Playing With Your Food...and Other Things Your Mother Told You Would Make You Blind

I have wanted to use that title for a week and could not come up with a coherent post to follow such an auspicious beginning. Not that this one is worthy, I just gave up trying so hard.

I have a Howard Dean topic I really want to cover, but have not had time to do the necessary research (the time I put into these posts would astound you, not that you can tell the difference). So he must wait another day.

And if you haven't heard, the Senate reached an agreement on judicial nominees and the filibuster, but I'm not ready to weigh in on that one either. I need time to sort out my mixed feelings.

Have you heard the one about Daniel Okrent's final column as the NYTimes ombudsman. He titled it something like 13 Things I Intended to Write Stupid Made-up Stuff About But Didn't. In it he takes a last few unsubstantiated swipes at Paul Krugman again, just because he could. And I would just like to say I think Okrent is an asswipe, just because I can. God, that felt good, but it's not what I'm posting tonight either, just gratuitous snarking.

Like Okrent I have something I haven't written about, but in my case it has been deliberate. I'm a Christian. Bubba, my host at this site, hates Jesus. No, just kidding, he's mostly agnostic, but I have tried to be a good guest and not talk about religion much. Didn't our mothers tell us not to discuss religion or politics in polite conversation.

On Tom Tomorrow's site read the posts date May 19th, called Take Back Jesus and Onward Christian Soldiers. The first chastises Democratic Christians for allowing themselves to be marginalized by the conservative Christian right. How different would the last two elections have been if liberal Christians spoke out about their faith with the same passion and willingness that the fundamentalist do? Why don't we? Because our religion is one of compassion, openness & acceptance. We do not prostilitize or condemn those who believe differently. In our commitment not to judge, we have been judged, and been found wanting. By not casting the first stone, we have been stone into submission.

Onward Christian Soldiers tells the cautionary tale of allowing the conservative Christian right to continue on their present course, because it is the way of Totalatarianism and Fascism. Like Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, when people are blinded by the utopian promises of the right, critics are silent for too long, and power, the ultimate aphrodisiac, becomes it own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Pilgrims were a Christian minority in England and on the European continent. They came to the New World to live and worship in peace. Our Constitution was written be men who wanted this country to be free of the kind of omnipotent power so desired by the fundamentalist element in the GOP. People of faith whose religion and politics are both currently in the minority should carry on the work of the founding fathers and speak out about their beliefs and their fears for this country, before we are again forced to find a new place to call home.