Talarico fellation and religious inaccuracies from the Texas Observer

Fresh off him throwing secularists halfway under the bus (despite him having previously written about the secular movement) and not looking very deeply at the roots of Hanukkah in a piece at the Observer last December, which I eviscerated, TCU professor David Brockman now writes that Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is firmly within Presbyterian tradition.

The first big fail is pretending that the Presbyterian Church USA is the only Presbyterian denomination in Merikkka. Wrong. The PCUSA is the biggest, but even with setting aside splinter groups, it's far from the only one. Wiki has the details. It list the PCUSA at 1,045,000 members. The conservative Presbyterian Church in America, which split off from the southern half of the predecessor to the PCUSA, is at 400,000, or 40 percent of its size. Let another split of the PCUSA, the ECO, has 125,000 members. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church split off the Northern Presbyterian predecessor to the PCUSA back in the 1980s and also is at 125K.

OK, adding up the three main conservative groups and you're at 650,000, or 65 percent of the PCUSA. So, we've got a fail by Brockman right there. Or a lie by hand-waving. 

Now, the big differences, per this site which does not list the ECO, but does have a 1930s splitoff from the northern Presbyterians, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

PCA is men-only pastors; ECO and EPC, that's an adiaphoron. All three non-PCUSA believe in an inerrant bible. Homosexual acts are a sin.

Brockman claims Talarico is also within the mainline Protestant tradition. Wrong. While conservative Lutherans may not add up to 65 percent of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, they break 50 percent. Actually, they break 75 percent; I didn't realize, per Wiki, that ELCA membership has cratered in the last decade or so. (It's 55 percent, per Pew, if you talk about people who "affiliate with" the different wings.) The UMC, now entering the schism world, lost 25 percent of its US churches after its 2024 general conference.

Brockman also is a weasel-shit in another way.

He nowhere discusses Talarico's claim that the Annunciation in Luke is about being pro-choice, which I noted last month is bullshit. 

The three non-PCUSA churches in my link, and I will venture the ECO as well, all consider abortion wrong. 

Interestingly, per the "mush god" stereotype of librul Protestantism, he's a very easy grader and prof in general, per Rate MyProfessors. 

Look, Prof. Brockman, if you want to just say you're "chill" with Talarico from your personal religious perspective (he was at SMU before TCU, and says in one piece that he's "high church Episcopalian"), say so.

But, don't think you can bamboozle all readers out in the wild like freshman college students in a 100-level class. 

In 2022, for the Observer, he wrote about Southern Baptists facing up to a denominational history of sexual abuse. Actually, the denouement on that was sweeping it under rug and forcing dissenters out of the denomination, as much as possible.