House Speaker Mike Johnson erupted after failing to block a bipartisan proxy voting bill allowing parental leave for lawmakers.
Despite once voting by proxy himself, Johnson called it "unconstitutional," revealing GOP resistance to family-friendly policies.
Critics say this aligns with Trump-era efforts to push women out of public life, consistent with Project 2025's goal of restoring "traditional families."
Johnson's move, including canceling House activity, exposed the contradiction in the GOP's "pro-family" stance and highlighted deeper hostility to workplace flexibility and women’s equality.
"Pro-family", "family friendly", "family values", and similar phrases are pretty much all dogwhistles for "Christian values" but not the values that actually help anyone (love thy neighbor, etc).
Aside from a funeral and a couple of weddings, I haven't set foot in a church since I moved out on my own. However, I would absolutely sit down for a service where the preacher read passages from the New Testament with the moral of the sermon being "Are we the baddies?"
There is a quote that often makes it around the internet mis attributed to Ghandi says something along those lines. The most likely origin is speculated to be Indian philosopher Bara Dada in the mid-1920s : "Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians, you are not like him."
Okay, so this was interesting to me, since Bara Dada isn't really a name. It literally means elder brother in Bengali. (Although most speakers will shorten it to Borda in everyday conversation.) I did a bit of searching, and the quote seems to come from Dwijendranath Tagore, the eldest brother of the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath did refer to Dwijendranath as Bara Dada (Boro Dada would be the better pronunciation) in his writings, and Dwijendranath was a philosopher and poet so it makes sense. The original quote seems to be, "Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians -- you are not like him." which is found in the book The Christ of the Indian Road by E. Stanley Jones.
And by “Christian values” they mean “White American Evangelical Protestant values”, not anything that has anything to do with what the Christ of the Bible was talking about.