Perkins cheers the White House’s restrictive posture toward abortion rights and its “religious freedom” executive orders (which critics allege are part of a thinly veiled attempt to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ Americans). He says his only gripe with the administration is that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is not doing enough to stop abortions and liberal activism around the world. “We’re seeing Soros dollars being connected with USAID funds, and they’re creating these pro-abortion, pro-communist groups in some cases, working to take down conservative governments,” Perkins says.

Are these pronouncements by anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim abortion-obsessed hate leader measurably different from other “evangelical” leaders? They are not. We may be best off presuming that "evangelical" voters, last seen defending child molestation by an Alabama Senate candidate under the precise same rationalization that Perkins used to defend Trump repeatedly soliciting sex from porn stars, themselves represent an emergent theocratic, anti-Christian, anti-American hate group. The evidence for this consists of their own words; the evidence against it consists of people like Perkins and Graham getting indignant when you suppose it, then immediately doubling down on their own insistence that deep depravity by movement leaders is indeed unimportant so long as their movement edges closer to formalizing anti-abortion laws, anti-Muslim laws, and anti-LGBTQ laws that federalize their own fringe religious beliefs and encode them by force of law upon all other Americans.

Evangelicalism is, according to its own most prominent leaders, a movement that seeks to disenfranchise and, if necessary, imprison those whose beliefs on abortion or homosexuality are different from their own; an argument that such a group is not, in fact, a hate group would seem to have an uphill climb. The blithe assertion that politicians in good standing with the religion can molest children or solicit porn star sex so long as they provide the faithful with their reliable votes puts the movement in direct camaraderie with malignant theocratic "revolutionaries" from Boko Haram to ISIS. And no, I do not feel the slightest compunction to hedge on that one; Mr. Graham can prove me wrong anytime he so desires, and will not. The Alabama preachers who defended Roy Moore's molestations with public assertions that the Bible encourages child brides remain unrepentant, and are still seething and bitter that their pliable ever-religious child molester did not win; I present them as my evidence of direct theocratic link between the various groups.

The public association of Perkins and a host of seedy televangelist grifters who have attached themselves, remora-like, to the most publicly and proudly immoral president of modern times is not enough to condemn an entire American religious sect as faux-Christian. But the cock has crowed a great many times, this last year, and those same voters have each time continued to back the notion that their leaders should be allowed to be corrupt, greedy, sinful, depraved, contemptuous, perverted, and whatever else they might wish so long as they are willing to wave a Bible around and promise the movement that "the gays" or the abortion-seekers will be punished.

At some point the rest of us need to stop pretending at a moral uprising among evangelicals that will never happen. It is barely even a religion at this point, rather than political sect; even the movement’s long-held obsession with too-evolved sexual mores got dropkicked to the sidelines the moment their own candidates were exposed to be perverts. The movement has not been subtle in announcing either their motivations or how few pretenses at morality they expect from their leaders in return; they seek a theocracy in which their enemies are governed by the movement's own loudest perverts and charlatans, and will abide any perverts and charlatans necessary to allow that to happen. The movement could disown Perkins, or Moore, or the jet-setting prosperity peddlers, or the indulgence-dispensing moral relativist Graham, or the transparently crooked man using the White House as a cash cow for his cheap real estate empire while making a mockery of every supposed religious tenet the group has had for the past forty years. It will not. Of course it will not. We will see preachers defending the forceful taking of child brides and the nobility of porn star sex before we see an evangelical movement truly and angrily denouncing those things.

It is not even a religion at this point; a religion has identifiable values. It is a hate group led by Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, and a handful of grifting televangelists leeching off elderly Americans in order to buy themselves jewelry, property and jets. Now that the movement has descended into support for porn star sex and child brides we can dispense with the notion that it stands for anything at all. That cock has crowed; the rest of us need not claim camaraderie with these sorry shouting fakers. They are the crowd that will proudly march us into corruption and fascism; they will gladly wear the armbands of anyone who promises them a small sliver of power.