Republicans Unfit to Adopt

[trish]

thought i'd share a letter the editor of a ohio paper didn't print:

Recently the Ohio Democratic Senator Robert Hagan introduced an outrageous bill that would outlaw the adoption of children by Republican couples. “Credible research,” he claims shows that adopted children raised in Republican households “…are more at risk for developing emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos,…” and “…an alarming lack of tolerance for others....”
I want to say up front, I’m normal; i.e. not a Republican. But I sincerely believe that what consenting adults do behind secure doors should be classified. Anyone who lies in bed at night obsessing over what those Republicans are doing in their secret dens is just being perverse. Get over it! The love between a Republican and her investment portfolio is just as strong a foundation for raising children as the love between two human beings.

[Mugai_hentaisha]

Look at gun crime statistics in Europe and look at them in the USA.

Where does not banning them, help?

You want guns because you like guns - boys and toys, I'd be the first culprit on that one (see above photos) but as a society, it's a screw up. The US gun crime is sick and having access to those guns is a main part of that sickness.
seanchai

Didn't England and Scotland have a drastic upswing in Knife related assaults and killings?

Most Gun related crimes in the US are committed with weapons purchased or obtained illegaly.

However with great power should come great responsiblity and the US needs to grow up and know the difference between legal and illegal obtained weapons and develop laws to combat the real issue. then again the whole world could learn this lesson.

I own weapons many of them several guns and several bladed types but I am not a Criminal in fact I only have 2 speeding tickets (which are off the records now).

Archie Bunker said it best Seanchai...."would you feel better if they were pushed out of windows?
well would you?

[chefmike]

A Religious Push Against Gay Unions


By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: April 24, 2006
WASHINGTON, April 23 — About 50 prominent religious leaders, including seven Roman Catholic cardinals and about a half-dozen archbishops, have signed a petition in support of a constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage.

Archbishop John J. Myers said of the campaign, "We think the American people are on our side on this, and we want the Senate to know it."

Organizers of the petition said it was in part an effort to revive the groundswell of opposition to same-sex marriage that helped bring many conservative voters to the polls in some pivotal states in 2004. The signers include many influential evangelical Protestants, a few rabbis and an official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But both the organizers and gay rights groups said what was striking about the petition was the direct involvement by high-ranking Roman Catholic officials, including 16 bishops. Although the church has long opposed same-sex unions, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had previously endorsed the idea of a constitutional amendment banning such unions, it was evangelical Protestants who generally led the charge when the amendment was debated in 2004.

"The personal involvement of bishops and cardinals is significantly greater this time than in 2004," said Patrick Korten, a spokesman for the Knights of Columbus, a lay Catholic group.

The Catholic bishops and many of the other religious leaders involved have pledged to distribute postcards for their congregants to send to their senators urging support for the amendment. The Knights of Columbus is distributing 10 million postcards to Catholic churches.

The petition drive was organized in part by Prof. Robert P. George of Princeton, a Catholic scholar with close ties to evangelical Protestant groups. Aides to three Republican senators — Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader; Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; and Sam Brownback of Kansas — were also involved, organizers said.

Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark said that at a meeting in Washington in February, the Senate aides recommended the idea of a postcard campaign, recalling the success of a similar effort that the bishops organized in support of a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion.

"We think the American people are on our side on this, and we want the Senate to know it," the archbishop said.

The campaign comes as many in the Republican Party are increasingly worried that their core supporters may stay away from the polls this year because they are demoralized by the war in Iraq and other matters. Senate Republican leaders have scheduled a vote on the proposed amendment in June, partly as a means of rallying conservatives.

No one expects the measure to pass this year. But drives to amend state constitutions to ban same sex-marriage proved powerful incentives to turning out conservative voters in Ohio and elsewhere in 2004. At least two states with contested Senate races — Tennessee and Pennsylvania, where Mr. Santorum is seeking re-election against a Democrat who also opposes abortion rights — are debating constitutional bans on same-sex marriage this year.

But Ohio and other pivotal states have already amended their constitutions, and at least one poll suggests that the public's negative response to the first same-sex marriages is cooling. A Pew Research poll in March found that 51 percent of the public opposed legalizing same-sex marriage, down from 63 percent in February 2004.

Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group, said supporters of the amendment were out of touch. "We have a war raging in Iraq, we have a Gulf Coast that needs to be rebuilt, we have an economy barely hanging on," he said. "The last thing America wants is this Republican-controlled Congress spending time writing discrimination into the Constitution."

Matt Daniels, founder of the Alliance for Marriage, an umbrella group that supports the proposed amendment, said the religious leaders represented "huge numbers" of people. His group has set up a Web site, religiouscoalitionformarriage.org, which includes the petition, pew handouts and suggested notes for sermons.

Organizers said the petition had brought together cardinals from both the left and right sides of the United States bishops' conference, including the liberal Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles and the conservative Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, as well as Cardinals Edward M. Egan of New York, Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, William H. Keeler of Baltimore and Sean Patrick O'Malley of Boston.

The prominent conservative Protestant figures included leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination, as well as the president of conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and a handful of Episcopal bishops.

Other signers included James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family; the evangelist D. James Kennedy; Bishop Charles E. Blake of the historically black Church of God in Christ; the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez Jr., president of the National Hispanic Association of Evangelicals; Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb of the Orthodox Union; and officials of the Orthodox Church in America.

[chefmike]

A fantastic editorial on the whole GOP/Moral Majority bible banging bash... going all the way back to former chimp-in-chief Ronnie. If I believed in hell, I would like to think that Reagan is roasting on a spit there for all eternity, along with Nixon of course....

Bush's Trojan Christ

While virtually every other country in the Western world recognizes May 1st to be 'the International Day of The Worker,' we here in America studiously ignore it as anything other than just another day. That's training for ya.

Sure, the occasional rabid pundit like confessed drug addict Rush Limbaugh or classified info leaker Robert Novak might reach deep into their propaganda bag of tricks to remind us that May Day was officially ordained 'Law Day' by that friend of the working man, President Ronald Reagan, but in general the media does it's best to placate its owners and not give the uppity working man his due.


You remember Ronald Reagan, who's first official act as president (if you don't count negotiating with the Iranian government to keep their American hostages until after he defeated Carter), was breaking the strike of air traffic controllers, the first salvo in an assault on worker's rights that follows a direct line through NAFTA to our current abominations of pension theft and the elimination of minimum wage in New Orleans? A real man of the people.

It was under Reagan that the whole religious 'Great Awakening' began, which wasn't so much an embracing of religion as it was a repudiation of the social advances of the 60's, with Donald Wildmon and James Dobson peddling their pre-Focus on Family 'Promise Keepers,' (where men rule the household), Phyllis Schafly screaming equal rights for women undermines 'family values,' and Charles Schaar Murray declaring--with a straight face--blacks do worse in America simply because they're stupid. It was an awakening, all right.

Suddenly, the 'ostracized' religious right were 'rejoining' the national debate under the 'revolution' of faith---spearheaded by a president who rarely set foot in a church during his reign, lied regularly and outrageously to the public, and illegally funded nun-killing death-squads in Central America.

Or so the story goes, if you listen to Karl Rove, Robert Novak, Peggy Noonan and the other shit-spinners who learned their chops at the feet of Reagan/Bush PR wunderkind Lee Atwater, a vicious mudslinging thug who died young of a brain tumor and renounced his scurrilous tactics on his deathbed---tactics that have made Karl Rove a household name.

What the Reagan years really ushered in was the start of 'The Great Hypocrisy,' the GOP's twisting of religion to create a class of disgruntled zealots so blinded by hate they'd rush to vote into office the very thieves, liars and torturers who would not only screw them at every turn, but would decades later deliver George W. Bush to our doorstep with his Faith Based Everything.

And 'the national debate'---where is it? There is no debate, just ideologues screaming at each other to see whose one-dimensional faith-based sound byte can 'win'--nonsense like 'God Hates Fags' and Rick Santorum's equating homosexuality with bestiality.

It used to be that Christians were known to all by their good deeds, but after almost four decades of the GOP's cleaving the populace into warring sects to be manipulated at the polls, 'being Christian' is no longer defined by doing good deeds, it's defined by an arrogant mission to tell others how they must live---who they can marry, who they can adopt, what they can say in public, what they must teach in schools---all the way down to what kind of medicine they should have access to.

It was easy to look away from inconvenient historical facts of Christianity like the Inquisition, the Crusades, or the pedophilia of the priesthood when you could still see true people of faith marching for civil rights, working in soup kitchens, or bearing witness in Nicaragua as the Reagan-funded militias gunned down families of peasants.

But 'The Great Awakening' now brings us faith-based leaders promoting torture and war, who lie to us on a daily basis, and violate our constitutionally guaranteed rights. The 'national debate' about values is reduced to quippy bumper stickers like 'It's Okay To Pray' or 'One Man + One Woman = Marriage.' Our national conversation on ethics, morality, and faith has become a kind of WWF 'Religious Smackdown.'

The Great Awakening has also brought us, as reported in the Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/nation/wa...dreds_of_laws/ , a president who claims the authority to disobey over 750 of our laws.
Maybe it's time to ask ourselves what exactly has really been awakened.

Is it a coincidence that our most pro-faith president is also our biggest law-breaking president, presiding over our most scandalized administration in history? You tell me.

Is it coincidence that our pro-faith vice president has a gay daughter he'd prevent from adopting a child or marrying her lover, a great Christian whose wife converts from writing lesbian romance novels to ethics primers for kids in the blink of a presidential campaign, a soldier of Christ who tells a senator on the Senate floor to go fuck himself? You tell me.

We have two million people incarcerated in federal prisons. If we're to believe the polls the Pat Robertsons and Bill O'Reillys constantly throw at us that 89% of our country are practicing Christians, that means our federal prisons are stuffed to the breaking point with about 1.8 million Bible-thumpers. Hmmm.

How come when we talk about religion in the great national debate, it's never fact s like these we discuss, instead of arguing over posting the Ten Commandments in City Hall?

What about Lynddie England, described as rarely leaving her barracks in Iraq except to go to church--and of course torture naked Iraqis by forcing them to simulate anal sex for snapshots taken by the father of her illegitimate child. If that 89% is correct, wouldn't that mean that the majority of Lynddie's co-torturers were, you know, Christians? When are we having that faith-based discussion?

And poor Clay Aiken, touting his Christianity to the blind, er, I mean, fans of American Idol, rumored to be caught in a gay relationship and seeking the love that dare not speak it's name on the Web, all the while recording an album of ---you guessed it---Christian songs. It's been reported some fans are so mad they want to sue RCA for false advertising. Why aren't we hearing any talk about the gullibility of a Christian audience in our national debate? Why is this kind of intelligent discussion avoided in favor of finger pointing and sneering? If Aiken were gay, his claim of devout Christianity gave him the power to fool--or at least encourage denial in--millions. Shouldn't we look into that power?

And what about the Duke lacrosse team? The entire debate is whether or not a rape occurred, not what were a room full of Christian boys from 'good homes' (two of them educated by Jesuits) doing ordering strippers to entertain them while threatening sodomy with a broomstick and taunting black women with racist jibes about their cotton-picking slave grandparents? Why don't we discuss Christianity in that context?

And of course there's Tom Delay, the great born-again purveyor of moral rectitude, the man with his hand in so many tills even Texas republicans had to cut him loose. The President salutes him as a great patriot who 'served his country well' and the Rove-minions repeat ad nauseum, 'the Dems don't have their poster-boy for corruption to kick around anymore.' What does that mean, exactly? Did he do it, or not? If he's innocent, then how could he possibly be a poster-boy for corruption? And if he's guilty, why is the president saluting his patriotism? And if he's a thief and a liar, what are we to think of his relentless touting of Christian values? Doesn't that mean he's a hypocrite, and that Christian values, in a political sense, are meaningless?

What all this tells us is claiming to be Christian, on it's own, signifies nothing. In fact, given the religious makeup of our populace, pedophiles, thieves, liars, hypocrites and torturers in America are more likely to be Christians than Jews, Buddhists, Muslims--or atheists. It's simple math.

This is why the Founding Fathers--God-fearing men all--were smart enough to keep religion out of government. They knew the power appealing to a people's spirituality could have, that faith could be invoked while hiding great violations of it's very tenets, encouraging otherwise docile people to do and say despicable things, to hate each other, to threaten the very fabric of a progressive, democratic, rational society.

Ironically, what Bush, Rove and the rest of the Fourth Reich have shown us is that putting more religion into government doesn't make it more moral; what it does is allow every cut-rate thief, liar and hypocrite to hide behind the cloak of morality while committing immoral acts around the globe and at home that would shame any real person of faith.

It's not a coincidence that the most 'faith-based' government we've had in over a century is also the most corrupt, secretive, murderous, lying, and law breaking in history. In the name of 'reawakening' Christianity in government, Bush, et al, have shown us why it should be locked out. As soon as a politician starts quoting the Bible and going on about his faith, we should run him out of town.

What the GOP has in fact done is mock and destroy Christianity, and that's a shame. Like Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Christianity and God are some of our greatest creations. By appealing to an ignorant fringe of assholes who codify their hatred behind a misuse of spirituality, the GOP is an embarrassment to not only truly devout Christians, but to the rational world at large.

But they've done us an odd--if unintentional---service by showing us in practice exactly what the Founding Fathers feared and tried to prevent; that religion strikes so deep and renders people who want to be 'good' so gullible to manipulation, that any absurdity can be pushed through, including nonsense like dinosaurs walked the earth only two thousand years ago, praying can stop cancer, and somebody else's marriage can threaten your own.

So if you're against abortion, don't have one. If you're against gay marriage, don't marry one. And if you're against illegal immigrants, don't hire one. Clean your own damn house and pick your own damn broccoli, and when you're unmarried daughter breaks her pledge and gets pregnant, face your own moral dilemma and search your own spirituality for answers--just don't force me to apply those answers to my daughter. I'll handle her, and my grandchild, on my own.

But if you want me to see the beauty and the power of your faith, lead by example, not by cramming it down my throat or voting for politicians who want to screw all of us so the rich can get richer. Christian values are feeding the hungry, helping the poor and aiding the sick---not cutting Medicare, veteran's benefits, environmental protections, school lunch programs or health care. Period.

Values are something you adhere to, not something you force someone else to adhere to; that's called fascism.

And don't stand there and tell me a smiling president who reserves the right to violate a Congressional ban on torture is a man of faith.

That's called stupidity.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-gi...t_b_20289.html

[Felicia Katt]

Oops she did it again. Despite driving with her kid on her lap once, and with him facing in the wrong direction in his car seat later on, Britney is not only allowed to continue her parenting but also encouraged to spawn repeatedly. Yet kids would be damaged if they were place into stable homes with committed gay parents who manage to use child safety seats and high chairs without causing personal injury.

http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/68606.htm

FK

[chefmike]

Now More Than Ever...No Child's Behind Left Alone.