read as: Jews) and Muslims and Latinos and and and. We know they are desperate to round us all up and put us in Stephen Miller’s fucking concentration camps.

But they’re also really REALY eager to kill as many of their own fucking voters as humanly possible.

Let’s take a look at a short list of Republican priorities:

• Gutting Medicaid - This money goes overwhelmingly to red states and rural voters, aka Republican voters. The impact on rural hospitals alone will kill thousands a year.

• Blocking vaccines/encouraging anti-vaxxer stupidity - Covid went from killing Black people to killing Republicans because Trump and the GOP convinced their voters not to wear masks or get the shot. Why not build on that success by convincing GOP voters to stop ALL vaccinations?

• Cutting school lunches - Republican voters will tell themselves this is taking food away from lazy Black kids in NYC and Detroit. The reality is that most of this money goes to rural and smaller cities, which are overwhelmingly white and Republican. This won’t be lethal, but taking food away from hungry children is about as inhuman and cruel as it gets, and shows a stunning amount of hatred for the people who vote for you.

• Killing FEMA right before hurricane season. I wrote about this two weeks ago. Red states rely on FEMA more than blue states. Without federal disaster aid, blue state budgets will take a hit but red states will be crippled and a lot of people are going to die without FEMA.

  • Side note - While FEMA still exists, you’d think Trump would send disaster aid to his loyal supporters in red states. He isn’t. FEMA isn’t even showing up to do its basic job of helping people in the aftermath of a disaster. When the hurricanes come and smash the southern red states this summer, no one is coming. They’ll be left to die by the GOP they voted for.

• Loosening child labor laws - Republicans want to put kids back into dangerous factories. Blue states aren’t going to allow that but red states have been tripping over themselves to get rural 13-year-olds working overnight. We stopped doing that due to the high mortality rate among children, but when you want to maim or kill as many of your future voters as possible? This is how you do it.

This list could go on for another 3000 words but you get the idea. There was once the pretense that Republicans would punish Those People and take care of their own. It didn’t exactly work out that way in practice but at least Republicans went through the motions. Now? Now, the most dangerous place to be is a red state under Republican control.

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The Ogre says the GOP is a death cult!

The most important thing to understand here is that these are not accidental byproducts of what the GOP is doing. It’s completely intentional. They’re completely lawless at this point. They do not feel constrained by the Constitution or the letter of the law. They chafe when judges tell them “No” and they try anyway.

They could, for instance, only cut school lunches to blue states. Or only cut Medicaid to California and New York and Pennsylvania. The could withhold FEMA from states Democrats control or even from districts that voted for Democrats. They’re perfectly capable of that level of precision if they felt like it. Reward their base’s loyalty, punish those who voted against the Dear Leader.

But they’re not even lying about giving a fuck about Republican voters. They’re just blowing them off and moving on. Republicans are doing things they know will hurt and kill their own voters at a significantly higher rate than Democrats. If Democrats were bloodthirsty animals, some of this is what they would do to inflict the maximum amount of pain and suffering on the right.

The only way this makes any sense is to understand that the Republican Party has a pathological hatred of their own voters. I mean, I get it. They’re a power-mad death cult that has to rely on a mob of imbeciles to stay in power. They spent decades and billions of dollars to turn the average Republican voter into a mindless dumbshit who will believe the stupidest fucking thing imaginable. I mean, for God’s sake, some of these fucking morons actually believe Obama was president when 9/11 happened! If you’re a millionaire Republican educated at an Ivy League school, and most of them are, the idea you have to pander to these inbred Neanderthals has to be infuriating.

Even worse, they fucked up all of your plans by handing your party over to Donald Trump, a drug-addled nitwit who shits his diapers and can’t form a coherent sentence. He came thiiiis close to ruining everything and he still might. He condensed a 50-year quiet fascist plan to a 10-year loud overthrow of the government. It’s do or die now. It’s a miracle the public was stupid enough to give them a second bite at the apple. There isn’t going to be a third.

So, yeah, I can see why Republicans despise their own voters, now more than ever, and are not hesitating to kill them as quickly as possible. They see them as much of a threat as they see us. They can’t be controlled as easily anymore and better to break them than to risk an uprising from a heavily armed and heavily stupid mob of extremists. At the very least, if the Republican plan to end democracy fails and the GOP is snuffed out, they’ll have the satisfaction of inflicting massive harm on the people who fucked it all up by flocking to Trump.

For my part, I can’t say I feel all that bad for the GOP’s base. They’re getting the very thing they’ve been voting for all these years. Sure, they thought all this pain and misery and death would be directed at Black people and Jews and Latinos and women in blue states and big cities, but this IS what the soulless fucks have been gleefully voting for decade after decade.

Now that they’re the target of the GOP’s cruelty, I’m not going to shed a single tear for them.

Personally, this is not what I would have chosen for the GOP’s base. My idea of a lifetime of suffering for the average Republican voter would have been universal healthcare. Fully funded schools. Free college. Clean food, air, water, and medicine. Higher taxes on the rich and affordable, abundant housing. Lower energy bills from renewables and a modern smart grid. All the freedom they demand but for everyone, not just white men.

It would literally be hell on earth for them to see prosperity for not just themselves but all of the people they hate. Imagining that world and the misery of Republican voters having to live in it is what keeps me going.

But in lieu of that, I’m more than happy to enjoy them being murdered by the very people they elected to kill the rest of us. We all take great delight when we watch a movie where the villain dies from the monster or disaster they unleashed. Schadenfreude is awesome and the only thing better than watching MAGAland be crushed will be when they finally realize, as a group, that they’ve been betrayed. That they are not in charge or winning, but just like us, resources to be chewed up and spit out by the billionaires. Victims, aren’t we all?2

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 160 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Team Trump Claims Whites Are the Real Victims of American Racism

Donald Trump and his faithful are working hard to end what they view as anti-White racism. From the numbers they use to describe America’s population to fast-tracking legal immigration for a few dozen White Afrikaner farmers to the nonsense claim that Black people murder Whites and steal their land.

Team Trump wants all the fruits of our economy to go to White people, leaving just enough scraps for people of color and women to dissuade informed and effective opposition. And even among White people, only those loyal to Trump deserve anything more than misery.

But where does this belief that White Americans are the victims come from? How could anyone think that it is Whites—not Blacks, Hispanics, and Indigenous peoples—who get the short end of the stick?

One powerful indicator is jobs. Keep in mind that Trump has for many years claimed that White people are having their jobs taken away by immigrants, both legal and not. He also pushes the baseless claim that unqualified minorities and women are taking jobs that White men are entitled to hold.

To put this baseless belief into action, Trump and the quisling Republicans on Capitol Hill work together to remove from America every bit of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—right down to banning books and a growing list of officially banned words, including woman and women.

Here’s some BLS.gov data that alarms Trump and his fellow white supremacist, misogynist, replacement-by-nonwhites Tiki torch marchers. The data below compares from baseline jobless rates (U-3) across more than two decades.

The data shows a long-range trend of jobless rates narrowing as Black and Hispanic people moved closer to the jobless rates of White people:

                           2000          2023
White               3.5              3.3
Black                7.6              5.5
B/W Ratio       117%           67%

That narrowing, from 117% higher Black unemployment to 67%, is more than enough to set Minister of Hate Stephen Miller’s hair on fire (if he had any).

My calculations show that the Hispanic/White unemployment ratio also narrowed, from 91% higher joblessness to 39% higher.

Jobless Rates

Now add this: the Black jobless rate fell 2.1 percentage points while the white rate barely changed, slipping only 0.2 percentage points. To Miller and Trump, what more evidence do you need that Whites are victims, losing out on jobs to people of color and women who get hired only because of what they perceive to be anti-White and anti-male policies?

Numbers like these show America moving to a less unequal, less racist society. But to those who want to Make America White Again, who want minorities and women to know their place, the relative change is clear evidence of discrimination against White people, no matter how crazy that interpretation is.

You can look up the Bureau of Labor Statistics data here, especially Chart 5. In addition to graphics, you can download tables into spreadsheets.

Trump is appalling ignorant. He didn’t know why the USS Arizona Memorial exists at Pearl Harbor. He spoke of 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass as alive in our time. He insists that China will pay the tariffs on goods it exports to America when that burden falls directly on the importing company and is almost universally passed on to consumers through higher prices.

Dismissing 17 Million People

On Memorial Day, Trump spoke of “an American nation 325 million strong, which will soon be greater than it has ever before.”

The Census Population Clock shows that the U.S. population today is just shy of 342 million.

The difference of nearly 17 million fits with a debunked claim on Instagram aimed at the MAGA faithful and their sympathizers. And it further reinforces the point that, to Trump, people in America without permission simply don’t exist as human beings.

Last year, on the campaign trail, a video captured him calling those who oppose him and immigrants “vermin,” invoking the rhetoric of Hitler, Mussolini, and other fascist dictators.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our people,” Trump said again and again, invoking a racist Nazi meme used to justify murdering six million Jews. Trump denied knowledge of Nazi ideology, but the Associated Press showedhis remarks were part of a Trump pattern.

In 2024, Trump denigrated the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. without permission in ways that Nazis and neo-Nazis applauded. “They’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals,” Trump said, a half dozen police officers in uniform standing behind him, an improper display of police authority in a political campaign.

Economic Fruits

Trump’s administration is white supremacist, pseudo-Christian nationalist, and misogynist.

Team Trump wants all the fruits of our economy to go to White people, leaving just enough scraps for people of color and women to dissuade informed and effective opposition. And even among White people, only those loyal to Trump deserve anything more than misery.

As Trump consolidates power, shuts down sources of accountability like Inspectors General offices, stocks the justice Department with loyalists who act as his personal revenge seekers, and moves toward a massive redistribution of wealth from the 99.9% to those hauling in $10 million a year or more, this will only get worse unless we people stand up for our Constitution, for the liberties of the people, and basic decency.

Allowing or stopping Trump’s dictatorship is a matter of choice. Do nothing, or only ineffectual responses like smart aleck Internet posts, and our liberties will erode until they are but a memory. And even that memory can—and will be—wiped out through actions like the word bans and book removals already underway.

It’s your choice. Act now or in the future, perhaps in months, but for sure within years, America will be a land not of the free and the brave but of cowardly victims of political prosecutions, concentration camps, and firing squads because all dictatorships turn to these tools to enforce their lawless control.

The post Trump’s Racism and Misogyny in Action appeared first on DCReport.org.

When Donald Trump’s in a hole, he digs deeper.

As he does with other policies affecting immigration, trade and culture wars, Trump is still — or once again — pushing coal, beautifully clean coal as he calls it, as an energy goal. In pursuit of his belief that coal is being overlooked or displaced by “woke” concerns for solar, wind and alternative energy sources, last month Trump signed a series of executive orders towards reviving the dying coal industry.

Whatever political sense it makes for Trump to court miners (or mine owners) in West Virginia and Wyoming, his efforts seem a tad shy of recognizing environmental, economic or market condition realities.  Apart from all else, Trump’s tariffs-driven trade war would seem on its face to discourage exports of coal to China and other Asian countries — the biggest markets for it.

To underscore the strategic pretzels being created around coal, China could turn to its increasingly warm ally Russia to buy yet more of its coal.

Earth.org, one of the myriad environmental groups critiquing Trump on coal, reminds us that coal remains the dirtiest fossil fuel, at 40%, the single largest source of fossil fuel carbon emissions and a major contributor to air pollution. “In fact, nations worldwide are turning away from coal,” the group said after the executive orders came out.

Similar coal promotion efforts during the first Trump administration fell flat and more than 100 plants shut down and others preferring cheaper, cleaner alternatives.

Trump on Coal

In four executive orders signed in April, Trump claims emergency authority to allow some older coal-fired power plants set for retirement to keep producing electricity to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars.

Trump has directed federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands — ending a “war on coal.”  Basically, the orders rescind any existing rule that gets in the way of mining coal or distributing it and calls for acceleration of coal technologies. Trump believes in “clean” coal technology that the industry itself finds overly expensive with questionable environmental gains.  The difference concerns sulfur content, according to the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis says

As a further incentive to coal-fired power companies, Trump offered a two-year exemption from federal requirements to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and benzene because, well, ridding of regulation and dismissing concern about pollutants apparently are good.

In particular, Trump’s orders push to use coal to power new artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, which strikes one as using outmoded, dirty energy to power something Trump sees as cutting edge and “clean.” For context, Microsoft wants to re-power the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to power its AI operations.

Together, the orders accept that coal is essential to national and economic security; he sees the supply as vast, while others see it as finite.

Of course, the coal promotion fits with incentives to the oil and natural gas industries and is meant to counter climate-driven government policies towards harnessing more solar, wind and nuclear sources — all part of the “Green New Deal” that Trump ridicules and hates.  And, in the Trump way, the energy push is another national emergency that requires setting aside regulations and cutting Congress or courts out of policymaking.

The Environmental View

Consensus among environmentalists has been that Trump’s oil-heavy view of energy-at-any-cost policies are bad across climate, business and individual economics and strategic concerns, and that his chosen path to declare a national emergency to bulldoze over years of legislative and regulatory protections are a “sham.” We have Trump emergencies for immigration, tariffs, education, justice and more.

The Sierra Club says that since taking office Trump has weakened domestic energy production by pausing all wind projects, for example, and promising to slash hundreds of clean energy projects promoting under Joe Biden’s infrastructure project legislation.

Indeed, wind and solar now account for more U.S. energy power by percentage than does coal, which two decades ago reflected fully half of all electro power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) predicts that Trump’s push will fail again. Coal is more costly, pollutes more and offers less reliability than other sources, and promoting it for power will increase consumer costs. No new plant has kicked in in more than a decade and the average age of existing plants is 53 years because coal has trouble competing. Studies suggest that emissions from it had a role in a half-billion U.S. deaths between 1999 and 2020.

Once again, coal policy offers us an interesting perch to watch the Trump administration at work. Clearly there are elements of politics at work here over, say, concern about environmental concerns, but we also see how anything related to “energy” that comes out of the ground is a personal trigger for Trump action. The idea that a nation could have some coal and some oil and some wind and solar just doesn’t seem to add up for Trump; to promote coal means to halt wind power — even as the world’s power needs as a whole are increasing.

Unless you are Trump or a fan, pushing coal to the exclusion of other energies makes little sense.

Photo at top is from Pixabay via Pexels

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The post Trump’s Coal Fetish appeared first on DCReport.org.

Morgan Armstrong decided in April to come out as gay. The school where she was a senior-- Tennessee Christian Preparatory School in Cleveland, Tennessee-- called her into the office and laid out punishments and threats. 

Armstrong came out in an Instagram post on April 23. She sent some private messages to friends asking for support; she says she was expecting some relatives to take the news poorly. She wrote “go like and comment on my post guys bc if no one on my socials knew I was gay then they sure as hell do now so this is a big thing tbh, also I’m kinda scared about the facebook comments bc i have some ruthless [tr*ump] supporting “jesus” mfs on there." 

The school took the position that the private message violated the school's social media policy, which says students must not say anything that reflects poorly on Tennessee Christian. She was suspended and told she wouldn't participate in the graduation ceremony (she says they told her she'd not get her diploma, they say she just has to pick it up on her own from the office). She also says the school threatened to screw with her college application materials if she made further trouble. 

Thing is, the post doesn't actually mention the school. So one of a couple of things happened here. One is that the school admins read "I have some ruthless trump supporting 'jesus' mfs on here" and thought, "Well, hey. We're Trump supporting Jesus mfs-- clearly she's talking about us." The other possibility is, as Armstrong contends, the school simply wanted to punish her for being gay.

Armstrong has filed a lawsuit, and the media has provided Tennesse Christian Prep with all sorts of publicity it doesn't want (Armstrong's claims are "misleading" they say). 

But there's one small detail that most of the media coverage is missing. On the school's website, on the admissions page, there's a whole tab about Tennessee's brand new voucher law, the Education Freedom Act, which, says the school, "promotes educational freedom by empowering families to make the best decisions for their children’s schooling."

Tennessee Christian has been following "the progress of this law for several years" including registering and getting approval as part of the pilot back in 2019. Now they have some thinking to do:

As an independent school and stewards of God's mission for Tennessee Christian, we feel a deep responsibility to thoroughly evaluate any government assistance. Tennessee Christian will not accept any funding that would alter, change, or modify the mission and vision we are called to lead. In collaboration with Rep. Kevin Raper, the Leadership Team, and the Board of Trustees, we are carefully considering whether the EFA is the right fit for Tennessee Christian.

What if the voucher law puts them in a position of not being able to discriminate against LGBTQ students? They won't stand for that.  They have some other concerns as well.

1. The requirement for participating students to undergo national standardized testing through the EFA, though a list of approved testing materials has not yet been provided. 

2. The obligation to report test results for participating students. Although the results are anonymous, Tennessee Christian needs more clarity on the specific reporting requirements. 

3. The long-term sustainability of the EFA. Our administration and teachers are deeply committed to nurturing students from their early years through graduation. The lasting impact of this law on our school culture is an important factor in our assessment.

Were I in their shoes, I'd worry about some of that, too. And I give them full points for worrying about the long term effects of such a program, even if part of their concern is likely "What if the state dumps the program and we lose a bunch of families that can't afford us on their own? That would be a hell of a revenue hit. 

We remain committed to carefully evaluating the implications of the EFA to ensure it aligns with the best interests of our students and community.
Although we do not yet have a definitive answer, we anticipate providing updates as new information becomes available.

If Tennessee Christian wants to operate with discriminatory policies, that is their right as a private institution. And they do-- the student handbook may open with a message about the importance of kindness, but its page about marriage, gender and sexuality is quite clear that there are only two genders, only one definition of marriage, and a list of sexual immorality that includes anything non-heteronormie. You can't disagree and still work or volunteer there. 

Now, Tennessee Christian is not the worst one of these discriminatory policies that I've ever seen. That same page of the handbook seems to indicate that "hateful and harassing behavior" toward any individual will not be tolerated, and they have some actual anti-bullying policies.

But even if the school strives to present a kinder, gentler brand of Christian discrimination (and Armstrong's experience suggests that they are having a little trouble living up to their brand), it's still discriminatory and therefore should not be receiving a single penny of taxpayer money. 

This is what vouchers are about--defunding a system that has an obligation to serve all students and giving that money to a system that can discriminate against whoever for whatever reason. Operate that private system if you feel you must, but do not fund it with public tax dollars. I hope Tennessee Christian decides not to accept vouchers. Better for them, and better for the taxpayers of Tennessee.