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 11^th 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.