I read this crap … so you don’t have to

A sample of the Florida Today web forum on Terri Schiavo:

- MAY GOD BLESS TERRI AND HER FAMILY. MAY WE ALSO SAY A PRAYER FOR HER HUSBAND WHO MURDERED HER.

- Her scumbag low-life of an estranged husband refused to let her parents be with her as she died, they had to wait outside somewhere. What a completely worthless stench of humanity that man is.

- This is an example of Logans Run a movie made on how a government controlled the right to live or to die. Mike Schiavo is a scum bag in my sight. Not giving her parents the rights to bury their daughter where they want to. Why should he care? He is not married to her anymore or is it just that he wants the insurance money so he can be a little richer. What a greedy person. If he had a bone in his body that he really cared about Terri, he would of never left her side after all these years.
He has no right to take her and have her cremated or even the right to say to perform an autopsy on her. Terri’s Parents have that right to bury her where they want to. My heart goes out to the family and may Terri Rest in Peace. The people of Florida need to consider on finding some new judges and also the government needs to stay out of peoples lives instead of trying to interfere. As for Mr schiavo may he rot in hell. >:-(
AS FAR AS I AM CONCERN MICHAEL SCHIVAO IS A MURDERER!!!!!!!!!!! TERRI you are home safe in the hands of the Lord, may you rest in peace!!

And some people think this story is going to go away now? Don’t get your hopes up …

The passing of Terri Schiavo

Just got in from playing golf to see the news today.

And so it ends … or does it?

I don’t mean to minimize Mrs. Schiavo’s life, or her death, for that matter, but what exactly was the over-under on how long it would take Georgie to comment on her death? Let’s see … by comparison, it took several days for him to comment on the Minnesota school shootings, and when he finally did, he seemed to do so reluctantly.

Then again, that was only some brown people. This, on the other hand, was about “the sanctity of life.”

Whatever.

Howell Heflin: 1921-2005

I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) at the age of 83. I met Sen. Heflin on several occasions in the late 1980s while I was working as an instructor with the Close Up Foundation, and I was always impressed with his humility, his personality, and his quiet strength.

I knew Sen. Heflin as “Judge,” an honorific he preferred, having served as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court before his election to the U.S. Senate. A conservative Democrat, Sen. Heflin frequently supported the initiatives of presidents Reagan and Bush (41), yet he stood up for Democratic causes when it counted the most.

To me, privately, Sen. Heflin was “Senator Grandpa” because of his kindly and sage demeanor. My greatest memory of him was in the fall of 1987, in only my second week with Close Up, when I was in charge of a session where Sen. Heflin spoke to a large group of students from his home state. If my memory serves, Sen. Heflin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently had voted against the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, taking a position that differed from that of his junior colleague, Sen. Richard Shelby (then-D-Ala.). Shelby was scheduled to speak to the students immediately after Heflin, and it was my job to make sure that Heflin exited down one aisle in the auditorium while Shelby was to come down the other aisle. Naturally, though, my plans went awry.

Sen. Heflin spoke significantly beyond his allotted time, and we couldn’t hold Sen. Shelby off any longer. The two men met in the middle of one of the aisles, and their strained smiles and handshake (made possible, I guess in part, by me) made the front page of every newspaper in Alabama the next day. (Well, that may be hyperbole, but I know for a fact it was on the front page of The Birmingham News – I saw it myself.)

Still, in future encounters, “Judge” Heflin was always pleasant to me. Perhaps he’d forgotten about our first meeting. At any rate, I found him to be a statesman of unusual, yet understated, strength. I am not an Alabamian, but thanks to my personal connection, I mourn his passing nevertheless, and I have many fond memories of “Senator Grandpa.”

Will wonders never cease?

I thought I was an anomaly as the driver of an SUV with a Democracy for America bumper sticker. (Don’t bother … I know, I know …) Yet, today, out and about in Melbourne, I saw a Honda Insight – a hybrid gas-electric car – with a Bush-Cheney ‘04 sticker.

An environmentally conscious Republican? Perish the thought …

Women on the Sunday news magazines

Inspired by a comment on Atrios’ Eschaton, I decided to delve into the issue of female representation among the guests on Sunday morning news magazines such as Meet the Press and Face the Nation. Not surprisingly, it’s a massive sausage fest. (The fest is massive, that is, not necessarily the sausages.)

Jamato on dKos posts a list of guests each weekend. During 2005, there have been 237 separate appearances on the Sunday shows. These include all duplicates, so if a guest appeared on multiple shows on a single Sunday, I counted all the appearances. Of the 237, 28, or 11.8%, were women.

It gets worse when you drill down into the numbers a little further. Only 18 women account for the 28 appearances. Condoleezza Rice, naturally, leads with five appearances, four of them on January 30. Sen. Barbara Boxer and UNICEF’s Carol Bellamy have three appearances each, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton both have appeared twice. The others are a smattering of members of Congress and journalists, mostly, with four of the latter (Katty Kay, Andrea Mitchell, Dana Priest, and Robin Wright) doing one roundtable on MTP on February 20.

Yep, that’s 18 women in three months, or 13 Sundays, among five shows. Read it and weep.

I didn’t count up the duplicate appearances by men, but you can count on the usual suspects: Rumsfeld, Santorum, Lieberman, Frist, Powell … you know the drill. Any way you slice it, though, 11% ain’t exactly proportional to much of anything. As Atrios pointed out in his own comments, female representation in Congress is even more than 11%.

Tangled up in faith

I didn’t go to church today.

That alone is not surprising. I haven’t been to church regularly since 2001. I was very active in my church in another Florida town, before moving to Michigan, and my family and I struggled for quite some time to find a church experience that rivaled what we had before. Thus far, we have been unsuccessful.

We were involved in our old church – Methodist, if you’re wondering – in many ways. I served on a pastoral committee and sang lead for the contemporary services on Sundays. They welcomed this liberal Democrat with open arms, despite the fact that many of them, including my pastor (who was probably my best friend in the church), gently teased me for my Gore/Lieberman bumper sticker and my decidedly out-of-place politics. Still, it felt like home.

In the three and a half years since we left that town, moved to Michigan, and returned to Florida, I have done a lot of soul searching, and I am beginning to conclude that, for me, right now, organized religion is not a place I want to be. Watching the Schiavo debacle unfold, not to mention the moralistic pandering of the Religious Right that has preceded it as long as BushCo has been in power, has led me to question the very foundations of my faith and whether or not I want to be associated with the types of people who will greet you warmly with one hand and stab you in the back with the other. The United Methodist Church’s refusal to ordain gay pastors, and its tacit rejection of gay members, pushed me away further.

I am a Christian. I have not necessarily lived up to that standard very well lately, but I still consider myself such. Yet that term now is loaded with so much baggage and has been demonized by the Left in much the same way that the Right has cast aspersions on the term “liberal,” that I wonder whether or not it applies to me at all anymore.

It seems that in the America of 2005, to be a Christian, you have to adhere to the following:

• Blind, unwavering allegiance to the current President and condemnation of any so-called immoral or amoral behavior, especially that of the President’s immediate predecessor, unless the person involved is a Republican, in which case you must rationalize and forgive.
• Hatred of all non-Christian people, whether here or abroad.
• The insistence that you know the only correct way to behave and to believe, and those who do not so behave or believe are to be ostracized.
• Obedience to Christian values is not just permitted by the Constitution, it is demanded.
• Failure to espouse America above all else (other than Jesus) constitutes treason.
• Activist judges are bad … unless they are your activist judges.

I think what has turned me off more than anything is the hypocrisy. I have read the Bible and studied it, and the Bible I read admonished me to love my neighbor, to turn the other cheek, and to do unto others as I would have them do unto me. I learned that all people have worth in the eyes of God, and indeed, that we all worship God (if we do) in many different ways, all of which are valid. I thought it taught that selfishness, spite, and intolerance were un-Christian values. I was under the impression that forgiveness of and love for others were the greatest, most divinely inspired emotions we could have.

I began to delve deeper into the history of Christianity. The number of wars (including our current quagmire) fought at least in part, nominally, for the sake of Christianity is staggering and, frankly, appalling. Beyond that, the insistence by our “Christian” leaders that their way is the only way seems to fly in the face of what I understood Christianity to be. Theirs is not the kind of faith that is attractive to me.

I am a 39-year-old husband and father of one with another on the way. Even as a Christian, I am profoundly disturbed and embarrassed to be presenting my children with citizenship in a theocracy posing as a democracy. We may have majority rule, but sometimes, in my opinion, the majority is wrong.

I didn’t go to church today. And I don’t know when – or if – I will go back.

(Cross-posted to my diary at Daily Kos.)

Easter Sunday news roundup

Today’s paper, proudly brought to you by Gannett¹, brings us a couple of bits of tid:

Top headline as of 10:08 a.m. online: Schiavo supporters pray for miracle. Putting aside the moment that not one of these people actually supports Terri Schiavo herself (remember her? She’s the one who did not want to live in a persistent vegetative state), the headline is somewhat bothersome, especially on Easter Sunday. The only miracle I’m praying for is that these people, “conservatives” who presumably advocate less government, butt out of this situation and let the families grieve and go on with their own lives.

Turning to the editorial page (a section regularly and roundly castigated around here by the wingnuts), retired journalist Stanley Flink comes out as a “liberal conservative,” which is sure to attract the crazed righties like vultures to roadkill. Thing is, Mr. Flink seems to be hanging onto the “conservative” tag, when it’s clear, at least socially, that he is a liberal:

We drove off the Taliban in Afghanistan, though not before they destroyed priceless and unique works of art celebrating religious convictions with which they disagreed.

Now, an American Taliban of self-appointed moralists wants to censor the motion picture business and TV producers — including Public Television and National Public Radio — with sanctions, fines, even criminal prosecution for the use of words and pictures they do not like.

No one has to listen, or watch. They can turn it off or walk out, but can we survive as a democracy — the form of government we are currently trying to export around the world — if we allow censorship or intimidation to silence the American voices certain people disapprove of?

Debate and disputation, yes. Censorship, no.

*****

All religions are free in the United States, limited only by violation of existing statutes that prohibit hate speech and incitement to violence — which are understandably considered to have no spiritual value.

On the other hand, the “religious right” is neither.

*****

Pollution and poverty are producing health problems and plague-like diseases that cannot be eliminated or controlled without vast expense and widespread educational programs.

Who could oppose common-sense measures affecting nutrition, exercise, scheduled physical examinations and sufficient aid for people barely surviving in deprivation and hopelessness?

We must conserve their right to have a chance, a belief in the future, some minimal self-fulfillment.

In all these areas, and many more, I am a conservative.

I wish to conserve the best we have discovered and learned in the past even as we confront the changes we must face — good and bad — in the coming years.

Upon reflection therefore, I think I had better borrow from the founders and declare that I am not merely a conservative.

I am a “liberal conservative.”

Without the “liberated” and the “generous” — which are derived from “liberal” — we will have very little to conserve.

What is more, as a liberal conservative, I will give the same weight to the adjective as to the noun.

Welcome to the good and decent side, Mr. Flink. Remain a fiscal conservative if you must – I actually consider myself much more moderate (if not conservative) fiscally than socially. But it is a step in the right direction to embrace the term “liberal” and thumb your nose at, as you put it, the “demonizing” of the term.

¹ For those of you interested, our local Florida Today actually was the precursor of USA Today. You learn something new every day.

It was a different time, you understand

Once again thanks to the generosity of Wes of Walk in Brain, I am pleased to share with you the brilliant parody that is The Old Negro Space Program. And since this is Blast Off!, coming to you nearly live from the general vicinity of the Kennedy Space Center, TONSP actually is topical. Sort of. Anyway, it’s a must-see. So, click away, and have a few laughs on me.

Paging Dr. Freud

Heard on ESPN during the broadcast of the LSU-Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s school) women’s basketball game today, in describing a couple of Liberty players: “They are so fundamentally sound.”

Guess they’d fit right in in Pinellas County (see below).

Pinellas County: Fundie Central?

Here’s a geography lesson for you: the Terri Schiavo saga is unfolding in Pinellas Park, Florida, only about five miles or so (if that) from the famous Virgin-Mary-in-the-bank-window:

Drive north on US 19 in Clearwater and you can’t miss it, at Drew Street just north of Gulf-to-Bay Blvd. (which becomes Courtney Campbell Causeway).

The erstwhile bank has been transformed into a “church,” (caution: link is photo-intensive) or I guess more accurately a Catholic worship center, complete with an enormous wooden crucifix and folding chairs on what used to be the parking lot. No doubt those chairs are seeing a lot of use this weekend, and not completely because of Easter, either.

What is it about Pinellas County (where I lived for a total of almost six years) that attracts the fundie element? If it weren’t for the Buccaneers (my season ticket seatmate and friend lives in Clearwater) and Skyline Chili in Palm Harbor, I’d probably never go back there …

UPDATE (1:43 pm 3/26/05): For some reason, the picture link was acting up. I think I’ve fixed it. Let me know if it goes kablooey again.