The "Values" Voters
For the past week, the media mantra has been to point out the hypocrisy of the “party of family values” when it chose protecting a member of Congress over the protection of teen-age boys. In my opinion, the Republicans became hypocrites long before the Mark Foley affair. Indeed, their hypocrisy dates from the minute they took on the mantel of “the party for the values voters,” and began their cynical pandering to the religious right.Growing up in the South, I have more than a passing acquaintance with religion and core values. I studied religion in high school and college, attended Sunday Schools, taught Sunday Schools, served as director of Children’s Ministries, and sung in a multitude of church choirs. I have attended worship services in Jewish Temples and synagogues, and Christmas Mass at the Catholic National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. I founded my ethical construct on the words of Jesus (Matthew 25: 40) when he commended the righteous for feeding the hungry, ministering to the sick, and clothing the poor: “Inasmuch as you have done to the least of these my brethren, so you have done unto me.”
This Christian ideology is not compatible with the Republican world view, which can be readily summarized as “comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.” Tax cuts designed for the almost exclusive benefit of the ultra rich; opening governmental resources including national parks and forests at bargain rates for corporate profit; energy policies that pile wealth upon obscene wealth into the hands of the oil companies; elimination or ignoring of important safeguards guiding the quality of air, earth and water, as well as food and drugs – this is agenda of the GOP.
As for the social safety net, designed to make sure our most fragile citizens have some measure of protection: the Republicans don’t believe in it. They fought Social Security when it was first proposed, and they would like to eliminate it now. They didn’t like Medicare when it became law, and they have been consistent in their campaign to turn it into a cash cow for pharmaceutical and insurance companies rather than a service for those who are sick and elderly. They hated the Great Society, and have succeeded in unraveling it with amazing thoroughness.
So, how does the party of wealth bring the “Christian” masses into its tent while disavowing Christian ideals at every turn? It appeals to values, such as war, torture, guns, illegal surveillance, and an abandonment of the ideals of tolerance and respect for those who may disagree with them, or are of a different race, religion or ethnicity. I am not exaggerating in the least. A letter to the editor in our local paper blasted the Democrats as the party that is “pro-murder and pro-gun control” (an interesting combination, harking back to the “liberal” position that Terry Schaivo had a right to die). Leaders of the Christian right lectured Congress, warning that a failure to pass a pro-torture bill would have serious repercussions in the mid-term election. The 700-mile barricade between the US and Mexico is a sop to the right-wing, which labels almost all Hispanics as illegal immigrants (although it appears that a sop is all it is, and it won’t be built). How they justify these positions as being godly is a bit of a mystery. Certainly they aren’t taking their texts from the four Gospels. But as long as the Republicans push for war and guns, and chip away at science, education, and women's reproductive rights, including the right to contraception, they have the radical Christians in their pocket.
A party that openly proclaims its only ideals as the maintenance of power along with access to the public treasury will naturally react to a report of a representative’s illicit correspondence with minors as a political problem only. The only hypocrisy is to pretend that anything else matters. The only shock is that they have finally found an issue in which the Christian right isn’t completely comfortable in cheerleading on their behalf.
posted by Lenore Wilson @ 1:22 AM
1 Comments:
Hello Lenore and all,
Very good article! Keep their feet to the fire until the blind and deaf Republican thralls finally open their eyes to the truth and understand the true extent of their strong delusion and great folly!
If Christian political leaders are going to go around attacking others for not living up to their professed values, it's a damn good idea to be truthful and actually walk the walk. Logs and motes in the eye, camels through the eye of a needle, glass houses, kettles and pots, and what goes around comes around, et al. Karma's a bitch when She finally decides enough is enough! This wouldn't have been so bad on Republicans if they hadn't been such arrogant hypocrites in order to corner the so-called values voters! Now the Two Candlesticks and Two Witnesses (Truth and Justice) are "breathing fire" and "raining hailstones!"
Christian Political Leadership, Hypocrisy, Duplicity, and Purposeful Evil
The current scandal involving Congressman Foley is merely the latest in an amazingly long list of blatant deception and duplicity by Republicans and the Christian Right in recent years. While bedeviling us all with their holier-than-thou pretenses, they consistently support and/or perform blatant greed and abominable evil. Never forget the extent of their arrogance over the last two decades and especially the last 6 years. It is beyond amazing that Christians continue to blindly support such obviously blatant scoundrels, even as they are repeatedly exposed going against the most basic of human values. The level of hypocrisy and duplicity boggles the mind. There is no longer any doubt, whatsoever, that Christianity is little more than a purposeful deception used by political and religious leaders to dupe, manipulate, and coerce entire populations into giving them wealth and power, which they always use for greed, injustice, and abominable evils.
The actions of Foley and those who covered up for him directly parallel the actions of scores of priests that have raped innocent children, preyed upon others for centuries, and had their actions hidden and abetted by the Vatican. Now, in eerie repetition of Vatican history, we have a power hungry Christian Emperor (GW) working closely with the Vatican and Judeo-Christian aristocrats to lead crusades in the so-called Holy Land. Furthermore, to leave little doubt about the reality of this assessment, the USA, as the new Holy Roman Empire, is about to legalize the torture it has perpetrated in recent years while steadily reversing many of the democratic and civil freedoms that people gained when the Vatican and royalty lost control of their European empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. Now we see them following the same old path of evil as they strive to cement the status of the USA as the latest proxy Vatican empire. Make no mistake about it, the new dark ages are looming on the horizon unless we do something proactive to prevent it.
Remember that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it!
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Here is Wisdom !!
Peace...
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