On Sep 20, 2006, at 9:02 PM, jdiebremse wrote:
--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Gibson Jonathan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
My problem with this particular situation is a serious lack of
evenhandedness shows deepening flaws. For almost two decades I've
watched conservative politicians court and skirt this set of rules -
especially in the South - and more recently listening to my California
mother in-law recount her pastor advocating first Bob Dole and then
the
GwB tickets with strong admonitions to his flock against the other
candidates {with an amazing amount of vitriol towards Kerry}...
On the other hand, there seems to be a much stronger tradition of
Democratic candidates actually campaigning in Churches, than of
Republicans. Of course, these are in historically African-American
Churches, and for whatever reason it doesn't seem to generate much
outrage every four years.
JDG
Sure. Pot calling the kettle black, heh?
Do the ends really justify the means for so-called Conservatives?
As I stated, both situations are worthy of critical review.
In this particular, as I recall, a huge swath of that ONE B-B-B-BILION
PUBLIC DOLLARS went to black churches. Out of, or into, this mulligan
stew of faith-based emotions, gyrating prejudices, and
our-side-can't-be-wrong... came such lovely testaments to brotherly
love as graphic flyers of a black man on his knees to a white man with
messages about gay marriage - just the thing for retrograde southern
demographics whichever color the audience skin!
Karl Rove was humming over that one.
What has changed over the last few decades is the wholesale intermixing
of the tax-free religious machinery with the monster money raising
juggernauts that stalk the landscape now. The scale alone ought to
give one pause. Not content to rig markets, now the monied are fixing
religion firmly to the civic processes directly - to short-circuit the
basic notion of democratic rule. Churches have had a sheltered tax
life under certain constrictions they are ever-more willing to
transgress. They appear just as power-crazed as the political
operatives they champion. Some would call this tax evasion {what's Pat
Robertson worth now, a $ billion?}, while some call it politics. How
about calling it bankrupt morally and fraud prone?
What we see in this Republican-Christian axis is a fine-tuned
demographic slicing machine geared to shave a few points off my
demographic here, add a few more to yours there, playing into their 50%
+1 vote methodology for winning. In fact, I think if Democrats don't
get off their asses soonest, the Republican savants will win again this
fall. Forget actually governing - it's all about winning. And
carrying big sticks. And don't bother us with the facts because our
minds are made up. One wonders just what contextual frame Rove's gay
father puts all this. Supposedly they get along well - belying his own
church propaganda that gay-ness is incompatible with family. That
"moral" leaders are so willing to glad-hand Karl Rove and the tactics
he embodies makes a mockery of rose-tinted claims to superiority these
churches espouse - and those people outside the stained glass see this
clearly for what it is.
We all lose when a minority rules a majority through chicanery and this
hardly makes for a stable structure.
A big wag of the finger at Americans for sitting still for all this so
long.
Jonathan Gibson
www.formandfunction.com/word
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