Politicians – Judge Them By Their Deeds
“Go out and preach the gospel. And if you must, use words.”
— St. Francis of Assisi
This week I watched the GOP round-table debate. It still startles me to hear words and moral claims from candidates who must believe we’ve never seen their deeds. I’m a big believer in the separation of church and state … but let’s suppose we were a “Christian Nation,” not just a nation made up of Christians, Jews, Muslims, old believers, pagans, atheists and free-range hippies.
Could we, this new “Christian Nation,” pick the Beatitudes as our rule of law? Personally, I prefer the “Blessed Ares” to the “Thou Shalt Nots.” My guess is the current crowd of sanctimonious X-ians (Christians sans Christ; think “Merry X-mas”) would be at the front of the line crying out for the separation of church and state.
The greatest cries from the “Moral Majority,” misnamed because it is neither moral nor the majority, center on the right for women to choose to be mothers or not and the “homosexual agenda.” I’ve often wondered where these folks would be if there were a first trimester fetal test for gayness. Think about that for a second.
We hear the terms “sanctity of life” and “pro-life” from the GOP presidential candidates, our governor, local lawmakers and officials more often than we do from most preachers. The constant whining about how America has lost its morality fails to mention the crippling, insatiable greed of our corporations combined with the rapid rise of poverty and hunger among our citizenry.
If the same people cared about life over controlling the uterus of women in this country, we’d have single-payer health care.If they cared about life, coal companies wouldn’t be permitted to spread coal dust on schools and natural gas companies wouldn’t be able to frack drinking water supplies. Pollution is, after all, a natural enemy of life.
If they cared about life, our food supply wouldn’t be genetically altered to look pretty but lack nutrition.
If they cared about life we’d consider executions a very late-term abortion and would have abolished the death penalty.
If Rick Perry truly “erred on the side of life” he’d have been one of the “Blessed Are the Merciful” and refused to sign the execution warrants of 236 human beings no matter how horrible they were, let alone brag about it.
If the Sanctity of Life were true, we’d adopt “Blessed Are the Peacemakers” as our foreign policy because that is the definition of the Children of God.
I realize questioning someone’s sincerity is risky, but I’ll go on record. I’m anti-abortion, which is why I support sex education and the availability of contraception.
This week I spoke with state Sen. Bettye Davis. I haven’t talked to her before, just followed her public service. Her commitment to provide health care to women and children in Alaska is humbling.
She previously introduced a bill that passed both the House and the Senate to provide 1,300 additional children and more than 250 pregnant women access to health care. Seventy percent of it would have been paid for by the federal government.
Gov. Parnell, citing his “pro-life-ishness” vetoed a bill that forged a trail through endless committee hearings in both houses and then successfully navigated the remaining bureaucracy and gauntlet of Juneau. It was a tad disingenuous and definitely pandering on behalf of the governor. Parnell knew the federal Hyde Amendment makes it illegal for federal funds to pay for abortions unless the mother’s life is at risk or the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape. When Parnell was a senator he asked for such clarification, got it and then voted for Denali KidCare.
Parnell’s faith calls him to hold a day of prayer for our state, but he doesn’t realize people without health care pray all the time they don’t get sick.
It shouldn’t be lost on people that the majority of miracles Christ performed involved healing the sick. There was no co-pay required for leprosy, and Lazarus wasn’t asked if he’d met his deductible. If the same miracles were achieved today, government officials, at the insistence of the HMOs, would have Jesus locked up — for not being licensed or having the proper insurance or permits.
Religious leaders could have run this country if they’d stuck to the true morals in their Good Book instead of comparing the shiny gilding on the edges of those pages.
The Occupy movement is stronger this week than last. The enemy is greed. The prolonged terror threat to our senior citizens over their health and home security, the bankrupting of pensions and the relentless attack on working men and women rose to the point of immorality.
People of all faiths and no faith are showing up to shore up a moral compass that has been lost.
It wouldn’t hurt for the same people of faith to “Occupy Churches” and demand their Bibles back from the hypocrites who hijacked them over the past several decades.
There is a movement afoot doing just that — being good stewards of the Earth; caring for the sick in body and heart; helping the poor in wallet and spirit; and loving thy neighbors are all trending again.
Remember these things when you listen to politicians of either stripe tell you how much they love God. Watch what they do, how they vote and what their priorities are.
If they are going to brag about their faith they should be prepared to defend their actions. Rick Perry’s wife said he’d been “brutalized” for his Christianity.
No, Mrs. Perry, your husband and so many of his ilk who run for office are not brutalized for their faith. They are being called out as fakes.
It’s different.
Thank you Shannyn.!
Shannyn,
Excellent post! I will distribute the link to my email list and drive my RWNJ friends even crazier!
DD
And then we have Politicians that politicize serious issues for personal career ambition:
Video Case Study:
Two YouTube Videos – One Guy Political Grandstanding
SWAT OFFICER RESPONDS TO A CALL:
http://youtu.be/_mWG3yYOIjU
HAWN vs. HAWN – A Politician Fights his own Words
http://youtu.be/oxZOm0QbH14
Keep it up Shannyn! That was fabulous!!! Yay!!!!!
Religious zealots of the peculiar American stripe have curious notions. To a capitalist,Jesus would use his knowledge of all things and soon have all the wealth and validate every assumption a capitalist could ever dream of why capitalism works. He could there-by isolate himself from the ills of the world and count his gold pieces. His minions would be free to mind everyone’s business and personal lives and pray some day to be able to feast with their beloved god who thinks the way they do. And so ends another chapter of All is RIGHT in the Known World. In reality,since so many of the nutter persuasion have no use for real science,it could be explained by me,mike from iowa,that in the surreal world of right-wingery and fauxknee religiousness that opposites repel each other. This explains why nutters claim to embrace morals and family values,they never have a cozy relationship with family values. The closer and more intense the claims become,the farther from the truth the reality is. I have never personally seen a moral or family value with a voter registration card or political preference. Maybe that is where the problem lies. Politicians sure as hell do.
In physics and chemistry, opposites attract. Like repel.
I’ve always pushed the point that if gov’t is going to force every woman to give birth to every child (except for the exceptions) then the gov’t needs to pay for the health and wellbeing of that woman and child or pour money into the adoption services and foster care systems and whatever after care services are needed for the mother and family afterwards. The child should be well cared for through health services, food, clothes, education until they are legally able to get out on their own – 16, 18? The gov’t can not cut off birth control efforts at one end and then not support the child and mother and family at the other end. But of course that is exactly what is cut – think of the funding cuts to Planned Parenthood and the whole host of cuts after the child is born and to the families trying to get by. It is such an indefenseable position of the whole picture of that child’s early life that it pathetic to think the GOP continues to use the God fear speak to support their agenda. The dems try to pass programs that help families before, during and after a child is born and they are considered amoral, wasting money and adding to the debt of the country that is going to hurt children and future grand children. It is just a head-shaker.
24owls..I totally get what you are saying. Thank you.
In today’s NY Times: The Evangelical Rejection of Reason
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/the-evangelical-rejection-of-reason.html?_r=1&hp
“Charismatic leaders like these project a winsome personal testimony as brothers in Christ. Their audiences number in the tens of millions. They pepper their presentations with so many Bible verses that their messages appear to be straight out of Scripture; to many, they seem like prophets, anointed by God.
“But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.””
Congratulations Alaska! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44940415/ns/us_news/#.Tp1wB5viE8k No to Pebble Mine!
What would I give to be super rich and not ever have to take no for an answer. I personally would feel insulted to have some korporation tell me I was misled by my own beliefs because their side says wealth=might=right. Geez,lawdog I know wasting my family is against the law,but since I;m fabulously wealthy,I think your law is wrong and I’m gonna proceed with my plans because I’m fabulously wealthy.
What the Taliban is to the Islam faith, the GOP is to the Christian faith.
absolutely OMG and spot on.
Great post, Shannyn.
(On a t-shirt discovered by my DiL): “If the fetus you save is gay, will you still fight for its rights?”
I’d hazard the folks Shannyn writes about wouid rather eat broken glass and guzzle gasoline. beth.
some military personnel with an exclusive right bent,swear to uphold the constitution,just not the one with the gays in it. They are hilarious.
Is the author saying St. Francis of Assisi was pro-abortion??
thank you
I would also like to point out that many of Jesus’s healings were of women/girls. He treated them as equals.
When we healed the woman with the hemorrhage, he actually ignored an important male official to see who had touched his clothes, and touched her, making him unclean. Then he went to the official’s house and raised his daughter from the dead.
He treated women children as equals under the law–the religious law.
Shannyn, just for the record, I doubt there are hordes of people out there who are pro-abortion. It’s difficult to imagine how anyone could be in any way “pro-” about it. Sometimes it’s necessary. And it is not infanticide. Females should not be persecuted because they must sometimes make a difficult and painful decision.
I’m with you, Mo. I’ve never met a single soul who is “pro-abortion.” Not one. I’ve never met a single soul who is “anti-life”, either. Not one. Using the terms “anti-abortion” and “pro-life” fail because their diametric opposites fail. Whether for personal, moral, religious, or whatever reason(s), a person is either for (pro-) or against (anti-) the law stating a woman has a legal right, in every instance, to sovereignty over her own body. Pro-choice and anti-choice not only meet the ‘opposite’ test, but are factual terms. beth.
Rick Perry is suppressing a scientific report about the effects of climate change on Galveston Bay.
http://www.themindisaterriblething.com/2011/10/dont-listen-to-scientists-because-it.html
Spot On, Shannyn!
Sean Parnell totally gives me the creeps. I can’t believe there are voters out there that can’t spot his fake smile and pandering, televangelist hypocrisy from a mile away. If he’s a “Christian”, I’m the freaking Crown Princess of Freedonia!
They don’t give a flying duck about life. They only care about keeping women (and gays) down.
I’ve never believed in any of this “pre-born child” crap. If life begins at conception, why do they hold no funeral service for their miscarriages? Why don’t they baptize them? People they look down on as primitive pagans (e.g. Native Americans) have ceremonies for miscarriages. Why not the Xtians?
I thought for a while maybe I’d exploit this — go to school, become ordained as a minister, hook up with a skilled carpenter who could make tiny little coffins (think jewelry boxes) for these fetus funerals. I’d probably have made a ton of money (and no, the irony of enlisting a carpenter is not lost on me). But I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself, taking advantage of the mentally ill.
And Shannyn, good call on the first trimester test for homosexuality!
Of course there is Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum who took the dead not-so-ready-to-be-born baby (who conveniently died so its mother could live) home from the hospital, where its mother was being treated for a serious illness, to spend the night with its almost siblings. How the hospital ever allowed that I will never know or understand!
Our Republican representative, Dave Camp, is very quick to say that he supports the “unborn.” Those he does not support, however, are all of those already-born children as he is willing to end any federal program that might help children or their families. And he would never support universal healthcare or money for education or decent housing or public television or government agencies that protect us all. Nope. Tax cuts for the wealthiest and nothing for the rest. True Republican and true modern conservative. Love those unborn babies but do your best to make the lives of those who are living miserable.
“If life begins at conception, why do they hold no funeral service for their miscarriages? Why don’t they baptize them?”
In addition, why don’t they issue social security cards to them if they are already people?
I don’t have a problem with women NOT having an abortion, nor do I take issue with those who do have an abortion.
“And Shannyn, good call on the first trimester test for homosexuality!”
Can I hear an “Amen!”?
“Faith is believin’ what you know ain’t true” – Huck Finn.
Thanks Shannyn. Excellent post.
Excellent, my friend, excellent. Thanks.
Just got this from my friend in Florida. Check out the names. Separation of Church and State?
I don’t think they get it.
http://onenationundergodevent.com/stemberger/email.html
the Puritans ride us back to Salem,Mass.
These “save the fetus and throw the mom out with the trash” folks, like Parnell, are hypocrites.
And frankly, Mr. & Mrs. Perry are embarassment to god lovin families. The Mat Su is loaded with these hypocritical religious cretins. I swear some of them just want to belong to a churrch for a tax write off. And the rest are walking around like they been hypnotized to quote bible quotes like a fake zombie.
Then you have the “god, guns and oil” militia. A whole different breed of hypocrites. The hubby’s screwin around while workin on the slope and the wives self medicate themselves after their daily exercise class.
I so tire of these creepy hypocrites.
Oh yeah, Ms. Davis was a nurse for years, IN ALASKA. She knows the value of providing medical availability to those in need. The women is a knows the need.
And then you got dip stick Parnell who knows the oil lobby industry and has to live with the fact that the big oil he so caters too, IS older than his religious beliefs. That is creepy.
Chances are Ms. Davis sleeps better at night than dipstick Parnell.