Shame
Today
the House Republicans passed a bill that will kill more Americans than all the
“radical Islamic terrorists’ combined have managed to kill. They passed a bill that will let babies die
at birth – hard to align with that famous ‘pro-life’ stuff isn’t it – and will
shorten the lives of your parents and grandparents. It will send countless families into
bankruptcy and deny women access to basic reproductive health. If you voted Republican, or even if you voted
Independent, you voted for this carnage.
Of all
the preposterous and intellectually incompetent excuses for this action, the
one that galls me the most are the votes cast by Republicans who for decades
have said they are guided by their Christian faith. Is there an 11th commandment that
says we should torture the sick and the old?
Is there something in the Gospels that says that your Christ came here
to make life more painful and sickening?
As much as this vote strips away any pretext of the Republican party as
a moral or humane entity, the most glaring inconsistency is religious. We should spit in the face of the next
Republican evangelical who says anything about God. There is no God in the Republican party.
These
people have acted as if they had some moral superiority granted to them because
they said they were Christian. Today
they proved all of that was a lie, not that it hasn’t been obvious for a
while. This the same party that has said
outrageous and inflammatory things about Islam on a routine basis, almost
always revealing more about their ignorance than anything else. They have babbled on about a ‘clash of
civilization’ between Christians and Muslims, but if their actions today are
any indication, Sharia law would be an improvement.
Religion
isn’t supposed to be part of our politics, but Republicans have propped up
their boldfaced move toward a kleptocracy by always falling back on their
‘religious’ principles. No other group
in our politics have done more to wrap themselves in some phony cloak of moral
certitude. Today, all of that is
officially a lie. They haven’t even seen
the bill. None of them can say with any
clarity or certainty what the ramifications of this repeal are or might be. They have lied about it at every turn (there
goes another commandment that we don’t need any more), and they have
intentionally hurt the people they were elected to serve.
I take
no joy or feel any sense of justice in the fact that the people who follow and
vote for them so blindly will be impacted the most. I would like to think that this will wake
some of them up, but I gave up hoping for that when they voted for Trump. What country takes away protections from its
citizens? What craven band of infidels
can’t see the pain and suffering this will bring? We can organize, protest and vote them out of
office, but the fact that this happened at all is deplorable. I guess Hillary was right.
I think
it’s dangerous to brand any group or religion by the actions of a few, but
today we should ask what Fox News always asks of our Muslim brothers and
sisters: where are the moderate Christians?
Why won’t they stand up against this act of murder and terror? Maybe we are in a struggle with religious
extremists for the soul of the future, but those extremists are not followers
of Islam. They call themselves
Christians and they identify by putting an R after their names.
