The President and President-elect both followed their usual Sunday routines after the 2020 US election.

Mr Biden attended the 10.30 am Mass at St Joseph On the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington with his wife and grandchildren.

After Mass, Biden visited the cemetery across the street where his parents, first wife, young daughter and son Beau are buried.

Meanwhile Trump, confirmed a Presbyterian who now identifies as ‘non-denominational Christian', visited his golf club in Sterling, Virginia. He was greeted by supporters as well as by demonstrators lining the sidewalks near the club's entrance chanting and waving signs.

The sitting president sent six tweets, all flagged as misinformation by Twitter. They maintained he won the election, before getting in his second round of golf for the weekend.

Mr Trump has not made an official in-person speech since the election was called. But, there has been no shortage of tweets from him claiming the election was stolen and that he won by "A LOT".

Trump quoted conservative surrogates like Newt Gingrich who have falsely claimed that there was rampant voter fraud in the election.

Twitter flagged his remarks, affixing to each of his tweets a label reading: "This claim about election fraud is disputed."

The President-elect progressed with planning for taking office in January. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have launched an updated website as they prepare for the transition process.

The site includes four priorities of their upcoming administration: COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change.

Sources

• Independent
• NPR

House Representative Grace Meng made the request in a letter to the Biden campaign last week, asking the former vice president and his running mate Kamala Harris to publicly make the commitment.

"The judiciary today does not reflect the America it presides over," the letter states. "As of 2020, there is to our knowledge no appointed member of the federal judiciary who identifies as Muslim, nor has there ever been."

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"You could view it as the ultimate swing constituency in the country," says Matt Schlapp, a conservative activist and co-chair of the newly formed "Catholics for Trump" coalition. He was speaking last month on EWTN, a Catholic cable network. Read more

Religion was a big player in this election. In a country where over a fifth of the population identifies as Catholic, the majority voted for Trump.

This was a big swing from the previous two elections when Catholics by and large voted for President Barak Obama.

Exit polls also suggest the President-elect may have "carried the largest evangelical vote in history".

About a quarter of Americans belonged to evangelical Christian faiths in 2011 according to a poll.

Four out of five white evangelicals said they voted for Trump. Evangelicals of colour, who represent two-fifths of all evangelical Americans supported Hillary Clinton before the election.

However, reports suggest Clinton showed up badly when Hispanic and African American evangelicals compared her with the outgoing Obama.

Meanwhile, Trump deliberately set out to corral white Christian America. Unlike Clinton, who overlooked the evangelical sector, Trump chased them during the months leading up to the election.

Like Obama, he realised their vote would count.

His running mate, Mike Pence, also realised the Catholic vote was on offer.

He saw that abortion would be a sticking point for the Catholic community.

Clinton came out as being strongly pro-abortion. Pence, on the other hand, defended the unborn in his debate with the Republican Senator Tim Kaine

The Clinton campaign also overlooked poorer white citizens. Trump picked up on their dissatisfaction.

He encouraged them to vote - to vote for change. To vote for him.

Unemployment, flat incomes, rising health care costs and poor health outcomes were topics he brought to their attention.

Their interest sparked and along with the white Christian majority they turned out and voted in high numbers.

Trump's victory speech remembered his voters, promising to be "President for all of Americans".

Source

• National Catholic Register
• CT
• Quartz
• Wikipedia
• Virtue Online
• Image: Alwaght.com

This remark is contained in a hacked email exchange between current Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri and John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP)

Halpin described the conservative Catholic position as a "an amazing bastardization of the faith."

"They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy," Halpin wrote.

CAP is a Democratic think tank with close ties to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House.

Palmieri, who was at CAP at the time, responded that Catholicism "is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals."

Republican politicians were quick to respond to the revelation.

"The Clinton campaign, when in private, expresses breathtaking anti-Catholic bigotry,"said American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp.

House Speaker Paul Ryan who has distanced himself from the Trump campaign, called the emails "staggering."

Ryan, who is Catholic, released a statement Wednesday saying: "If anything, these statements reveal the Clinton campaign's hostile attitude toward people of faith in general. ..."

"All Americans of faith should take a long, hard look at this and decide if these are the values we want to be represented in our next president."

The Clinton campaign has noted that Russian hackers have been known to fake information, but the campaign has not pointed to a specific example of a hacked email being altered.

CAP released a statement that did not authenticate the email exchange, but said Halpin, a Catholic, "has spent his career advocating and fighting for the common good and improving the lives of all Americans as a key tenet of his Catholic faith."

Source

• yahoo.com
• Image: wp.production.patheos.com

Black Protestants have been nearly twice as likely as other Christians to hear about the election, and nearly half have heard voting messages favouring incumbent Barack Obama.

Fewer white churchgoers have heard messages supporting a candidate. Those that did were more likely to favour challenger Mitt Romney.

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As Republicans were promoting themselves as a multiracial party from the platform in Tampa two weeks ago, an ugly incident on the convention floor suggested not everyone had got the memo. From the podium a range of speakers of Haitian, Mexican, Cuban and Indian descent spoke of how their parents had overcome huge barriers so they could succeed in the US. In the audience, a successful black woman who works for CNN was being pelted with peanuts by a convention-goer, who said: "This is how we feed the animals." Read more

Sources

• Gary Younge in The Guardian
• Image: Breaking News

Gary Younge is a feature writer and columnist for The Guardian based in the US.

The move was made to try and defuse Republican attacks but may have backfired as it infuriated many delegates.

The motion only passed after a third attempt.

"In the opinion of the chair, two-thirds have voted in the affirmative," convention chairman Antonio Villaraigosa said, drawing large boos and shouts of objections.

Removing God from their platform is something the Republican pairing of Romney and Ryan have seized on, saying the Democrats out of touch with mainstream American people.

Democrat Party officials both references were reinstated through the intervention of President Obama and come at a time when he is reportedly struggling to win support from white working-class voters, many of whom have strong religious beliefs.

Earlier in the week the Democrats had dropped the words "God" and "Jerusalem" from their party platform.

Responding to statements from conservatives who criticized the move to drop the word, including vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan, Democratic Director of Faith Outreach the Rev. Derrick Harkins called the controversy a "complete non-issue."

"How dare anybody say we don't have faith as a central component of who we are as a party," said Harkins, who is also senior pastor of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. "It's just an obfuscating argument to say that because language was changed that we have a change of faith."

Sources

• Huffington Post
• Associated Press
• LA Times
• Image: Huffington Post