For the most part the very people who want to regulate our personal lives by passing laws based on their religion and posting the Ten Commandments in public places like state capitols, school buildings, and court houses are the very same people who object to regulations that are meant to keep us safe from corporate greed.
Michael Phelps stood on the winners’ podium with his hand on his heart, and started laughing.
Not grinning.
Laughing.
And the American public saw nothing indecorous or disrespectful in his laughing during the National Anthem, but did wonder what he was laughing at. It was as if they wanted to join in on the joke and perhaps laugh as well.
But you see, he had just won a medal and was just so giddy about it. He was like a little boy, a big 31 year old little boy.
After some United States Olympians peed in some bushes behind a Rio gas station Ryan Lochte did some minor vandalism by kicking down the door and urinating on the bathroom floor. Station security demanded the Americans leave the taxi cab they had walked swiftly to, obviously intending to leave the scene, and pay for the damage.
Two of the Americans gave about $50 for restitution while Lochte didn’t hand over any of his money.
He did however repeat the story that he and three fellow American athletes were pulled out of a taxi by men pretending to be police and were robbed at gun point.
When the facts began to come out his explanation became,
“Whether you call it a robbery ( it wasn’t), whether you call it extortion (it wasn’t), or us paying just for the damages ( it was, but without his inclusive “we”), like, we don’t know. All we know is that there was a gun pointed in our direction and we were demanded to give money.”
Lochte is a 32 year old man who lied, and then left his team mates behind in Rio to face the law, while he returned to the United States, untouchable.
But, hey, boys will be boys, and people are actually defending him as just having gotten a little tipsy and causing a little mischief while representing the people of the United States.
When Ryan Crouser and Joe Kovaks, who won the Gold and Silver in the shot put, stood on the winners’ podium during the National Anthem, they stood with their arms at their sides.
They had just won medals. They were probably proud to have successfully represented the United Sates, and stood respectfully.
Crouse is 24 yrs old and Kovaks is 27, so they are just two giddy boys who were just so thrilled, and knowing this, there was no uproar about their hands not being placed over their hearts. Give them some room.
When the U.S. women’s gymnastics squad took first place in the overall team competition in Rio, the first time a U.S. women’s team has won gold at two consecutive Olympics, Gabby Douglas, 20 years old, stood respectfully on the winners’ podium with her hands by her side, and she was slammed by people who saw her not only as disrespecting the United States, but misrepresenting the American people.
A 31 year old adult male is a boy being a boy. A 32 year old adult male was just forgivably giddy about his medal. Two burly shot putters one 24 and the other 27, are good guys whose respectful stance on the podium was acceptable.
A 20 year old woman, however, is a disgrace.
It just can’t be the woman thing. Perhaps there is something else I am overlooking.
I will avoid the laundry list of those times conservative religious leaders have claimed that God will destroy certain areas with natural disasters because they do not discriminate against Gay people, only to have the places where these religious leaders have their headquarters hit by those predicted disasters.
The most recent and vocal prophet of other people’s doom is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council who famously blamed the Boston Marathon bombing on “abortion, family breakdown, sexual liberalism, [and] religious hostility.”
He is one of hose who claims after the fact that something that goes wrong is a punishment from a God who seems to suffer from a case of really bad aim, and it would appear it has happen again.
One of the consequences of the recent flooding in Louisiana is that the home of Tony Perkins was hit by the flood waters, and he and his family had to evacuate by canoe.
Something tells me that in this case he will explain it as merely a natural disaster and not some punishment from God unlike all the other natural disasters.
Or, he has a secret sin that he just will not tell us about.
It wasn’t as hot and humid as it has been up here in the North East, but it was hot enough if you had to march the full length of Commercial Street in Provincetown, Massachusetts for the annual Pride Parade.
Most know that the Pride Parades all over the country and across the world celebrate the events of June, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village that were pivotal in the civil rights struggle for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Americans.
And now this past June, June 24 to be precise, President Barack Obama designated the section of the neighborhood around the bar, the approximately 7.7 acres that include the Stonewall Inn, the historic Christopher Park, and surrounding streets and sidewalk, as a national monument, the first to honor the history of the GLBT community in the United States.
So this year rangers of the National Seashore on Cape Cod took part in the Provincetown Pride Parade.
They included in their entry Veterans and Friends of the Stonewall Rebellion, among them David Bermudez who was in the bar at the time of the raid, Bob Isadore his spouse since the first year of Marriage Equality in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, having been married on the anniversary of the rebellion and who have been a couple for around 42 years, and yours truly.
For nostalgia and a tribute to my friends who have fought and continue to fight for equality in Oklahoma, I wore the pride rings I wore everyday of my 17 years as a teacher in Oklahoma City.
As an extra bonus, this year is the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the National Park Service, and we marched with the Regional Supervisor whose district includes The National Sea Shore and the New Bedford Whaling National Park in the center of which stands the New Bedford Whaling museum where I do my three times a week volunteer work of whaling ship log transcription, teaching a cartooning class, and being a wandering question “answerer”.
She is not the one in pink.
I will confess that I carried the banner for most of the parade, but handed it off to a younger man, and finished the parade sitting in the air conditioned cab of the NPS utility pickup truck waving to the crowd from the open window.
The rangers from the NPS had a great time, and those of us used to such events were thrilled that they not only had a great time, but were really glad they had been involved in this historic event.
These are the steps presently followed when a refugee wants to enter the United States:
The hopeful refugee must first register with the United Nation, and then have an interview. If the applicant then gets refugee status they must then get a referral to the United States which results in an interview with the State Department.
This is followed by three background checks, and three finger printings, obviously not all at one time.
The applicant is then interviewed by the Immigration Department which could result in repeating any or all previous steps.
If the applicant passes a Homeland Security face-to-face interview, they move on to a contagious disease screening and cultural orientation.
The applicant is then assigned to the best available location in which to live.
After a multi-agency review and security check, they are allowed to come to the United States where they are given one more security check at the airport or other point of entry upon arrival.
If they fail any step, they lose their status and chance for entry.
You will notice that the majority of the vetting takes place BEFORE coming to the United States.
Trump says he wants a stricter vetting procedure, but, as with all his plans, he avoids citing specifics.
In this case by saying nothing, he leads those easily influenced to believe that refugees are just allowed unvetted entry.
It could also be that he does not know what the process presently entails, and is just saying what he knows will frighten people.
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When introducing Donald Trump in Youngstown, Ohio on Monday, Rudolph Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York city on September 11, 2001, declared
“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”
Apparently he forgot all those speeches he makes when he just can’t avoid mentioning his successful handling of the events and the days after 9/11.
Oddly the man he was introducing had stated back in October,
“Do I blame George Bush? I only say that he was the president at the time, and you know, you could say the buck stops here.”
Maybe these two should get together and review history so they are both on the same page.
But then, again, we have seen President Obama blamed by Republicans for a bad response to Hurricane Katrina 4 years before he became president, and his having been the one who sent troops into Afghanistan, again before he was in the White House.
Realizing with his numbers slipping, Donald Trump has found a way to explain to himself, anyway, how things will go in November and why.
As far as God, church, and religion go in his political aspirations, Donald Trump has declared,
“I don’t bring God into that picture — I don’t”.
And as far as church attendance, he claims he attends “always on Christmas, always on Easter, always when there’s a major occasion.”
And in spite of the bible usually speaking against it, Donald exhibits a lot of pride and hubris while exalting himself.
Michael Gerson, in a Washington Post piece, explained,
Evangelicals “are identifying with a man who has fed ethnic tension for political gain; who has proposed systemic religious discrimination; who has dramatically undermined the democratic values of civility and tolerance; who has advocated war crimes, including killing the families of terrorists; who holds a highly sexualized view of power as dominance, rather than seeing power as an instrument to advance moral ends.
…many are preaching a type of utilitarianism — a distasteful offering of incense to the emperor for the sake of the greater good. But in lowering the sights of Christian political involvement, they are no longer serving a faith where “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” They are dishonoring that ideal before a watching nation.”
After years of claiming the high road and claiming they are the better people, they have sat down in the gutter, and that brings into question everything they have been saying when it comes to the morality, or lack of it, of everyone else.
Their claim might be that the only other choice is Hillary, someone they think is not trustworthy, but Trump had to first face his opponents in the primaries who were far more religious than he was.
It would seem that in spite of their claims of religiosity and their willingness to use it as a club against people they do not like, they could easily abandon it for a three time married divorcee who bragged about his womanizing and adultery, and who espoused his support of such things as abortion and Gay Rights, until he saw opposing them got more cheers.
Whatever credibility Evangelicals had remains only among themselves as the majority of those observing them see how quickly they threw away their religious principles to back a man who violates the Bible on a regular and loud basis.
From this time on, they may claim that their faith is all important and influences their lives, but that will be a hard sell now that we have seen how easily they turned their backs on it to make Trump their preferred candidate in the primaries and now for the presidency.
“Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him” (Prov. 29:20).
The other day a veteran, who served during the Don’t Ask/Don’t tell days and doesn’t seem to grasp the nature of her “offense” while serving and how it could have been handled to her disadvantage, and for that reason sees no great value to the repeal of that law, was explaining why she was voting for Trump as opposed Hillary.
In previous conversations where she claimed Hillary Clinton was dishonest and untrustworthy she was unable to present one supported reason to come to that conclusion, and even though she claimed Trump was better for the GLBT Community, could not come up with on piece of evidence that would support that claim.
Her main reason for her choice of candidate this time was that as a gun owner she could not quietly accept that someone was coming to take her guns, but could not explain why, after 7 years of hearing Obama intended to do that, she still had her guns.
Brushing that information aside, she declared that her opposition to Hilary was that she was going to do away with the Second Amendment.
I asked her if she loved her country, and, of course, she insisted she did as evidenced by her having served it in uniform.
I asked if part of what she did was to defend the Constitution, and, of course, it was.
But when I continued that it would stand to reason that if she was defending the Constitution, and not just the idea of it, she should have a pretty good knowledge of what it contained and what she had been actually defending, she could not tell me what the method for changing the Constitution, whether through amendment of repeal, was contained in the document.
She obviously was unaware that she had defended a concept with a catchy name, but not the substance of it.
She was like those people who, while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance are actually unaware that they are not really pledging allegiance to the flag itself, but to the country it represents.
She protested when I explained the Constitutional process, claiming that was not how it was, even though she had just admitted she did not know the section of the Constitution that enumerated the steps for amendment or repeal.
She also could not explain how a president could unilaterally change the document or how members of the Supreme Court could do so since they are not part of the process that is reserved to the House, Senate, the legislatures of the states, and their governors.
So, in case anyone comes at you with the claim that Hillary will do away with the Second Amendment while Trump, by his own claims, will not, explain the process to them.
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