At The End of the Day

It’s astonishing how many people are angered by the truth and how few by deceit.

You would think this is about equal rights for gays and lesbians. You would be wrong.

Here’s why this is important – even dangerous. For over 40 years the religious right has sought to take over the Constitution and the United States government – locality by locality, state by state. Their goal? To destroy what America’s founders created and replace it with a theocracy: to impose their narrow religious dogma on everybody by amending the Constitution and demolishing the Bill of Rights.

They believe they are close to achieving their goals. You’d better believe it too.

On Monday, June 5^th, today, President Bush addressed the nation on the “importance” of amending our Constitution to satisfy the religious right and disenfranchise over 30 million American men, women and children by passing the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA).

The blatant hypocrisy behind Bush’s speech is found in Newsweek’s June 12^th edition – “One of his old friends told NEWSWEEK that same-sex marriage barely registers on the president's moral radar. ‘I think it was purely political. I don't think he gives a s--t about it. He never talks about this stuff,’ said the friend, who requested anonymity to discuss his private conversations with Bush.”

Or the LA. Times editorial headline, June 5^th: “Gay Marriage Vote Serves Only to Divide Nation.”

So successful is the religious right’s relentless campaign of intimidation that you already face quite real threats if you say you believe all Americans are entitled to equal civil rights (including marriage) under the Constitution. You risk loss of job and income (and therefore your home, your children’s education funds), ostracism from friends and family and community, harassment, threats, intimidation, even violence.

Free speech exists only in theory in many parts of the country, particularly in the Bible Belt. You can suffer heavy penalties for exercising that supposed freedom.

Most of The Hall Monitor’s friends are Christians – loving, caring non-bigots. They struggle with issues like equal rights for gays and lesbians or women’s right to determine their own medical choices. But they are not seeking to demonize over 30 million American men, women and children by writing hate into the Constitution. The religious right is to Christianity what the Taliban is to Islam.

Who are the religious right? Certainly not most Christians or Jews. They are, rather, the estimated (Pew and Gallup polls) 23% of America’s 80% who say they are religious. They are fundamentalists who call themselves Evangelicals. When you include the 20% of Americans who are non-religious, the religious right represents less than 20% of America. But they are determined to use any means necessary to force their narrow minority religious views on the other 80%.

Some within the religious right already publicly advocate rounding up gays and lesbians and isolating them in concentration camps. Yes, seriously. Some preach extermination. Yes, seriously.

To America’s 30+ million gays, lesbians and gay children add America’s roughly 150 million women, whose wombs the government of the religious right seeks to own and control. Not for any valid scientific reasons: solely on the basis of their narrow and rigid dogma. In much of this country, they already DO control women’s wombs, despite laws on the books ostensibly protecting rights of privacy and self-determination of medical procedures.

If you’re an impoverished 12 year old black girl in Mississippi whose uncle rapes and impregnates you, you can’t afford travel expenses to the one remaining clinic in that state which still provides abortions (after decades of threats and violence from the religious right have shut down the other providers). You can’t afford the $300 or so for the procedure, plus a few days’ stay in a motel for follow up visits to the physician to ensure your health and safety, plus meals. The religious right has successfully ended any chances for any kind of life for you, at age 12, and the baby you are forced to carry to term and deliver. You and your baby have been consigned to perpetuate lives of devastating poverty and tragedy.

Solely because of the accident of the place of your birth, your race, your geography and your economic class.

That's what the religious right thinks about poor black girls in the Bible Belt. Worse, that's what the religious right teaches that God thinks about poor black girls in the Bible Belt. As if the Creator of the Universe and All That Is condemns an impoverished 12-year-old girl and her child-of-rape to a life of oppressive tragedy as human beings, through no fault of the girl's.

If you’re middle class or better, especially if you're white, and have the funds, you are better able to find a physician to administer the procedure, though it still can be difficult in Mississippi and many other states where threats, violence and murders have curtailed medical providers.

In other words, the religious right's anti-abortion stance is not-so-subtly racist, sexist and classist, in the name of God.

The reality for women in many parts of America is that the state owns your womb unless you can pay to get it back. The religious right wants to make it a felony for you and your physician to exercise your own private medical choices if they concern your uterus.

Or take this real case from Oklahoma, 2006 A.D. Two gay men, together 26 years, ranched quietly on property owned by one of them. They were unable to afford the thousands of dollars in legal fees necessary to secure the same property and inheritance rights granted to heterosexual couples for a $30 marriage license. When one died last year, his family (his legal property heirs) swooped in and successfully evicted his lifelong partner, leaving him with nothing to show for a lifetime of faithful love . . . but homelessness.

Multiply such tragedies as the Mississippi girl or the Oklahoma men by millions to get some idea of the power already exerted by the religious right in America. Realize they’re not about to stop until they’ve stripped our Constitution and Bill of Rights of all legitimacy. In other words, they won’t stop until they turn democracy into a theocracy.

Praise Jesus? Hardly.

Jesus never said a word about abortion. Nor a word about sex – hetero-, homo- or in-between-o.

Now let’s go global.

As cited earlier this year by scientists around the world, including the President of the Royal Society of England (the world’s oldest continuing scientific body), the Vatican’s anti-condom distribution policy in Africa will be directly responsible for between 20-60 million deaths in Africa from AIDS.

Further, Vatican spokesman Cardinal Trujillo continues to publicly lie that latex condoms are permeable to the HIV virus. In fact they are not. Condoms are, in fact, the single most effective method of preventing infection from HIV.

Why lie? Preserving religious dogma is more important than truth, more important than saving human lives.

If the Vatican’s forceful stance against condom distribution were taking place in America, the outcry would be deafening. But it’s not. It’s taking place on the other side of the world and affects mostly black people.

These are all facts. But the religious right doesn’t want you to know facts. They don’t want you to know the medical and scientific truths about abortion or homosexuality or stem-cell research or condoms or evolution or global warming or any other facts that challenge their vengeful theocracy. They want, like the Taliban, to force you to submit.

So they’re going after the Constitution with the FMA President Bush supported today.

The policy of the religious right, absent facts to counter people who actually have facts, is to condemn truth-tellers with ad hominem attacks – name-calling, ridiculing, dismissing, bullying, even threats of physical violence.

The "facts" presented by religious right organizations like Focus on the Family are lies promoted by well-paid faith-based “scientists” like Paul Cameron, whose methods led to his being ousted from the American Psychological Association. Their favored method is to misrepresent ideology as science.

There is not a single reputable scientific study that shows any harm whatever in children being raised in same-sex households: only the religious-based pseudo-scientific “studies” promulgated by the haters who trump up false evidence to support their foregone agendas.

Using the oldest trick in the book, the religious right demonizes anybody who disagrees with them. Their opponents are “godless,” “heretics,” “blasphemers,” “evil.” The religious right alone is godly.

In madrassas around the world, including America, mullahs teach that Christians and Jews are apes and pigs, infidels and kafir. Islam too has its religious right.

Pope Benedict (formerly Cardinal Ratzinger), author of the infamous “homosexuality is an intrinsic moral evil” statement, ignores the scientific fact that homosexuality occurs throughout nature. Far from being "unnatural," it is ubiquitous. Over 450 species not only practice homosexuality but also enjoy lifelong same-sex relationships – including elephants, whales, giraffes, penguins, apes, etc. All that and more is conclusively documented in works like Dr. Bruce Bagemihl’s “Biological Exuberance.” Bagemihl even explains the evolutionary role homosexuality plays. The religious right hopes you know none of that, however. They'd rather you believe in “evil” elephants, whales, giraffes, etc. Believe the lie, not the truth.

Which brings me to the point some make that the PBHS Class of ’62 website is NOT the forum for this discussion. Or that it “offends” people. Or, worse, isn’t “nice.”

Considering what’s at stake in this country – namely the survival of democracy, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the carefully considered and written foundations of our historic country, there isn’t a forum ANYWHERE that’s inappropriate for this discussion.

Straight or gay, male or female, young or old, religious or not, there is not a single life in this country that isn’t currently threatened by the religious right’s dangerous onslaught against America’s very existence.

It’s not just important to tell the truth about it: it’s essential.

Daily, the religious right “offends” the four-fifths of Americans who disagree with them. Why is it then “offensive” to tell the truth about them, here or anywhere else?

They utterly disrespect the vast majority of Americans by ceaselessly demonizing those who challenge them with truths and facts that expose their dogmatic lies. Why is it incumbent on anybody to show them the “respect” they deny four-fifths of the citizenry? Do you respect Hitler's anti-semitic Thousand Year Reich because he couched it Catholicism?

No.

Is it “nice” of an extremist, indeed terrorist, religious minority to viciously undermine our Constitution by placing “activist judges” on the Supreme Court? Yet somehow NOT “nice” to talk about it?

Think using that fine old Anglo-Saxon expression, “fuck,” to stir controversy and provoke thought is more upsetting than 20-60 million deaths from religious dogma?

Then a priority check is in order.

Will “faith-based” (as opposed to reality-based) justices rule in favor of Constitutional equality for all Americans? Or turn America into a theocracy with decision after decision enforcing religious right dogma?

[UPDATE: The five-man activist Catholic majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in April 2007, none of whom are physicians, made it illegal for physicians to perform medically rare but necessary, for varied and tragic reasons, late-term abortions. Religious dogma over medical science, once again. These heart-rending medical procedures (for all involved) are so rare that they comprise LESS than one-percent of annual legal abortions performed in this country. Five Catholic males on the Supreme Court, with no medical eduation, have made that devastating personal, medical and spiritual choice for everybody, for years to come, legislating their religious dogma.]

Praise the Lord, incidentally, for “activist” Supreme Court justices who on June 12, 1967, in Loving vs. Virginia, finally made interracial marriage legal by acting against the hateful and bigoted – and religiously based – “will of the people.”

That’s why separation of church and state was deliberately built into the Constitution, despite the lies of the religious right: to protect us from becoming the theocratic hell-holes that characterize Islamic countries.

Turns out this June is even more important than that June. Then, they weren't trying to amend the Constitution.

Telling the truth here or anywhere is “offensive?” No. Condemning millions to death through religious lies about condoms? THAT is offensive. And immoral.

Shoot the messengers all you like. Facts remain.

The earth orbits the sun, not the other way around, though it took the Vatican 350 years to admit Galileo was right and the Church was wrong.

Speaking of facts, here are the results of the latest Gallup Poll (June 5^{th, 2006}), same day as the President’s speech promoting the FMA.

Gallup asked 1,003 Americans to say -- without any prompting from pollsters -- what should be the "top priority for the president and Congress to deal with." Here is the complete tally of responses:

Situation in Iraq/war: 42 percent.

Fuel/oil prices/lack of energy sources/the energy crisis: 29 percent.

Immigration/illegal aliens: 23 percent.

Economy in general: 14 percent.

Poor healthcare/hospitals; high cost of healthcare: 12 percent.

Terrorism: 4 percent.

Education/poor education/access to education: 4 percent.

Federal budget deficit/federal debt: 3 percent.

Unemployment/jobs: 3 percent.

Taxes: 3 percent.

Social Security: 2 percent.

International issues/problems: 2 percent.

National security: 2 percent.

Environment/pollution: 2 percent.

Medicare: 2 percent.

Foreign aid/focus overseas: 2 percent.

Poor leadership/corruption/dissatisfaction with government/ Congress/politicians/candidates: 2 percent.

Poverty/ hunger/ homelessness: 1 percent.

Ethics/moral/religious/family decline; dishonesty; lack of integrity: 1 percent.

Natural disaster relief/funding: 1 percent.

Trade deficit/foreign trade: 1 percent.

High cost of living/inflation: 1 percent.

Unifying the country: Less than .5 percent.

Judicial system/courts/laws: Less than .5 percent.

Abortion: Less than .5 percent

Lack of money: Less than .5 percent.

Gap between rich and poor: Less than .5 percent.

Other: 1 percent.

No opinion: 4 percent.

Where is the push for a Constitutional amendment to stop homosexuals from getting married? Nowhere in this unbiased poll. Nowhere.

The important questions are not why one deliberately chooses four-letter words to puncture hypocrisy and attract attention, or what venues are "appropriate" for telling the truth.

The important questions are how, and why, the religious right minority has risen so far in their drive to amend our Constitution to reflect their fear, ignorance, hate and bigotry?

At the end of the day, each of us can look back and say we lovingly tried to give our best to humanity through our actions and the groups we supported; that we spoke against ignorance, bigotry and intolerance; that we were a witness for truth.

Or not.

That’s what’s at stake for each of us, at the end of the day.

To lie or tell the truth.

That, at the end of the day, is what’s at stake for America.

So, with all the respect due them, and all the eloquence at my command, “Fuck the religious right.”