When my son was about nine, he asked me, “Mom, is there anything you hate?” And without administering a maternal filter, I said, “Yes, I hate a bully.”
Now, I understand that the correct answer to that question should have focused on the sin, not the sinner. In my best theological headspace, with the goal of parenting compassionate children who would grow up to be compassionate adults, I would have said, “I hate bullying” rather than “a bully.”
However, this morning, when I heard GOP senators had voted to censor Dr. Fauci, I was awash in the same anger and frustration that had prompted that answer so many years ago.
I saw today that Miss North Carolina USA was stripped of her title after past racist, homophobic and transphobic remarks were uncovered. The Miss USA Organization’s chairman and CEO, Thom Brodeur, said this conduct, which violated the organization’s standards, was uncovered in a “thorough review of recently surfaced information.” He said the pageant “does not tolerate racism, homophobia, transphobia or language that strips any person of their dignity-whoever they are.”
He continued: “It is the floor of what it means to represent this brand. A title here isn’t a trinket. It is a position of trust, extended by an organization and accepted by the woman who agrees to carry a standard in public. When the standard is broken, the title cannot continue as though nothing happened. What was brought to us was not a single moment. It reflected conduct over an extended period of time.”
The irony is almost too much to grasp. Who knew that the standards for the Miss Universe pageant, which Donald Trump owned in the mid-1990s, were considerably higher than those of the duly elected senators of the United States—a group of elected officials who no longer seem interested in governing the country’s future? They would rather threaten an eighty-five-year-old man whose whole life has been about the greater good, about things that have no bearing on our tomorrow, over petty grievances from yesterday.
With years of opportunity to do the right thing, they have allowed people from their own camp to insult and lie to the Senate, then elected them to positions of power that have affected all of us. Their own prejudices and heat-seeking missiles aimed at their own opportunity for power are on full display.
Who are the bullies willing to sanction a man who exercised his constitutional right simply because he outsmarted them? How many lives have the people who made up this vote to sanction saved with their positions of power? In fact, how many lives have they been complicit in ending with their passing of the “Big Beautiful Bill”?
These are lives that have suffered from lack of food and medicine, not only in countries that have no value to them, but here at home. Their hypocrisy is untethered from the trust they were given to hold their positions and represent a government that reflects and serves the people. They treat this power as a trinket to be acquired, not as a responsibility for the greater good.
It is my opinion that the people who abuse their power are the bullies who should be sanctioned and held in contempt, not the other way around.
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Retired campus minister, campus ministry coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, and Collegiate Specialist for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.