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No one seems to agree about what Russia’s saber-rattling behavior on the Ukrainian border means. In America, normally united political forces—such as Fox News commentators and the GOP—are divided over how to talk about Vladimir Putin’s latest moves. In Europe, allied superpowers are not all making the same preparations for possible war. The White House and Ukrainian leaders are openly disputing how seriously to take the threat of Putin sacking Kyiv.
So perhaps some viewers were comforted by Saturday Night Live’s response to such a confusing and terrifying situation with the exact same kind of comedy it always does. The world may be on the brink of a major new conflict, but Lorne Michaels can still assemble his actors for an Oval Office cold open featuring a hodgepodge of one-liners that aim less for insightful political satire than for proof that the show’s writers read the internet.
In last night’s starting segment, James Austin Johnson’s President Joe Biden squinted and said “malarkey” as his advisers updated him on the situation in Eastern Europe. Putin’s soldiers, according to an official played by Alex Moffat, were the “least of our problems.” The real threat: Russian propaganda. Fake headlines—“Ukrainian Border Encroaching on Russian Troops,” “Neil Young to Remove Music From Spotify Unless Ukraine Surrenders”—were ginning up support for invasion. America’s best hope to stop Russia lay in a mean teenage girl who could cyberbully Putin.
SNL’s focus on disinformation highlighted a real and salient tactic that Russia is using in its military buildup. But the concept mostly just let the show clear out some unused ideas about other trending topics. The nearly seven-minute segment subsisted on TikTok imitations, tired memes (Crying Jordan in 2022, really?), and gossip (“We’re even getting some reports that Russia has already invaded, but those are from the same people who said Tom Brady retired,” Ego Nwodim said). The sketch itself also felt propagandistic at times: a pro-Russia commercial portrayed the country as full of arsenic miners who eat potash.
[Read: ‘The timeline you’re all living in is about to collapse’]
Only when turning its ire to American leaders did the sketch manage to draw a laugh while making a point: “Let’s do something simple and fun that everyone can get behind,” Johnson’s Biden suggested, “like a drone strike!” The same principle behind that joke—the show is most comfortable when mocking presidents—held true later on “Weekend Update.” “Well, the stock market is plummeting, and there’s a threat of land war in Europe,” Colin Jost said. “So it looks like Democrats were right—Joe Biden is the next FDR.” Jost went on to quote the Ukrainian official Oleksii Danilov saying that “panic is the sister of failure.” An image of Donald Trump’s sons flashed, and Jost asked, “I thought Ivanka was the sister of failure?”
With anxieties about war hanging palpably over the generally forgettable episode, other sketch topics were notable mainly for how quotidian they were. A New York City tenants’ meeting gave the cast a chance to try out a variety of impressions of angry normies. A music video about waking up in the middle of the night put a catchy tune to a series of very relatable observations. Though known for his otherworldly intensity, the episode’s host, Willem Dafoe, felt like a muted presence, except in a strange sketch about impotence.
As is so often the case with SNL, the best moments were the most absurd ones. Ever the master of goofy stagecraft, the musical guest, Katy Perry, turned her set into a mushroom forest. Aidy Bryant and Bowen Yang played trend forecasters with inferno-hot contempt for men using movie posters as decor. (Bryant also dissed babies: “Get in your bed that is also a jail!”) The night’s highlight came from the former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, who joined “Weekend Update” to talk football but really just raved about Emily in Paris. He, like SNL, knew he was supposed to be discussing the news of the week—but frivolity and distraction made for the more satisfying play.
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Joe Biden, who ran for president promising to restore trust in American democracy, recently undermined it. It’s not what he was elected to do, and he needs to repair the damage.
During his marathon press conference last week, Biden was asked whether the failure of voting-rights legislation in Congress would render this year’s elections illegitimate.
“I’m not saying it’s going to be legit, as the increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is a direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed,” Biden responded. Because the reforms didn’t pass, by implication the midterm elections later this year may indeed be illegitimate.
The White House tried to clean up the president’s comments on the legitimacy of our elections. Press Secretary Jen Psaki tweeted out a statement saying “@potus was not casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 2022 election.” But the harm was done.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the reforms Republicans have been pushing in several states, the notion that they qualify as “voter suppression” is at best questionable, and Biden’s claim that they amount to a “21st-century Jim Crow assault” is indefensible. The new Georgia law, for instance, left intact no-excuse absentee balloting and actually expanded in-person early voting. In fact, the state has more early-voting days (17) than New York or New Jersey (nine each). According to PolitiFact, liberal New York has, in this and other respects, more restrictive voting laws than Georgia. And according to the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Accessibility, even after the passage of Georgia’s new election law, Georgia is among the top states in voter accessibility.
[David French: Georgia has a very strong case against Trump]
Whether the federalization of election rules that Democrats were pushing in their voting bills would have made the system somewhat better or somewhat worse, the rhetoric that has surrounded this issue has been hyperbolic and bordering on incendiary at a time when our democratic discourse is way too hot. The intentions of some (not all) Republicans who pushed for voting reforms were partisan and opportunistic—as is often the case when politicians draw up voting rules and political boundaries. But exaggerating the bills’ effects and making hysterical predictions only heightens the distrust in democracy that Biden promised to reduce.
The debate over voting rights was not one of those moments that are “so stark that they divide all that came before and everything that follows,” in the president’s words. It was not the case of “democracy over autocracy.” And it wasn’t a choice between siding with Martin Luther King Jr. or George Wallace, John Lewis or Bull Connor, Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. It was an argument on the margins concerning laws that reasonable people can disagree about.
The most levelheaded summary of the current state of affairs was written by Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute, who points out that it’s easier than ever to vote, and that voter fraud is vanishingly rare. Levin told me that his view of the Republican bills in the states is like his view of the reforms championed by Democrats: They are not necessary, because the problem they claim to respond to is basically imaginary—and therefore the fact that they are being advanced is bad for our confidence in democracy, even though they would not actually do very much. In this sense, the “debates” we are having about election administration are a bigger problem than any of the problems that either side says it wants to solve.
But this has to be said: The wounds inflicted on American democracy by Donald Trump and the Republican Party just since last November—attempting to overthrow the 2020-election results, encouraging a violent attack on the Capitol, continuing to peddle lies that the election was stolen in the “CRIME OF THE CENTURY,” releasing fake Electoral College certifications that declared then-President Trump the winner of states that he lost, planning to manipulate the certification process in key states—are far worse than anything the Democrats have done in this area. Republicans, starting with Trump but now including virtually the entire political apparatus of the GOP, have engaged in a sustained effort to undermine confidence in our elections and the peaceful transfer of power.
[David A. Graham: Coup Nation]
Which brings us back to Biden. From here on out, what he can say, and should say, is that efforts to corrupt the counting of the vote, and thus to reverse the voters’ will, are an attack on the legitimacy of the election—by definition, in fact. In Arizona, for example, Republicans hired the group Cyber Ninjas to conduct an election audit of ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, which turned out to be an embarrassing bust. (Cyber Ninjas found that Biden won by 360 more votes than the official results certified in 2020.) Simultaneously, Biden must counter the narrative being pushed by the Democratic Party—that because its voting-rights bills failed, voter suppression will happen and our elections will be illegitimate.
One constructive step Biden could take to defend voters’ supremacy is to put his shoulder to the wheel on behalf of the effort to modernize the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs the way Congress counts and certifies votes from the Electoral College after each presidential election. Ambiguities and loopholes in that law create potential maneuvering room for partisan governors, state legislatures, and members of Congress to nullify the election by submitting alternative slates of electors and throwing the decision to the House of Representatives.
Legal scholars from across the ideological spectrum have urged its reform, and a bipartisan group of senators, led by Republican Susan Collins, are working to do just that, in order to avoid a repeat of the circumstances that led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
According to Collins, “The model for us coming up with an election reform bill that is truly bipartisan that would address many of the problems that arose on January 6 and that would help restore confidence in our elections is the approach that we used for the bipartisan infrastructure bill.”
In his inaugural address, Biden said, “This is a time of testing. We face an attack on democracy and on truth.” He was right. The attack on democracy and truth was led by his predecessor, a man who did nearly unfathomable harm to our country. Biden’s task is to repair the damage, not to add to it. He can do that by modeling equanimity when possible, and by speaking with precision rather than exaggeration.
The temptation in a time like this for all of us—for me—is to get caught up in the heat of the moment, to let your frustrations get the better of you, to rhetorically overreach because you face opponents who might be unreasonable. Calling others out with conviction and moral force without speaking recklessly or uncharitably isn’t easy. But being president never is.
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www.japantimes.co.jp › news › 2022 › 01 › 29 › world › ukraine-joe-biden-russia-troops
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Religious texts such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran don’t say anything about vaccines—of course, all three texts predate them by hundreds of years. So when faith leaders face questions about immunizations, they generally offer their own interpretations of the scriptures. Such questions, particularly about the applicability of religious exemptions, have become more urgent during the pandemic, forcing clergy to take hard stances for or against excusals.
Even though the Supreme Court recently struck down a federal vaccine-or-test mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees, many Americans still must receive a COVID-19 vaccine in order to resume in-person work. Some people are seeking ways to skirt the obligation, and religious exemptions, which stipulate that a person’s spiritual beliefs can free them from a medical requirement, present one way to do so. In private Facebook groups, for instance, people swap tips on how to convince employers that they don’t need a shot, while others are hiring consulting services for help obtaining an exemption. Many people requesting exemptions have tried to strengthen their case with a written statement from a religious leader, but to some clergy, agreeing to support a person’s claim feels unjustifiable. Instead, faith leaders I spoke with are trying to assuage congregants’ misgivings about the vaccines, and are pushing back against attempts to circumvent public-health measures with scripture.
Religious exemptions from vaccines are currently allowed in 44 states and Washington, D.C., and they typically require an employer to provide reasonable accommodation for “sincerely held” religious beliefs. But no objective test determines whether an individual’s request is genuine, which leaves the judgment entirely up to companies. Given the value that a co-sign from a religious leader can provide, I asked Brian Strauss, the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Yeshurun, a synagogue in Houston, about his approach to talking with people looking to obtain an exemption. When a congregant recently told Strauss that the Torah supported refusing the COVID vaccines, Strauss engaged the man in conversation and found that his concerns weren’t actually religious. Rather, he was scared of possible side effects. Strauss turned him away. “I told him, ‘You gotta keep trying to get a medical exemption,’” Strauss told me over the phone, “‘because I don’t think you’re gonna find a rabbi that’s gonna give it to you.’”
[Read: The unorthodox art of an ultra-orthodox community]
Avoiding the vaccines, Strauss contends, contradicts Jewish tradition. He told the Jewish Herald-Voice that there is “no legitimate justification” in the Torah for a religious exemption, and that Jewish people must safeguard their health and the health of others. “If there’s something that respected medical professionals across the board have said can save your life, you’re obligated to do it,” he told me. Strauss’s position echoes the attitude that several states have adopted. Personal-belief exemptions in the United States were formalized in the 1960s, after some constituents pressured state legislatures to pass them in response to compulsory-polio-vaccine laws. After a measles outbreak in California in the winter of 2015, the state banned faith-based exemptions. Five more states—including New York, Mississippi, and Connecticut—have disallowed them as well.
Religious exemptions can be a tense issue for faith leaders who want to preserve the constitutional separation of Church and state. Pastor Keith Marshall of Hope Lutheran Church in Enumclaw, Washington, told me over Zoom that his pulpit time is for “proclamation of the Gospel,” not politics. Though Marshall doesn’t see anti-vaccine contempt among his congregation, he published a piece in his local newspaper refuting the idea that Christianity exempts any person from getting a shot. “My ‘Religious Exemption’ requires I receive the COVID vaccination to safeguard life, and wear a mask to care for my neighbor,” he wrote. “Claiming the Christian faith is no justification to refuse these measures.”
Though many clergy are pro-vaccine, they often feel paralyzed or confused talking with congregants about their own stances, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School. Chang also runs Christians and the Vaccine, a project dedicated to helping pastors use biblical principles to encourage congregants to get their COVID shots. While about 90 percent of evangelical faith leaders say they would encourage others to get inoculated, less than half of evangelical congregants are in favor of it. “What’s happening is that the base is actually taking their cues on social and political issues not from their pastors primarily,” Chang told me, “but from Fox News.” He believes that as some conservative politicians continue to push the idea that vaccine mandates strip the populace of its civil liberties, faith leaders are losing their influence over their congregation.
[Read: The fastest-growing group of American evangelicals]
Even politically conservative faith leaders have found themselves at odds with others in their party. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of the megachurch First Baptist Dallas, is a prominent pro-Trump figure and an outspoken critic of the Biden administration. But he has said there is no credible religious argument against the COVID vaccines, and has even hosted vaccine clinics in his own church. Jeffress maintains that people can have valid political reasons for not wanting to get their shots, but that they shouldn’t be using religion to justify it. “They’re inventing objections to vaccines that can’t be supported in scripture,” he told me over the phone. “Joe Biden isn’t right about most things, but he’s right about this.” Framing this debate as a matter of religious liberty, Jeffress worries, may lessen the validity of arguments actually pertaining to freedom of the Church, such as those in favor of the institution’s right to proclaim political beliefs.
Tension over vaccines can emerge even when a person’s hesitation isn’t politically motivated. Makram El-Amin, an imam at the Minneapolis-based mosque Masjid An-Nur, has seen many Black Muslims hesitate to get a COVID shot because of the United States’ history of medical racism. Despite their uncertainty, El-Amin has refused to write letters in support of faith-based exemptions, because, in his reading, nothing in Islam reaches the threshold for an exemption. “I did not find a smoking gun of sorts that I could point to in a definitive way to say that [a vaccine] is definitely something that is against Islam,” El-Amin told me. Though he supports vaccines, he doesn’t support mandates, a sentiment Marshall, the Lutheran pastor, shares. “If you don’t want to get vaccinated,” Marshall said, “quit claiming Jesus’s name as the reason.”
When I spoke with Jeffress in October, he thought that the issue of religious exemptions and vaccine mandates would pass within a few months. However, with the latest surge in COVID cases due to the Omicron variant, imagining the world Jeffress described is hard. This past weekend, thousands of people from across the country protested vaccine mandates in the streets of D.C. As the controversy surrounding vaccines continues, faith leaders will face the dilemma of either speaking out and being accused of having a political agenda or staying silent in fear of alienating their congregants. Still, these clergy members feel more comfortable trusting their interpretation of scripture rather than stretching texts to flout a sound public-health measure.
This story seems to be about:
Religious texts such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran don’t say anything about vaccines—of course, all three texts predate them by hundreds of years. So when faith leaders face questions about immunizations, they generally offer their own interpretations of the scriptures. Such questions, particularly about the applicability of religious exemptions, have become more urgent during the pandemic, forcing clergy to take hard stances for or against excusals.
Even though the Supreme Court recently struck down a federal vaccine-or-test mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees, many Americans still must receive a COVID-19 vaccine in order to resume in-person work. Some people are seeking ways to skirt the obligation, and religious exemptions, which stipulate that a person’s spiritual beliefs can free them from a medical requirement, present one way to do so. In private Facebook groups, for instance, people swap tips on how to convince employers that they don’t need a shot, while others are hiring consulting services for help obtaining an exemption. Many people requesting exemptions have tried to strengthen their case with a written statement from a religious leader, but to some clergy, agreeing to support a person’s claim feels unjustifiable. Instead, faith leaders I spoke with are trying to assuage congregants’ misgivings about the vaccines, and are pushing back against attempts to circumvent public-health measures with scripture.
Religious exemptions from vaccines are currently allowed in 44 states and Washington, D.C., and they typically require an employer to provide reasonable accommodation for “sincerely held” religious beliefs. But no objective test determines whether an individual’s request is genuine, which leaves the judgment entirely up to companies. Given the value that a co-sign from a religious leader can provide, I asked Brian Strauss, the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Yeshurun, a synagogue in Houston, about his approach to talking with people looking to obtain an exemption. When a congregant recently told Strauss that the Torah supported refusing the COVID vaccines, Strauss engaged the man in conversation and found that his concerns weren’t actually religious. Rather, he was scared of possible side effects. Strauss turned him away. “I told him, ‘You gotta keep trying to get a medical exemption,’” Strauss told me over the phone, “‘because I don’t think you’re gonna find a rabbi that’s gonna give it to you.’”
[Read: The unorthodox art of an ultra-orthodox community]
Avoiding the vaccines, Strauss contends, contradicts Jewish tradition. He told the Jewish Herald-Voice that there is “no legitimate justification” in the Torah for a religious exemption, and that Jewish people must safeguard their health and the health of others. “If there’s something that respected medical professionals across the board have said can save your life, you’re obligated to do it,” he told me. Strauss’s position echoes the attitude that several states have adopted. Personal-belief exemptions in the United States were formalized in the 1960s, after some constituents pressured state legislatures to pass them in response to compulsory-polio-vaccine laws. After a measles outbreak in California in the winter of 2015, the state banned faith-based exemptions. Five more states—including New York, Mississippi, and Connecticut—have disallowed them as well.
Religious exemptions can be a tense issue for faith leaders who want to preserve the constitutional separation of Church and state. Pastor Keith Marshall of Hope Lutheran Church in Enumclaw, Washington, told me over Zoom that his pulpit time is for “proclamation of the Gospel,” not politics. Though Marshall doesn’t see anti-vaccine contempt among his congregation, he published a piece in his local newspaper refuting the idea that Christianity exempts any person from getting a shot. “My ‘Religious Exemption’ requires I receive the COVID vaccination to safeguard life, and wear a mask to care for my neighbor,” he wrote. “Claiming the Christian faith is no justification to refuse these measures.”
Though many clergy are pro-vaccine, they often feel paralyzed or confused talking with congregants about their own stances, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School. Chang also runs Christians and the Vaccine, a project dedicated to helping pastors use biblical principles to encourage congregants to get their COVID shots. While about 90 percent of evangelical faith leaders say they would encourage others to get inoculated, less than half of evangelical congregants are in favor of it. “What’s happening is that the base is actually taking their cues on social and political issues not from their pastors primarily,” Chang told me, “but from Fox News.” He believes that as some conservative politicians continue to push the idea that vaccine mandates strip the populace of its civil liberties, faith leaders are losing their influence over their congregation.
[Read: The fastest-growing group of American evangelicals]
Even politically conservative faith leaders have found themselves at odds with others in their party. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of the megachurch First Baptist Dallas, is a prominent pro-Trump figure and an outspoken critic of the Biden administration. But he has said there is no credible religious argument against the COVID vaccines, and has even hosted vaccine clinics in his own church. Jeffress maintains that people can have valid political reasons for not wanting to get their shots, but that they shouldn’t be using religion to justify it. “They’re inventing objections to vaccines that can’t be supported in scripture,” he told me over the phone. “Joe Biden isn’t right about most things, but he’s right about this.” Framing this debate as a matter of religious liberty, Jeffress worries, may lessen the validity of arguments actually pertaining to freedom of the Church, such as those in favor of the institution’s right to proclaim political beliefs.
Tension over vaccines can emerge even when a person’s hesitation isn’t politically motivated. Makram El-Amin, an imam at the Minneapolis-based mosque Masjid An-Nur, has seen many Black Muslims hesitate to get a COVID shot because of the United States’ history of medical racism. Despite their uncertainty, El-Amin has refused to write letters in support of faith-based exemptions, because, in his reading, nothing in Islam reaches the threshold for an exemption. “I did not find a smoking gun of sorts that I could point to in a definitive way to say that [a vaccine] is definitely something that is against Islam,” El-Amin told me. Though he supports vaccines, he doesn’t support mandates, a sentiment Marshall, the Lutheran pastor, shares. “If you don’t want to get vaccinated,” Marshall said, “quit claiming Jesus’s name as the reason.”
When I spoke with Jeffress in October, he thought that the issue of religious exemptions and vaccine mandates would pass within a few months. However, with the latest surge in COVID cases due to the Omicron variant, imagining the world Jeffress described is hard. This past weekend, thousands of people from across the country protested vaccine mandates in the streets of D.C. As the controversy surrounding vaccines continues, faith leaders will face the dilemma of either speaking out and being accused of having a political agenda or staying silent in fear of alienating their congregants. Still, these clergy members feel more comfortable trusting their interpretation of scripture rather than stretching texts to flout a sound public-health measure.