Faith and Freedom Coalition Survey, Part 2 of 2.
Question 8: What is your opinion of the fact that Hillary Clinton says she wants to use the full force of the government to change the beliefs of Christians to conform with support of same-sex gay marriage and support for abortion-on-demand? I’m given, predictably, the choice of Outrageous, Frightening, Concern, or I Support Hillary’s Call for Criminalizing Christian Moral Teachings, or Not Sure.
Facepalm. These are very clumsy leading choices.
I’m beginning to wonder about the conservative obsession with gay marriage. I mean, I write some gay characters (and straight, and asexual, and wow even non-binary!) and I’m not as obsessed as you.
My gay friends are getting married? Great! The world can be a weird and strange place, it’s good to find someone who loves you through all your foibles and faults. I’m exactly as threatened by gay marriage as I am by straight marriage: in that I’m just as likely to roll my eyes and mutter about expensive gift registries.
As for abortion…hmm, guess what. Young people are too busy dealing with dicey job markets and student loans to have much sex. They’re too poor to move out of their parents’ houses, so hook-ups are tricky. Poverty is not an aphrodisiac.
Abortion levels go down with higher education and access to real, proven family planning aids. Abstinence is a joke. Ignorance is deadly in a world with AIDs and drug resistant sexually transmitted diseases. You want to reduce abortion? Make birth control better. Teach real and effective sex education. Make sure girls aren’t married off in their teens to become broodmares pumping out little Stepford clones.
No one wants Chinese-style mandatory abortion. But like pet spay-and-neuter clinics, we need to be realistic about sex, relationships, and messy reality. The GOP needs to stop being the party of of ‘Forcible Rape’. Stop being the base camp for underhanded legislation that claims to be on behalf of ‘women’s health’, but is really aimed at shutting down women’s health clinics. Those happen to offer a lot more, especially to poor women, than just abortions.
Let’s talk about abortion and Zika, to use one heartbreaking example. The abortion laws in America thawed in response to a previous disease outbreak that caused massive, debilitating, and even fatal birth defects. Are you conservatives pledged to spend the millions of dollars to ‘save’ every Zika baby that does not have a functioning brain? To offer the mother a lifelong stipend so she can care for her Zika baby, herself? Because at the moment, the joke among the younger demographic is that many conservative activists will lie, cheat, and steal to get a pregnant teen to deliver…but offer her nothing but shame and scorn afterward. Or they just want the (healthy) baby to only be raised by ‘good Christian’ straight white adoptive parents.
By now, I’ve about had it with this idiotic survey and I’m tired of finding diplomatic answers. So this time, I do vote I Support Hillary’s Call for Criminalizing Christian Moral Teachings…insofar as that pertains to institutionalized sexism, racism, anti-science nonsense, faith-based medicine, child abuse and endangerment, and child rape. No, your cherished beliefs do not get a pass here.
Drumroll…another Issue Summary: ‘FAITH & FREEDOM COALITION believes that 2016 is probably the most important election of our lifetime because America is heading over a cliff in so many areas – and that America is right now at a “tipping point.” We believe that 2016 is our last chance to save America as the “land of the free” for your children and grandchildren.’
Ah, I see. They’ve narrowed down what they think is my demographic. Wrong again, Ralph. I firmly believe that America is only in critical danger from people like you.
Question 9: How strongly do you agree or disagree with this assessment by FAITH & FREEDOM? Yay, I have the choice of Strongly Agree, Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, or No Opinion.
I vote Strongly Disagree. I do worry that you clowns will create your own Apocalypse, and I doubt you’ll have the grace to only take each other out. Can we please have a Rapture here, soon? It may just save the planet.
Question 10: Are you currently registered to vote? The choices are Yes and No. The survey then helpfully offers ‘If your answer is “No,” would you like FAITH & FREEDOM COALITION to send you a Voter Registration Kit?’ Again, a Yes or No answer (with my prediction that if the survey reveals someone sympathetic, they are sending that kit anyway.)
I vote Yes, that I am registered to vote. Honey, I am so registered.
Question 11: Will you solemnly pledge right now to vote in 2016 if you are physically able to do so? A Yes or No choice, followed by an official ‘Important: Please sign on this line to verify your pledge to vote in 2016:’
Oh, to quote Sarah Palin: “You betcha!” I say Yes because I certainly pledge to vote. And I sign, but not with a signature that completely matches my legal one (I don’t trust these folks, after all, and this is not a legally binding document.) I am more committed to voting now, than even before. They’ve mobilized me!
Question 12: Will you also pledge to bring like-minded friends with you to vote in 2016, or to take steps to make sure they vote? Yes or No choice, refreshingly urgent in its simplicity.
Again Yes, and “You betcha!” I’m DMing all my gay millennial friends in about twenty minutes. And all my erotic romance writer friends. And a few age-tamed anarchists I know who are still on the fence.
Question 13: Will you send your best donation right now to FAITH & FREEDOM COALITION to help fund this $12.3 MILLION FINAL 90-Day HOME-STRETCH PUSH Battle Plan Dr. Ralph Reed described to you in his letter, so that we can save the America you love for your children and grandchildren?*
*Their words and capitalization. ‘Nuff said.
The America they love is the one with segregation and the Klan, ‘Strange Fruit’ and Emmett Till, banned abortions, banned birth control, anti-science and isolationist factions in power, and the fantasy of a theocratic empire. Where to prevent black people and white people swimming together in the early 60s (gasp!) Lynchburg VA, filled in three public swimming pools. And this home of Christian Liberty University wasn’t the only American city to go to such drastic lengths to avoid following the law of the land.
And get this: my choices literally are:
Yes, because I share your view that the 2016 Elections is our last chance to save America.
No, because I like the direction America is heading.
Of course this is about money in the end. It’s about money for the Coalition. Money that Trump makes off his name-value association during his political stunts, whether he wins or loses. Money made by lobbyists and political appointees. Money lost by the Trump followers, who still believe that Prosperity gospel will somehow transfer the equivalent of The Donald’s wealth to them. Meanwhile all of them are making my America an uglier, meaner, angrier place.
I vote No.
America is already great, and it can be much greater. Ralph, I don’t want to live in your version of ‘great’ America, because I’ve already seen it in post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction. Yuck.
Added later for emphasis: Ralph Reed says he is ‘counting on’ every good Christian to contribute an average of $26.43 to his fund raiser for Donald Trump. Neither of them are getting one greasy penny from me. In fact, this week I’m calling the Hillary campaign to offer my support.
Because she’s the adult in the room.
***
Added October 23, 2016:
Because she didn’t bother to post in comments, I’m adding in an email from a recent reader, Eileen Lupkes. I’m copying her words verbatim.
“Born in Minnesota on a farm, married and moved to AZ at 40.
Where did you learn about life? I find your comments sad and alone. Perhaps missing understanding of our Constitution that was framed with an American dream of the common man coming from dictators, monarchs and socialist tyranny in Europe. It was of LOVE and equality of men found in the Bible. World Government and open borders will be a disaster letting in more pandemics, and ISIS taking us back to the Dark Ages.
Right now our government is trying to spend it’s way out of debt. Does your bank allow this? Ours didn’t and we lost our farm in Minnesota. Our 4 children had to learn to make their own living. Our government now is leaving a terrible debt and unsafe future to our children.
OBamacare has taken billions out of our Medicare and has 21 taxes and an exemption for religions not believing in insurance on page 107. Insuring 11 million illegals at the expense of our elderly. $7000 deductibles and several thousand a month premiums?
I am praying for you and your elite friends.”
Thank you for your prayers, Eileen. I’d ask you to broaden their focus to our whole country, our planet, and our species. I agree that many things our government has done have been messed-up and stupid (hence, I’m an Independent voter and not a Democrat.)
I’m sorry your family lost its farm. We need more small-business-friendly infrastructure and investments in family farms, not more corporate giveaways (which have been just as much a hallmark of the GOP elites as with Democrats.)
The Bible has some shining moments of equality. One of Jesus’s greatest teachings was affirming that we are all of equal worth in the eyes of the Deity. But the Bible, yes, even the New Testament, shows some astonishing cruelty and inhumanity. I’d like to think our religions can outgrow the selfishness and evil of their youth, and become forces for true human good. I stopped waiting for it to happen, and became an agnostic years back.
As for the founding history of America, our Founding Fathers (the real ones, not the parody version in Tea Party daydreams) recognized the real horrors of allowing state religions, and of allowing any one religion to dominate others. I agree with them. I’ve got no problem with law-abiding, community-minded Christians…or Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, or whatever religion. I draw my line when any one religion or way of life starts claiming it is the ‘one true path’, and that all others must convert or die. That’s a part of religious Islamic fundamentalism…and if you’ve at all studied European history, you’ll know it is a shameful part of the Christian heritage, too. There isn’t much standing between Daesh (what ISIS really should be called, because it pisses them off) and Christian theocrats.
I draw the line when one group says their right to be prejudiced assholes trumps the rights of other humans around them. Gay marriage doesn’t scare me. Abortion doesn’t scare me. Politically honed and aimed religion…yeah, that worries me. People voting against their best self-interests out of suicidal pride and desperation…that grieves me.
My folks come from west Texas, and have lived in a semi-rural area of NM since the 1950s. We see the real costs of commercial flight and changing demographics, in my home county. Many of us also see that while Hillary Clinton isn’t our best choice, she’s worlds more responsible than a lecherous, entitled New York manchild like Donald Trump…who talks a good game to his followers, but has no real intention of helping them over his own petty revenge and power fantasies.
Trump is Nero 2.0, not Cyrus the Anointed.
Whatever happens on November 8, Eileen’s letter is an indicator that we’re all going to have to work together, to make sane and responsible compromises, to make sane and responsible decisions, to overcome the real divides between urban and rural America.
It made my head hurt to read the material quoted from that pamphlet. Politics in my own country have taken several steps to the right over the past couple of decades. We, too, have an increasingly vocal loony right bent on frightening people, telling us selective lies about “the good old days” and complaining that our freedom is being curtailed if we can’t belittle women and migrants without disapproval. We also get the “erosion of Christian values” story whenever someone raises the question of marriage equality, or suggests maybe it’s no big deal if Muslims in our suburb want to build a mosque. And both sides of politics remain blind to the ingrained inequality experienced by Aboriginal people. Seems like the politics of fear and envy ride high, in your country and mine, and plenty of others as well.
I hate seeing it, because these folks are absolutely right that society, culture, and humanity’s Golden Age are under extreme threat. They just don’t grasp that *they* are among the worst threats.