Hate Crime Unlimited

The last time I was a candidate for office in 1997, although it was the third time I had been a candidate, my youngest had moved here to San Luis Obispo County.  She had long before let us know that she was a lesbian.  That required that the two of us should have a really down to earth talk.  We both of us recognized that if we did not get out ahead of the media with her lesbianism, someone, somewhere would try to make it an issue.  At the same time, we did not want to make it a hot-button issue ourselves.  Therefore, we decided that I should comment truthfully if the subject came up, but certainly not try to “hide” it.  It so happened that there was an incident in South County where she and her then partner were shopping where someone stopped them and was really quite disgustingly rude.  The incident so infuriated our other locally living daughter that she wrote a great letter to the editor about it.  That, needless to say, surfaced the issue quite nicely, although we were sorry the incident happened in the first place.

 

Our family was very supportive of our daughter marrying her partner of 18 years, because we love that woman very much as well.  We had the wedding ceremony, and a small reception here at the house.  They had a much bigger whoop-de-do later in the year.  And we still support them, and their friends who are in same-sex relationships, as we do all in any committed marital relationship, same-sex or not.

 

You can imagine our horror and absolute freak-out anger this morning as we read in The Tribune, our local county paper, that some lawyer, Matt McLaughlin, in Orange County has paid his $200 fee to get his “Sodomite Suppression Act” which authorizes the killing of gays and lesbians by “bullets to the head” or any “other convenient method”.  From The Tribune:  [“McLaughlin’s plan refers to “buggery” or “sodomy” as “a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.”  Under the proposal, “any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification (would) be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”]  This in itself is bad enough but one could assume that this would be after a legal trial, with lawyers on both sides, and decent judges.  But then there is:

 

f) The state has an affirmative duty to defend and enforce this law as written, and every member of the public has standing to seek its enforcement and obtain reimbursement for all costs and attorney's fees in so doing, and further, should the state persist in inaction over 1 year after due notice, the general public is empowered and deputized to execute all the provisions hereunder extra-judicially, immune from any charge and indemnified by the state against any and all liability.

 

Think about this for a moment.  If the State of California rightly drags its feet on this, then after a year, if I were seen with any of my daughters or female friends, and we gave each other a big hug on parting, conceivably some religious whack job could haul out his/her gun and shoot us in the head, using the excuse that it was obvious we were just getting ready for “sexual gratification”.  And get away with it!  This is not free speech.  If it is illegal to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, then it is certainly a hate crime to advocate shooting people in the head extra-judicially, and with immunity for the actions!  
 

I used to wonder about not using the name of God in vain, the 4^th Commandment, considering that OMG is such a frequent and wonderful expletive.  I think rather it refers to using God’s name to justify evil, as this lawyer from Orange County is doing.  For a Christian to use what a Christian believes is God’s Word to justify such hate, in direct contradiction to what is taught in the Christian Bible is about as blasphemous as one can get, in my opinion.  What a travesty of the Great Commandments of Jesus:  Love God with all of your heart, mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself.  Using a reverse logic, if this man hates his neighbor to this extent, he must really hate himself!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Little of This; A Little of That

Ah, what to write about this week?  So many things; so little lengthy inspiration!  How about a little about a whole lot?  No!  Too bad!!  Here goes.  Some of value – some not.

I guess the new Republican budget could be worse, but I’m not sure how.  Although I have Medicare, and it helps us a great deal, we would still be able to scrape along without it.  But there are many my age, or younger or older, who desperately need it.  In good conscience, how could these people who call themselves Christian call for an almost total gutting of our country’s social safety net in order to cut taxes for those who don’t need to have their taxes cut.  Medicare, children’s health care, social security are all programs that truly help people who need the help.  There are many more that need help than churches, synagogues, temples and NGOs can conceivably supply.  Register to vote, then vote the bums out!

Last night we heard that a bunch of Christians are starting a Christian militia to go over and fight with the Iraqis against ISIS.  Oh, goody!!  A new crusade with their marching song, Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war?  This will certainly not endear us to the radical Islamist right to have a bunch of radical Christian right soldiers on their land.  That, by the way, is a song I refuse to play, along with Battle Hymn of the Republic in my music group at church.  It is not an issue at this time, but one pastor told the director to go ahead and schedule Battle Hymn, and that I would play it if everyone else was singing.  They sang without me. 

Closer to home, yesterday was a good day for me.  I got new “speakers” in my hearing aids, and my new glasses came in.  So now I can hear young women’s higher pitched voices much better, and can actually see some details I didn’t know were there.  Of course, that means I’ll have to haul out the sewing machine and mend some shirts of Bill’s that were ordered, delivered to our front door when we weren’t home, and our then puppies had a great time tearing the package open and playing tug-of-war with one of the shirts.  We took corrective action after that, but the shirt still has holes in the sleeve.  Fortunately it is a work shirt. 

Yesterday in between getting my new “ears” and “eyes”, we had a fender bender when a young driver thought he could make a left-hand turn in front of us before we entered the intersection.  Could have been much worse, but the good thing is the insurance adjuster today was a young woman with a very high voice, and I could hear her clearly!  How nice that was.  We used the fender bender as an excuse to have lunch at one of our favorite restaurants.  Hey, whatever works!

We have lived in our house now for some 35 years, so the inside really needed painting.  Which would not have been a problem except that I had a 60 year supply of books on one wall; books I considered as friends.  It took me about six months to slowly go through each book to determine if it should be given away, or kept in the new cabinet our neighbor/furniture maker was going to make for me.  Then I simply couldn’t part with any of the books until one of our daughters committed to taking them to the local homeless shelter for me.  She said they were always looking for books.  But then that meant that I had to take down all of the pictures as well, which of course presented the problem of what to do with them since we wanted to “unclutter” our walls.  I was complaining to a friend about what to do with all of the “kid” pictures which are about 40 years out of date, and her suggestion was brilliant.  Give them to the kids so we can enjoy them on their walls (if they chose to put them up).  We are in the process of doing that, but the guest bed is still awash in pictures, so hope no one wants to come and stay for a bit. 

Our big room is now all painted, the furniture is back where it belongs, a few pictures are up, and the only thing left is to have the new cabinet/console stained and a wall decoration put up.  I had looked in stores, catalogues, other people’s houses, etc., but really didn’t see anything I liked.  Then one Sunday morning a group of us decided to have brunch at a local restaurant after Mass.  I walked in, happened to look up at their big wall, and there it was!!  My perfect wall décor.  Bill liked it as well, so we bought it.  How nice of them to sell me their wall décor for my house.  Lovely people.  Now our neighbor is going to measure where it should go for me, since I am notorious for not being able to measure anything correctly, and we will be through with that.  Except that I bought a new quilt for the bed, and it doesn’t match the paint on the wall.  Ah, but I do love the smell of new paint!

Now if I could only get the Republicans in Congress to coordinate their often proffered religious beliefs to their actions, all would be well in my world!!

So VOTE, Damn It!!

This blog is either quite late for last week, or a tad early for next week.  But, the timing is right, I hope.

The fact that so many people didn’t bother to vote in the last election really bothered me.  As an almost member of the Greatest Generation (missed it by 3 years), watching as my cousins, friends and brother went in the Navy in WWII, worrying over whether they would be wounded, or worse, killed fighting against countries wherein the citizens could not vote, or else could vote for one candidate, and were jailed, or worse, if they didn’t vote for that one person, I was most distressed, to say the least.

Then I read that the son of a good friend of mine didn’t vote because he couldn’t see the point, and that bothered me to the point that I decided to write a blog about it.  Fortunately, life, in a good way, got in the way of having the time to write because the events of this past week have emphasized in my mind the importance of voting.

Sunday will be the 50^th year anniversary of the march of black citizens of this country crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge to protest the fact that black citizens were denied the right to vote by all sorts of techniques such as cumulative poll taxes and difficult literacy tests.  There were about 600 marchers who were told they could not cross the bridge and who refused to stop marching.  They were then attacked by police officers who beat them with billy clubs, sending some 50 marchers to the hospital, including John Lewis, now a respected Congressman from Alabama.  They regrouped, marched again a few days later, and were turned back again.  A few days later, they marched again and crossed the bridge.  These protests led to the voting rights act of 1965.

Fast forward to this week.  I would imagine that anyone reading this blog has heard about the scathing report from the US Attorney General’s Office regarding the really horrendous situation in Ferguson, MO, and the reasons the community erupted so forcefully after the shooting of the black teen-ager, Michael Brown.  What has also emerged from the mess in Ferguson is that over time, and probably with discouragement from the non-black side of town, was that the black community in Ferguson did not vote.  And they ended up with a government that had no regard for them whatsoever to the point of using them to fund the government by arresting the black citizens for specious reasons, then imposing outrageous fines for arrests.  And, if the individuals could not pay the fine, putting them in jail!  The citizens of Ferguson are now organizing themselves to register citizens, and then making sure they get to the polls because they have recognized that they need to vote for a government that will regard them as the lawful citizens that they are.

So what does this have to do with me?  I’m not black, nor even maybe brown.  I’m OK.

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time

there was no one left to speak up for me.  

There is an offshoot of Christianity called the Dominionists.  These folks want to make the United States a Dominionist Christian nation by being elected to local, then state and federal offices, school boards, special district boards, etc. thereby gaining control over all of our governmental institutions.  Google them if you think I am off center on this.  For the sake of the argument, let’s assume the Dominionists win.  There is no way I could subscribe to the government they want to impose.  But if I don’t speak up now for the black citizens of all of the Fergusons of this country, how can I demand that people speak up for me if the Domionists are in power, if there would be any left to do so.

There is another old, but excellent, maxim.  Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.  We all must register and vote; we all must start attending local board meetings, including the Board of Supervisors, and demand that these meetings be conducted in a civil and respectful manner, whether we want to go or not.  We must respectfully demand that people of all ages have a reason for voting, and that they recognize that if they want to enjoy the benefits of democracy, they sure as hell need to work for those benefits by at least voting.  Voting is the primary requirement of citizenship in a democracy.