Bishops, Bibles and tyranny

So let me get this straight, refusing to allow a Church to make its tenets, prohibitions and taboos the law of the land means that Barack Obama has

“cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty”

thus confirming the paranoid fears of Know Nothings and anti-Catholic bigots everywhere. How can we deny that the Arizona Bishop who wrote those words in one out of many letters from Bishops read aloud last Sunday to congregations around the US has perverted the First Amendment to advocate political control of private lives by Churches -- exactly in opposition to the amendment's intent? That intent, of course it precisely to deny such power, or "freedom" if you prefer, to faith based organizations whether elected or not.

I'm sure some will try to dress this up in Sunday clothes, but it's the same old ecclesiastical evil that's been bedeviling us for millennia. What it's about, is the administration's recent decision to make birth control available to women through their private health care plans, thus making "people of faith" second class citizens, according to Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in a display of dishonest, convoluted and perverted logic describing the demand that women be denied their rights in the name of religious freedom. Perhaps he'd like to explain why his organization pretends to hold all the moral cards here and other "faiths" would not be allowed to take rights and freedom away from their women in the name of some mangy god or demiurge -- perhaps not since it would entail exposing his Church's obscene claim to worldwide tyranny over the minds of men (and bodies of women) as Jefferson put it so unambiguously.

"Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights.”

No they didn't and many of them came to get away from the gruesome and eldritch horrors your ilk have perpetrated in the old country.

Catholics should pray to the Virgin Mary, says he, to "intercede for the nation" since God himself seems uninterested and I would be quite satisfied if that were the extent of this blatant political power grab for which we have to pay through tax policies that allow these plutocratic men of poverty to force their nasty, inhumane policies down our throats as though we were all helpless choir boys and without having to register as a lobby. There's little to suggest that such power would be enough, as anti-democratic and anti-American and inhumane as it may be.

Personally I'd prefer to pray to Dagon or Wotan or Yog-Sothoth, my grandson's teddy bear or even to Anton Kalashnikov that our freedom can continue to endure the unremitting assault from ecclesiastical tyrants of all stripes and as we all know, Yog never forgives anything.

Amen

Bring out the Bibles, bring out the guns, Jesus is coming to town

By Capt. Fogg

The headline in yesterday's paper summarizing the President's State of the Union message is 3/8 of an inch tall. The headline just under it, reading RICK SANTORUM RALLIES IN STUART is in bold face type and is much bigger. Welcome to the monkey house.

Santorum was here on Florida's Treasure Coast Tuesday, holding forth at the Community Christian Academy to parents and grade school students, a horror of which some are particularly proud. It's an "up-close look at politics in action," said school officials.

That live action, these politics, included a prayer by the 'Reverend' Dan Holland, affiliated with the school and the pastor of Community Baptist Church in Stuart, Florida.

"I like what he said in the South Carolina rally, where he said ' I come from a place where they have a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other'"

Rick Santorum doesn't need a script, because he really isn't saying much and with such an audience, it doesn't matter whether he makes sense or mangles facts or makes them up. Rick speaks from the pulpit and anything said Ex Cathedra will not be questioned by this crowd. Besides, it's precisely what they want to hear: Barack Obama is the worst president this country has ever had, who hates capitalism, wants to take away what God wants you to keep to yourself and is destroying our natural order of things. Don't forget this is a religion that demands that women be subservient, hints that black people should stay in their place and since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would vote for anything that hated Democrats.

Santorum's ever predictable message was about "family Values" "fiscal responsibility" and "ridding the White House of Barack Obama." One can take the last of the three as the real message since my idea of family values does not include veiled calls to armed crusade and lying about the economy.

An all-white group of 350 heard him say:

"we have to have a candidate who stands proudly, consistently, aggressively, forcefully for the values that made this country the greatest country in the history of the world."

Presumably that greatness was attained with Bibles and guns and anyone suggesting that we are in any way sinners, transgressors or less than perfect instruments of God's Christian ambitions, can go straight to Hell along with that apologist Obama.

They heard him howl about That Commie, apologist, freedom hating Obama bailing out Wall Street from the excesses and crimes the Republicans encouraged them in instead of using "free market forces" which would as any legitimate economist would likely tell you have brought that "greatest country in the history of the Universe" down to the level of Haiti. Still, the problem of galloping poverty isn't lack of resources, said Santorum, contradicting himself,

"the problem is in the home, the problem is in the churches, the problem is in the community. The people living in these woods are not the federal government's problem. . ."

Let's use poverty, disease and misery to fill the pews, because a just society is a commie, secular humanist Christ-hating society.

Perhaps he could have explained to me why the Republican's promise to provide jobs instead of food stamps while it's 'not the government's problem' isn't honest or consistent -- or how unlettered country folk with bibles and guns are going to help in the new anarchistic utopia he offers them -- but trying to present Rick Santorum as a rational candidate with any further agenda than dismantling all the rules that keep markets free, creating a new Christian aristocracy and most of all, hanging up that "White's Only" sign over the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a scam and a con and a farrago of flim-flam as great as any in the history of the world.

People like me can wonder how dismantling our entire economic system, refusing to pay the bills, can be called Conservatism, or any of the other radical, ultra-Chauvinistic, Denialist and dishonest rhetoric that smells more like Attila's unwashed hordes, but the blue-hair church ladies, their God smitten and brainwashed children and the rest of the angry Community Christian Academics don't seem to care. There's just something wrong out there and they don't know what it is and the sick Mr. Rick and his sanctimonious rabble are at hand to point out the enemies and heretics for the burning.

Cross posted from Human Voices)