It seems to me that it is not Romney's responsibility to ensure that the service he utilizes employs legal residents. Regardless of whether he did or didn't insist that the company check their workers' documentation, that is an obligation that should not be placed on the shoulder of the customer. If I hire a service to clean my house or my yard, it's not my responsbility to make sure the people they send are legal US residents. Should I also verify with my attorney that her paralegals are fully documented? Should I ask my doctor if I can see the nurse's proof of residence? Shall I insist that the Holiday Inn I stay at prove to me that the woman changing my sheets isn't an illegal immigrant?

On the bright side, at least he didn't call the workers dirty Guatemalans like a certain former Montana senator.

Would it make it better or worse if I only demanded proof of residence when the people looked Mexican? If the manual labor is dark-skinned, should I "know better" than to assume they're here legally?

No one would believe you if you claimed you have never felt so angry at someone that you would sorely like to hurt them. I am simply being honest. I am the least violent person I know... I have never raised a hand against anyone, have never been in a fight. I don't eat meat and I refuse to even smash bugs or spiders.

So as much as I appreciate your attempt to make me look like a violent psycho (for that would make me far more interesting than I am), I think all honest people here will agree that there are times they feel so morally outraged that they wish they could do something drastic to change it. The reason a few people have expressed their gratitude for what I wrote is probably precisely because I am not sugarcoating the experience of life or my own experience with faith. Life, and faith, are hard, and they both give people a lot of reason to be angry. Being a Christian makes my life harder, not easier. Believing in God makes my moral obligations more pressing, not less. Following Christ means I must live with the pain and agony of the people our world has deemed unfit of personhood, not pretend it is meaningless or an accident of fate. Believing that God commands us to love each other makes it much harder to love oppressors, not easier. Recognizing my own moral failings makes it much harder to believe God could love me, not less. You can continue to insist that my believing in some pie in the sky is just a way to make my life less unpleasant, but you're just turning a deaf ear to what I am earnestly telling you is my experience, and judging by some reactions to my letters, the experience of others in my position.

Besides, you make yourself entirely too important by pretending I want to "crucify" you literally or in any other sense. You apparently missed the entire point where I said I saw in you my own willingness to see Christ crucified. Were you the one accusing me of playing the victim? Doctor, heal thyself.

Also, I don't know if I'd care to be loved by you via your definition. It is my general practice to love people more than I expect them to love me, to do more for them than I care if they do for me. And isn't it entirely self-centered to assume that people must want for themselves exactly what you want for yourself? Your definition of love is just eye-for-an-eye justice, quid pro quo. That's not any kind of love that I understand. That's just commerce.

Well I can't say from experience, but it seems to me that the young woman's alleged feast of drooling older men is nothing to be envied. Most of the women I know are not interested in dating men significantly older than they are, and they are certainly not opposed to dating someone their own age.

And I for one have little interest in high school (or even college) freshmen (I am a junior), nor do I look forward to those days when I, too, can be a crotchety old man on the hunt for a trophy wife. Actually the love of my life is (*gasp*) a year older than me. Oh, the intrigue! We're just like Ashton and Demi.

I don't know why people bring this up as an excuse for older men having the societal "right" to "have" younger women. Besides, it seems to me that the crotchety old guys are just dumping their similarly-aged wives to get the new, younger models (pun not really intended).

Why is it so disturbing that freedom ought to require religoin? Why is that a dangerous direction?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a secular leader. Nor was Mahatama Gandhi. The abolitionists prior to the Civil War? Almost exclusively motivated by religion. Our founding fathers, though not as gung-ho Christian as many fundamentalists claim, were a diverse bunch of Christians and deists who almost all believed in God in some form.

Voltaire was a deist. Thomas More, author of Utopia, is a Catholic saint. Jan Amos Comenius, the father of modern education and the first real proponent of universal education for boys and girls of all ages, was a devout Protestant Moravian exiled from his own country for his beliefs.

Modern secular people hold this fantastical and completely ahistoric belief that we owe our current freedoms to secular thought that has fought back the cruel oppression of organized religion. There is a presumed false causation between the triumph of secularism and the increase of freedom. The reality is that nearly every great human achievement in the field of freedom has been made by someone who privately believed in a supreme being.

Even if the axiom that "freedom requires religion" is not hypothetically true, it is certainly historically true.