These Truths I Hold: part 3

These truths I hold to be self-evident, in no particular order: Part 3:

50.  Atheism rocks.
51.  Believing in something just because it "feels" good or right or comfortable is not enough of a reason to believe.
52.  Believing in something just because others believe in it is not enough of a reason to believe.
53.  Evidence, evidence, evidence.
54.  Which god?
55.  Which collection of literature?
56.  Rewriting history does not change what actually happened.
57.  Science saves lives.
58.  Funny how I didn't spot the unicorn in Isaiah when I was a fundy.  I was willing to deal with a talking snake and a talking donkey.  I don't know what I would have done with a unicorn.
59.  Evolution is not something to believe in.  It is something that you accept or reject totally or in part.  There is a common misuse of the word "theory" as in "only a theory" when the word "theorem" might be better suited.

60.  Homosexuality does occur in nature.  Ask any farmer who has had experience with a bull that turned out to be homosexual.
61.  Strawberry plants, blue-green lizards in Arizona.
62.  Adults can be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual.  Sexuality is fluid, not static.
63.  Insisting that "we are born that way" cheapens the fight for civil rights for all civilians.  Some folks may have been "born that way" but we do not really know yet what makes people straight or not straight.  It's a science thang, not a morality/sinner thang.
64.  Adults can identify as male, female, androgenous.  It's called gender identification and it too is not a morality/sinner thang.
65.  Some babies are born with an intersexed state-- which means they may have the genitalia of both sexes present at birth.  
66.  Babies who have A.I.S. [Androgen Insufficiency Syndrome] are genetically male.  Because their bodies do not respond to androgen, they are by necessity raised as female.  100% of A.I.S. female adults are either bisexual or lesbian.
67.  Transfolks who take hormones in the process of correcting their gender to correlate with their perceived gender will sometimes have an un-looked for change in sexual orientation.  The basis for wanting what is referred to as a "sex change" in the vernacular is NOT sexual orientation, as was commonly supposed in the sixties and is still supposed in some circles now.  A genetically male transfolk who is attracted to women may find that she is attracted to men, or both women and men after she begins hormone treatments. 
68.  The majority of cross-dressers [who are not interested in "correcting their gender"] are heterosexual males.
69.  I am not interested in being "tolerated," "toleration", or "tolerance."  If you cannot celebrate me for who I am and I cannot celebrate you for who you are, then it might be wiser for each of us to not engage each other.  Celebrate Diversity.

sapphoq itching for a coffee says:  Whether or not the United States was started as a Christian nation, we are now multi-cultural.  As a nation of many peoples and cultures and backgrounds, we are not all fundamentalist Christians.  Religion ought not dictate politics.  The public arena should remain secular-- including city, state, county, and national government; public schools [if you want your kids to pray in school then please send them to a religious school of your choosing...]; federal lands; courtrooms; any place that accepts public funding should be bound by secular public laws.  The laws that govern us all should not enslave us.  Not all of us are believers.  Even among believers there are differences.  Please get out of my vagina.  Don't dictate to me who I love or what I do and I will have the courtesy and respect to allow you to love who you love and do what you do.

              

Dump the Dubya 3/23/07

I take some modest pride in the knowledge, especially in the wake of the latest Republican-based scandal from Washington (The great US attorney purge) that I have been an inveterate foe of Dubya and all his works almost from the first time that I had heard of him. That, if you are curious was when the media reported, during the candidate debates in 1999, that when asked what political philosopher had had the most influence on him, he answered, “Jesus Christ, because he changed my life.” This response told me three things:

1. That he was a born again, fundamentalist mental midget,

2. That he was pandering to his religious base,

3. That he did not have enough grasp on the subject to tell the difference between a religious figure and a political philosopher, and

4. That he had never read any political philosophy, and so was supremely unqualified to be president.

In what appears in hindsight to be the utmost in wishful thinking, I assumed then that Dubya had managed to cut his political throat, and that we would never hear of him again past the third or fourth primary. I was wrong. I wish to goodness that I had not been. I underestimated the rising strength of the Religious Right, and the naiveté of the American public. Until 9/11, many people, myself included, believed that he would be a completely ineffective president, a belief that was strengthened by the fact that he appeared to be a “one-issue” politician, and that his mania for “faith-based” programs would continue to be crushed by a Congress that still had some hold on reality. We tend to think of the damage that Mohammed Atta and his gruesome little band did to America in terms of lives lost and buildings destroyed, but that pales in comparison to the fact that they transformed George III (think about it) from a nonentity into possibly the most horrifyingly damaging figure in American history. I remember before the full extent of the disaster became clear that I would say he was the worst president since Warren G. Harding. I now believe that was unfair to President Harding, who was at least aware of his own inadequacies.

I see in the news that the Mayor of Salt Lake City has taken up the cause of impeachment of this president. I fully endorse that position. If President Clinton could be considered for impeachment for lying about his sex life, what are we to make of a President who has entangled us in a foreign war on pretexts that were demonstrated to be false, almost as soon as the war was initiated? A President who has repeatedly used executive power to unconstitutionally pass out funds to religious organizations (Let’s drop the misleading euphemism “faith-based”) against the will of Congress and the American people? A President who has gutted environmental restrictions and subverted scientific findings on global warming in order to accommodate his buddies in the energy business? A President who allowed a government agent to be compromised in order to punish her husband for telling the truth about his corrupt regime? A President who appears to be attempting to make America over as a religious theocracy, and who seized unprecedented power over ordinary Americans by railroading through the Patriot Act? A President who initiates a purge of government attorneys who have placed their duties to America ahead of loyalty to those in power? When is enough enough? How about today?

The only problem I have with impeaching the president is that it does not go far enough to solve our current problem. If we dump Dubya, we are left with his Mephistophelean VP, Dick “Quail Hunter” Cheney. This grey eminence is the Richelieu of this administration, and needs to be included in any impeachment proceedings. Dick has the potential to be an even more disastrous chief executive than Dubya, if only because he is light years more competent and unprincipled.