The religious rights voices - talking out of both sides of their mouths!

I spend a lot of time reading what evangelical christians are writing about their fight to put discrimination against gay and lesbian americans into the constitution. Subsequently, you end up reading a lot about the evangelists leading the way. After a while, you end up scratching your head, and wondering why anyone would listen to these people, about ANYTHING.

Take Jerry Falwell for example. While the ruins of the world trade center were still smoldering, his comments about who was to blame for the attacks were nothing short of vile. Don't remember?

"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen."

Make sense to you? God is mad at us, so he helps radical muslim extremists murder thousands of people? I have a hard time swallowing that. So did Jerry Falwell, since not long after he made the statement, he apologized for it. I guess that makes it okay in his eyes.

He's made so many ridiculous statements, it's hard to just pick out a few favorites:

"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."

"I listen to feminists and all these radical gals... These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem."

You would almost have to laugh at how stupid this man really sounds. The problem is that people are listening, powerful people who are in a position to make laws that prevent us from having the rights that the rest of america enjoys. This perverted, hateful, voice has an audience that ignores his almost neurotic statements and allows him to influence policy makers in washington.

It doesn't end with Falwell though. You've got Swaggert, who has a history of being caught with hookers, and has stated that the Prophet Muhammad was a "pervert" and a "sex deviant." Pat Robertson, the champion of the anti-abortionists. He has business dealings in communist China. So is it any surprise that he defends the right for women to abort female fetus' there? It seems that abortion is only "evil" to Pat, if it doesn't help him to turn a profit.

The list goes on and is almost to nauseating to elaborate on. Robert Tilton, who's working on his third or fourth marriage (but lesbians and gays are a threat to heterosexual marriage to hear him tell it). Oral Roberts, who has visions of 600 foot Christs lifting hospitals and bragging about how easily they can lift it or tells his viewers that if he doesn't meet a quota of donations, God has told him he would die.

Why is ANYONE listening to these people, about ANYTHING? The only answer that I can grasp is that people just don't care. They ignore what they hear and don't like or disagree with, and latch on to what they want to hear. It's the old "Don't do what I do, do what I SAY" game. Well, I'm sick of playing.

Aren't you glad Specter Opposes the Marriage Amendment?

I can't imagine anything more comforting than knowing that Senator Arlen Spector is totally opposed to the anti-gay marriage amendment. I mean, what if he were "totally for it". What more could he do then? Vote to send it to the Senate floor? He did that anyway. You don't get to have it both ways Senator Specter. If you are totally opposed to something, then you take a stand against it. You and your fellow republicans don't get to vote FOR it, and then say that you're against it. Voting to send this discriminatory and hateful piece of legislation to the floor of the senate in order to appease your far right bigot backers, when they are threatening to sit out the mid term elections if you don't, is a vote FOR the amendment itself. I applaude Senator Russ Feingold for walking out of the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. In your own words sir, you are absolutely right! You are NO protector of the constitution in any way shape or form. You are just another republican pandering to the far right in order to help your party, at my expense.

I find it simply appauling that not long after religious conservatives threaten to sit out the mid-term elections if the GOP doesn't renew it's efforts to discriminate against gay Americans, the GOP jumped without even asking how high. In a country founded on the ideas of religious and personal freedoms, the GOP's bowing down to this attempt to legislate one groups religion over the rights of others goes to show how narrow minded and bigot filled the ranks of the GOP really are.

Don't ask, Don't tell? We'll find out anyway!

If this doesn't enrage you, I don't know what will. Turns out that not only does the United States government not NEED to ask, they don't NEED us to tell. They've had LGBT groups that oppose the "Don't ask, Don't tell" policy of the US armed forces under surveilance, collecting information and adding it to their database. How does it make you feel to know that by exercising your right to free speech, and demonstrating against something you find unfair, your name has ended up in a database supposedly reserved for threats to national security. Check out this link to learn more.

Bush Blurs the Line Between God and Government

Religion must not be the definition of morality.


What happens when you take the most powerful nation in the world, and put it in the hands of a man who believes that God wants him to be president, and that he is doing God’s work? Unfortunately, we are already finding out the answer to that question. President Bush, by his own words, believes that God wanted him to be the president of the United States of America. If you walked in to any emergency room in this country, and said that God wanted you to be the president, you would be given a diagnosis of some kind of neurosis or psychosis, and on your way to a nice little behavioral health center somewhere. If he said that God wanted him to be a teacher, or a preacher, or a healer of some kind, it wouldn’t be so scary. But no, this man believes that God wanted him to be the leader of the greatest democracy in the world, and the commander and chief of the most dangerous military arsenal in the world.


Now, only he could tell the world why he believes that God so favors him, and frankly that explanation would be even more frightening than the assertion itself to me. That one simple assertion that God placed him there for some self perceived purpose is to me the single most upsetting, and potentially dangerous situation that this country has faced since the end of the cold war. What a sense of power it must be to sit in an office such as the Presidency of the United and States and believe in your own mind that you sit their by God’s desire. Surely if you believed that, you to would believe that you had the right to force your religious convictions on others as President Bush seems to believe.


The Pilgrims first came to this continent trying to escape King James, who blurred the lines of church and state, and made religious doctrine a matter of law rather than choice. The founders of our nation, while being mindful of their own beliefs, were aware of the need to prevent the church from having control of the laws that would govern us. The first sentence of the first amendment to our constitution tells us that even then they realized that it was important that laws not be made to favor one church or religion, nor to persecute it.


It isn’t easy to respect the views of other people, especially when they don’t agree with your own. What makes this country so great is that not only do we respect the right of every individual to their own beliefs, and opinions, but that we have fought and died for their rights to express them Now, we have a president who would take us back over two hundred years, and not only assert his own religious beliefs on others, but write them into the very constitution that was meant to protect us from such tyranny. I don’t need religion to tell me what is right, and what is wrong. My Mother and Father did that for me, and I do it for myself every day of my life. I certainly don’t need President Bush to do it for me either. I respect his right to believe that my being a lesbian is somehow immoral, or a sin, or perverse, or whatever it is he believes. I disagree with him, but I know he has a right to that belief. I would not want to see a law that denied him the right to express his opinion, nor denied him any rights based on his belief. I just wish he had that kind of respect for me, and for my right to be who God made me.

Moral High Ground

Disguising Bigotry Behind Morality

If you have been listening to the hype being churned out by the right wing extremists these days about gay rights and same sex marriage, then you know that the reason they believe we must be denied the right to marriage is because we would somehow diminish the concept of marriage itself.
Apparently they believe that allowing two people who love one another, and want the ability to protect their partners in the future both physically and financially, will make the vows of a heterosexual couple somehow mean less. They base their arguments on moral grounds, point at us and call us sinners, as if that were all the explanation that was required to deny us the same rights that they enjoy in their own families. But their arguments lose merit when you shed a little light on them.
What relationship diminishes marriage more: a same-sex couple in a committed and loving relationship who somehow manage to keep their union together without the ties of a legal or moral contract, or a legally married heterosexual couple who have stood in their communities church amongst their friends and family and made vows of commitment, and then broken them? According to these so called “conservatives” definitions of an acceptable candidate for marriage, the only absolute necessity appears to be that you be heterosexual. You can be a murderer, an adulterer, a child molester, a drug dealer, or a thief and still pass their litmus test for being morally adequate to stand in their church and receive blessings on your union to anyone you like, unless they are of the same sex.
They say they are not trying to deny us our civil rights out of hate or religious bias, and they may even believe that. However, until they no longer allow thieves, murderers, adulterers, liars, drug dealers, and divorcees the right to marry it simply will not be a believable argument.
If their opposition were based on anything other than their own personal dislike for our way of life, then these other lifestyles that would be considered even by them to be morally objectionable would be left out in the cold as well.
What makes this even more difficult, is that it is impossible to argue a point with someone who can’t even admit what the point is they are trying to make. How do you confront an issue and work for change when your opponent won’t even admit what they are really fighting you for?
They are making us expend time, money, and energy to prove that same-sex marriage won’t diminish “traditional” marriage, when that’s not the point at all. They know that. They know very well that the couple across from the street from them has no impact on their own marriage vows. If your neighbor cheats on his or her spouse, does that obligate you to do the same? It’s been going on for centuries, and somehow marriage has survived.
The reality is that they choose not accept us for personal reasons, and that is just plain discrimination. It’s not moral high ground.