I Give Up

I have tried to soft pedal stuff that could slide into partisan politics, but it is almost impossible to avoid. The web is already full of extremist rantings that reflect what is going on in the political arena. I don't intend this to add to that, but it is possible that someone reading this might take issue with some of what I have to say. So the caveat is that this is just my view and you are entitled to yours. It probably isn't necessary to degenerate into brick throwing.

So here's the deal as I see it.

The last three Republican candidates standing are members of a religion that once ruled the known world or of one with ambitions to rule it. Both of these institutions routinely weigh in on issues of interest to and decisions about things made by people who are not part of their churches.

So basically they are trying to impose their doctrine on non-believers. [Before you start screaming about Sharia, yes, fundamentalist Muslims do it too.]

Get this straight. These people want to take away the religious freedom of non-believers all in the name of "freedom of religion." Am I missing something here? I think not, but correct me if I am. The intersection of doctrine and public policy is an ugly zone, getting uglier by the minute. My only hope is that it gets so ugly that people will see how screwed up it is and walk away from the yahoos.

A couple of observations. One of the candidates "defending traditional marriage" has had three wives (and he's not the Mormon one) and ended each of the first two while he carried on an affair with the next. He should have taken a page from Joseph Smith who rewrote doctrine handed down from on high to justify his own baser desires to have relationships outside of his marriage, His church still spawns sects that encourage old men to take teenage wives and drive young men out of their supposedly loving families.

My guess is that the Catholic Church probably spent more money to defeat same sex marriage in California than it spent world-wide trying to root out the institutionalized abuse of children that went on behind its walls.

Can you spell hypocrisy?

This is getting personal for me. Washington State has a death with dignity law that protects people's right to decline treatment and even to obtain palliative termination if there is nothing facing them except months of deterioration and pain.

I have a medical directive that no "heroic measures" be taken. I make sure I have a copy with me on the few occasions I have been treated at a hospital. I want no instances of "we didn't have it in the file." Just recently my health care system acquired another one in a merger. The new one is Catholic Church affiliated. There have already been stories of how people have been denied information about their rights because it conflicts with religious doctrine.

So what the [bleep] about MY religious freedom?

Screw the rest of us as long as you can use visceral religious issues to mobilize the base to get that uppity [insert racist epithet] out of the White House.

Sigh....