Oh, Sanity And Reason, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?

A small note on my unusual silence the last couple of weeks…….

It isn’t like I haven’t had scores of things I wanted to shout about.  There are plenty.  Too many, in fact.  I seem to have become buried alive in election cycle stress syndrome.  I can’t open any of my multitudinous (I love that word, and never get to use it) news and political sites without being assaulted by an avalanche of offensive and terrifying articles, posts, quotes, soundbites  and developments.  I have been hiding, frankly.  I’m kinda’ afraid if I begin to talk about any current events, I’ll deteriorate into full-on Southern-belle profanity.  For those who know southern ladies, y’all know there is no language on this Earth quite like ours when we are good and worked up.

I would like to pose a few questions to the world at large though…….

Who the hell are these undecided voters, and what, pray tell, is the cause of their indecision?  Much like Sheldon Cooper, I have the urge to ask them if they have recently received a sudden blow to the head.

Your candidate is offensive, pretentious,  obnoxious, and rude.  He is boorish and totally impolite.  He is completely disrespectful.  Now, come the second and third debates ( and VP debate) and the first thing out of y’all’s mouths is that the VP and POTUS are RUDE?  Wah.  Boo hoo.  I have news for you guys.  Lies, misconstrued facts, and politicizing events for your own selfish ends and gain–especially when you were pointedly asked not to by surviving family members in the case of Ambassador Stevens–deserve no polite treatment or mollycoddling.  What pathology do you guys suffer from, that you all think you are entitled (see what I did there) to set the terms for the way everyone else behaves?  Only from the rabid right do we see people whacking others over the head with metaphorical shovels while screaming “Why are you persecuting us?”

DOMA is finally getting put where it deserved to be from the first moment it was thought up…..in the trash can.  Case by case, court by court, I love to see it go.  When it finally disappears for good, and when lovers all through our nation are ultimately able to love and be loved by the partner of their choice, how precisely will that affect ANY of you?  The sacrosanct institution of marriage in our modern times is beset right, left, and sideways by unfaithfulness, separation, and divorce.  In a great many cases, multiple-remarriage and divorce.  Why deny same sex couples the right to be as happy as all of us straight couples, since we are all clearly ambassadors of nuptial Utopian living?

In reference to the absolutely staggering amount of propaganda, lies, filth, perversion, stupidity, and insanity directed at women and their right to make choices about their bodies and health (specifically reproductive health) :  Piss off.  I can’t be any more clear than that.  You people are insane.  You are not rational.  You are frankly frightening.  An incredibly astute gentleman once said “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”  Thank you, George Bernard Shaw, for reminding me that you can’t reason with some people.

Yes, I know the last was not a question, but it was certainly a statement I felt needed saying.

I look around and wonder, what on Earth must other countries think of us?  I suspect that if the nations of the world were a family reunion, we would be the inappropriate uncle who wears his underwear outside his pants and speaks in non-sequiturs that make everyone uncomfortable.

Sigh………..

Pro-Choice As Defined By Sarah Jane……

I have had it.  No more tippy, tippy toeing around, folks.

I have been holding off on making any public Facebook posts about the pro-choice issue because it was one of the last couple of areas I hadn’t caught H-E-double hockey sticks for from my family.  Yesterday, though, I got a lovely (not really) private message from my annoyingly holier-than-pretty-much-everybody cousin accusing me of being an Atheist and wanting to know what went wrong.  I kid you not.

You know why?  Because I have steadfastly refused to repost anything from that embarrassment to our state Mike Huckabee’s public statements.  Because I do NOT support Chick-Fil-A.  Because I have shouted loud and long about the evils of legislation intermixing with religion.  I’ll tell you what went wrong, ma’am.  Religious fanatics have been trying to overtake our government and turn it into Nehemiah Scudder-ville.  I don’t want to live in Scudder-ville.  Arkansas is bad enough.

I refuse to skirt the issues anymore.  Y’all thought I was outspoken before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

So there.

We now return to regular programming, already in progress………………….

(thank you to Liberal Hippie Nerd from whom I reposted the graphic on my Facebook feed.  It’s a great page, check it out.)

Does A Non-Deed Count As A Good Deed?

So Chik-Fil-A has reportedly taken the bold step of ceasing financial support to hate groups.  11 Alive posed the question ‘Do you think this helps or hurts the Atlanta company?’

Hmmm.  Don’t need to think long or hard about that, at least not in regards to whether the purveyors of intolerant chicken rise or fall in my estimation in light of this new information.

All this does is put them back at the square one of not doing anything intentionally harmful or discriminatory.  So after all this controversy, the best they can apparently manage is to do nothing at all.  Well, I’ll take nothing at all over the knowledge that they actively finance hate groups and dogmatically driven legislation, but it would be nice to see them take a further step and join the ranks of those who are actually trying to do something positive.

So…….it won’t hurt them, but I see no reason why it should help them, either.

Gee, Guys, I don’t Know……..

Okay, the sad thing here is that they actually do believe they are being persecuted and unfairly labeled as a hate group.  The level of blindness in operation here simply staggers me.

Umm…..if you stopped yelling at the top of your voices about all the things you hate, perhaps we would stop ‘attacking’ you with the truth.

 

*picture taken from the Facebook page of The Equality Mantra.

Oh, Yay, Another Ramble On Tolerance………

A word on values, tolerance, and our ever vanishing civil liberties.

I do not care what personal belief system anyone subscribes to, except at the point that it begins to attack or infringe on what I consider to be personal liberties.  Any ideology that endorses and promotes intolerance or repression is unacceptable to me.  Prior to that line in the sand, I love the prerogative of the denizens of this country to pursue their faith and beliefs.  It is a great and beautiful thing.  Unfortunately I see far, far too many instances of personal faith and ideals becoming public faith and ideals.  If you really feel that you must forcibly shoehorn every person you meet by sanctions and legislation into whatever odd shaped cubbyhole your religion happens to reside in……..perhaps you should go home, sit down, and really, really think about your own value system.  I think you may have diagnosed the problem correctly, but completely missed the actual source.

I have friends who are gay.  I have family members who are gay.  I worked with folks who are gay.  I find, increasingly, as time goes on, that I am putting that out there in my discussions of tolerance.  Why is that, exactly?  How is it that a narrow minded and fearful section of our society can force us to make such statements as if they matter?  It shouldn’t matter.  No more so than the fact that I have family, friends, and acquaintances with brown hair, or blue eyes, or who like jazz.  The only reason it even has to be repetitively brought to the forefront is that nobody is trying to criminalize, marginalize, penalize, attack, or shame anyone based on their hair color, eye color, or musical taste.

It’s a damn shame that such basic personal freedoms have to be dragged out into the public forum, like laundry on the line.  I want to believe, and I really do believe, that someday down the road nobody will even think to ask if so-and-so is gay, because it won’t matter.

As it should be.

Then we can begin to focus on things that actually matter, such as sustainability of fuel and food, the economy, and so forth.

Yep, that’ll be awesome.

In the meantime, we must yell loud and proud in defense of ourselves and our loved ones.  In defense of those we don’t know.  In defense of those we don’t particularly like. In defense of everyone.  Change never happens because of apathy or inertia.  Someone, somewhere, has to get up and start kicking over the conservative dominoes.