Plato's Playground
Right. This is difficult for many people to believe, actually. Yurica has been a voice crying in the wilderness. The corporate media simply do not want to go near this, lest they be accused of persecuting Christians.
Here's somebody else making the same plea I did:
"Where Are The Good Christians?
The fanatics and nutjobs now running the show sure give honest believers a bad name"
Link here
while i applaud mark morford, and aspire to his level of polemic, i don't think he went far enough. we heathens must goad and cajole christians to retake their religion, else we will hang together. and it is our job as heathens to insist that our elected officials preserve a secular official governance so that all of us may thrive.
I was a debater in high school. Only for one year, 1969-70, the year that the topic was U.S. unilateral military intervention in foreign countries, i.e. Viet Nam. My debate partner then now teaches contract law at Stanford. He married a Taiwanese girl he met when he taught at the University of Chicago. He was the son of a dentist who essentially ran the local community college. They called them junior colleges then. His parents were Rockefeller Republicans, moderates who believed in balanced budgets. But they were also regular church-goers; I wasn't. The dentist pursued politics for awhile, but the state became a Democratic stronghold in the mid 80s so moderate Republicans there got left in the dust. The dentist's wife, however, became steadily more and more religious and political. In fact, she ran for governor in '96 after ten or twelve years in the state legislature. She won the primary and then lost decisively in the general election, but she still has enormous clout in the party there. Her politics are those of her constituents, right-to-life, prayer-in-school, born-again, fundamentalist true believers. She spent twenty-five years refining her message. Call her wingnut, fruitloop, crackpot all you like. She heard far worse twenty years ago when her yobs kept re-electing her every two years. I suspect they are people who formerly opposed the Red Menace and in its absence have tried to reformulate their opposition to it in what they see as positive religious terms. The War on Terror serves to help keep them aligned. Left leaning Democrats seem to have a lock on New York, Chicago and L.A.. One would think that might be enough of a nucleus to build upon.
whoever votes for her---she is supposed to represent ALL the people in her district. ALL of them are her constituents. her SUPPORTERS vote for her. she is required by law and ethics--you remember ethics-- to represent her district.
The practical reality of democratic electoral politics is that political ethics are a teeter-totter. Pushing an agenda invariably creates organized opposition that eventually strikes some kind of balance. When the party with its feet on the ground decides the game is over, the party soaring aloft, having grounded its counter-weight, risks plummeting like a rock. Personally, I detest the 700 Club and its smarmy send-up of Christian piety. I would resent it even more if I felt I possessed a significant measure of real Christian piety or if I felt that my personal oxen were at real risk of being gored. Perhaps they are. I think it's great that Yurica has researched this poisonous plant and attached a common name to it accessible to laymen as well as Latin scholars. But I also couldn't imagine a better tool for exposing the vileness of this noxious shrub than the Bush administration itself. The more the American public sees of it the less they're going to like it. Margaret Atwood, a true blue Canadian, warned us this was coming twenty years ago, back when Jim and Tammi Fay were getting their well deserved comeuppance. I've lived in several countries that are or border on being full-blown theocracies. And I do visit home on a regular basis. The U.S.A. has some distance to go before it will be construed as a religious nation and it can go much farther before it will be mistaken for a theocracy. I suspect the last three years of the current regime will bear ample witness to that. As for Machiavelli, he's the reason that secular humanists read Shakespeare.
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