... "All abortion is wrong." The Republicans who want to oust Missouri GOP candidate for U.S. Senate Todd Akin also want to avoid discussing that they don't really want to ban abortion, they just want to keep demagoguing abortion for decades.
All the Tea Party folk and all the Born-Again Christians out there who vote based on the pro-life banner won't be able to put the GOP together again, if people open their eyes and realize the game Republicans have been playing.
Look at the record.
What has the allegedly pro-life Republican party done to reverse Roe v. Wade in the three decades since Ronald Reagan became president? After all, since 1981, there have been several years of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress along with a sitting Republican president.
What kept them from passing a constitutional amendment declaring that human life begins at conception? If they did that they wouldn't be able to keep ranting against abortion
and picking the ripe, juicy votes of folks who don't realize that without a
constitutional change, there is nothing any president can do to ban
abortion.
Or, what kept them from simply ratifying, without reservation, the American Convention on Human Rights, which contains such a clause ("Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception.")? If they did that, they couldn't sell weapons to Latin American regimes that torture in a most anti-Communist fashion.
Akin knew very well that the GOP's stand on this principle is riddled with more holes than Swiss cheese. That's why he fell into the fiction that "legitimate" rape is a method to prevent conception.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Nature helps us "Grow Down"
The beauty of growing down is how Nature prepares to take us back into her bosom. The world becomes muffled and quieter, voices more garbled, television's volume is never high enough. Faces lose wrinkles along with their sharp edges and I am always zooming in on text in my browser.
Slowly, the angry horns of fellow drivers fade away as do the ridiculous, and at heart trivial, questions and demands of petty bureaucrats, such as police officers, nurses and the whole army of factotums who work off scripts and protocols devised by and for morons. Never mind.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune stop at the cozy barrier of progressively weaker connections. Mental acuity and memory recedes to when we loved playgrounds and each day was a whole new lifetime. Tell me again what was it that called attention to what's between my legs?
Soon we are only breathing, uninterested in food or the newspaper. Until we no longer care to breathe.
Slowly, the angry horns of fellow drivers fade away as do the ridiculous, and at heart trivial, questions and demands of petty bureaucrats, such as police officers, nurses and the whole army of factotums who work off scripts and protocols devised by and for morons. Never mind.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune stop at the cozy barrier of progressively weaker connections. Mental acuity and memory recedes to when we loved playgrounds and each day was a whole new lifetime. Tell me again what was it that called attention to what's between my legs?
Soon we are only breathing, uninterested in food or the newspaper. Until we no longer care to breathe.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Sunday I found myself in New York City ...
Sunday I found myself in New York City,
my home town. As I do from time to time, I went to the old neighborhood
where I know no one any more. I even ambled over to the church where I
was baptized. I walked in for a moment, to see the tiny church I once
perceived as large as Canterbury.
The priest was finishing his sermon; they'd read Mark 4:26-34 and he was wrapping up. His New York accent assaulted me. I don't live there any more. So I have gone to search for the reading (http://tinyurl.com/6v36x6z) and see if I can formulate my own sermon.
The meaning of the opening simile parable that hits me in the face first off is the message that the reign of God is not in my hands.
So often I read the papers, which I can do at work as part of work (great job if you can get it), and become despondent. As a journalist I know that the one bias all reporters have is for the negative: someone died, so-and-so is corrupt, the world is falling apart. Yet I get caught up in it as I scour for the disasters to make sure I can find the news-of-the-day angle to my stories.
These days I am mindful of Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." I could recite all the headlines to you, but you don't need me to do that. You can go get depressed on your own.
So here comes Jesus saying that the reign of God, the state of being he is announcing to the world, is "as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how."
He does not know how.
There is nothing I need bother my little head about it, because even if I were the seed scatterer, I would still not know how it sprouts and grows. Yet it does by some process I don't know. The conclusion reminds me of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
The reign of God is at hand, despite all the darkening clouds. Perhaps the clouds just bring rain. Then the seed will become a tree and birds will nest in its branches, as the remainder of the passage says.
I don't know for certain that this is "the message." I was spared living in first century Palestine as a poor devout Jew who followed a Galilean woodworker-preacher, so I was not told what Mark intimates is the secret of the gospel. At least, I was not told as the disciples were told.
But here's my guess.
The priest was finishing his sermon; they'd read Mark 4:26-34 and he was wrapping up. His New York accent assaulted me. I don't live there any more. So I have gone to search for the reading (http://tinyurl.com/6v36x6z) and see if I can formulate my own sermon.
The meaning of the opening simile parable that hits me in the face first off is the message that the reign of God is not in my hands.
So often I read the papers, which I can do at work as part of work (great job if you can get it), and become despondent. As a journalist I know that the one bias all reporters have is for the negative: someone died, so-and-so is corrupt, the world is falling apart. Yet I get caught up in it as I scour for the disasters to make sure I can find the news-of-the-day angle to my stories.
These days I am mindful of Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." I could recite all the headlines to you, but you don't need me to do that. You can go get depressed on your own.
So here comes Jesus saying that the reign of God, the state of being he is announcing to the world, is "as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how."
He does not know how.
There is nothing I need bother my little head about it, because even if I were the seed scatterer, I would still not know how it sprouts and grows. Yet it does by some process I don't know. The conclusion reminds me of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
The reign of God is at hand, despite all the darkening clouds. Perhaps the clouds just bring rain. Then the seed will become a tree and birds will nest in its branches, as the remainder of the passage says.
I don't know for certain that this is "the message." I was spared living in first century Palestine as a poor devout Jew who followed a Galilean woodworker-preacher, so I was not told what Mark intimates is the secret of the gospel. At least, I was not told as the disciples were told.
But here's my guess.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)