Letters to the Editor
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YIKES!
Sounds like Klan rhetoric to me or was that Taliban rhetoric, no wait...didn't this happen in Germany???? Serbia??? Africa????
Let's call them what they are....terrorists. These guys peddle in fear...a sure sign that they are hiding something about their own lives.
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Religious Persecution?!
Christians constitute between 80 and 85 percent of the American population. Conservative protestants have control of the White House, both houses of Congress, and most of the state governorships. Everyone in the US has the privelege of being able to worship as he or she chooses in an easily-accessible, tax-exempt church, mosque, synagogue, temple, etc. For Christians in this country to claim that they are being 'persecuted' trivializes in a very ignorant and obnoxious way the actual instances of religious persecution currently happening in other parts of the world. In many places, religious groups are not allowed to worship or even meet openly. As we have seen in recent events, there are people subject to prison or even execution for their beliefs. In other places, minority religious groups are being politically, socially, and economically oppressed by others, and in some countries people are killing each other over religious beliefs. The vast majority of people living in the US, myself included, have no idea what real persecution is all about. Let's try to keep a sense of perspective.
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A question for liberals and all sane, civilized people
With the obvious increase in power and influence held by these insane assholes, why do so many liberals and Dems repudiate gun-ownership again? These far-right people are a serious danger to this country, in fact we have gone beyond "dangerous" to the point where they are actually already successfully implementing their agenda. And I shake my head in amazement that one of the top priorites of some American liberals is to make sure only the government has guns? The same government led by Tom DeLay and George W. Bush??
This is pure nuttiness. I read an article recently on MSNBC quoting the inimitable Robert Bork speaking at one of these far-right gatherings-of-the-loons and he was also talking of such things as "violent rebellion" and the apocalyptic "smiting" of America. This is not some camouflage-wearing fringe-dweller. This is a man who was nominated to the SUPREME COURT (and almost made it) by the highly controversial and polarizing president whom the corporate media now tells us was The Most Beloved American Who Ever Lived. Of course that is just another revionist lie but apparently, from now on, anyone born after 1970 will be completely unaware that Ronald Reagan was not in fact considered to be God-on-earth by most Americans while he was president.
I'm bird-tracking a little, but the point still leads back to one irrefutable conclusion: these lunatics are gaining ever-increasing control of this country, and it seems clear by now that they are not going to stop at any point, no matter how much power they gain.
So again, I have to wonder how long normal (liberal, libertarian, centrist, whatever) Americans can continue to pretend that the war has not arrived in the US already. Who needs Al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" when you have homegrown religious zealots ready to wage Christian Jihad right here, already occupying- and continuing to grow in rank - our own American halls of power? This is madness.
Sorry, gun-grabbers (I hate to use a wingnut term, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em), you can continue to live in utopian fantasyland if you want. Maybe you can stick a daisy in Robert Bork's rifle when he decides that God wants him to finally implement "the will of Jesus" in America at gunpoint.
As for me, I will most definitely remain very much "locked and loaded" myself. That's where me and whackos like Parsley are very much in concert. If anyone comes around trying to impose "Christian Reconstructionism" or Sharia law or the "Ten Commandments" or martial law or anything resembling the above in my neighborhood, I'll make sure they at least have to back up all that tough talk in order to do it. I feel sorry for the first one through the door.
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Christian Persecution
I say we declare a national holiday of an entire week, better would be 2, where we demonstrate to the entire Christian Right what persecution actually looks like. The drooling delusional masses need to have a frame of reference, and when they have the Jews for Jesus (aka Christians) in there braying that Christians in America are experiencing a new Holocaust, that's the last straw.
Afterwards, anyone who makes claims about the wills of unproven, likely nonexistant supernatural deities will be required to produce their deity for confirmation (after appropriate scientific testing of godliness of course). It's time to make very clear that faith is not a virtue, it's the whitewashing of learned mental illness and delusion. Take away these people's ability to spread their hate and lies, make sure that all churches are paying taxes like everyone else, and that televangelism operations like Trinity, CBN and Falwell's crap are carefully monitored and controlled (and most importantly audited with vigor). When the money drops out of the religion business, most of the financing and most importantly fortunes of these assholes will vanish, making sure that only their ideas are there to give them cheers or jeers.
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Hey, does anyone fact-check this stuff?
Just one point here, Peter LaBarbera's supposed "posting on a gay message board" seemed awfully fishy to me. I'm certainly no expert as I don't visit gay message boards but something about the way it was written seemed really off to me. It read more like a fundamentalist homophobic Christian's purile fantasy about what gross thing might be posted on a gay message board.
I guess there's no way of checking out if this thing's for real, but once, just ONCE, I'd like someone in the media to ask these people to verify the crap they throw out there, instead of just accepting it as fact. I mean, it's not like we haven't proved time and again in the past that these folks are liars.
I've read lots of MSM coverage of this conference, including in the NYT and Washington Post, as well as Salon. Did any reporter approach LaBarbera after he spoke about this supposed message board item? Did anyone ask him where he found it? The name of the website, maybe?
I've got a pretty good nose for bullshit and this stinks.