I thought we got all this cleared up last time around? The opinion thing? The notion that NO, we don’t go around generously offering each other the opportunity to “tell me what you think,” since what you think often can be documented on toilet paper quite frankly.
But two of ’em were at it this week alone, tellin’ me that their ignorant ideas were worthy of dissemination in the court of public opinion. One told me Bernie was a dirty dog but Hillary was an angel. I explained that he was delusional and then unfriended him. Another did the usual crap about how America went to hell the minute we prevented the “lamb” (Jesus) from accompanying our lil one’s to school each day.
Worse yet, said Texan (too many of the damnably stupid are from Texas you know), announced that she saw no “issue” in her post and said she intended to continue to support the Rebel flag and her “spiritual Baptist” beliefs. She begged me to unfriend her, being apparently unable to negotiate that difficult terrain without assistance from someone with an IQ at least 20 points higher than her own.
I obliged. I gathered from the supportive friends and family who were “with her” that such folks still in search of real intelligence, hang together, uplifting their common stupid to new levels of extreme height.
But that’s not what I’m talking about today. No, today I speak to a similar kind of stupid, but different as well. For there is a stupid that is fairly stupid, but knows they are talking stupid too. I mean, they know they are LYING, for it is impossible to be this stupid. You get my drift?
You may have heard about the lady clerk in Kentucky who refuses to issue any marriage licenses, forcing the entire county to live in premarital sin, because God informs her that gays are not marriage material. To each other that is.
Now I find this argument compelling in no way whatsoever. It utterly fails to meet any known test of “religious freedom” ever conceived, except in the mind of a Frankenstein oriented Christianist. It doesn’t even pass the smell test.
We start off in the state of Kentucky which is no state at all to be in. Pretty, I’ll give it that, given my cursory look at it from the cabin of a 74. It’s pretty “enough” as Barack might say. Beyond that? Oh, well, it is on the list of secondary refugee camps for the stupid. See, Texas can’t figure out what border to sit on, the one with Mexico or the ones with various US states, all seeking to rid themselves of the stupid. Such folks are placed on Greyhounds and bussed south to Texas. When Texas becomes overwhelmed, they send the extras to places where stupid people are uncommonly comfortable–i.e., Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and of course Kentucky. Whew, well now you know.
It strikes one as likely that the stupid people of Kentucky actually think that it is safe to equate the handling of paper work for gay couples seeking marital union, a complicity of sorts. After all, I’m being asked to do something in my job that I find icky, thus Jesus must find it that way too, and He certainly wouldn’t be turning any water into wine for them, so, I should refuse to be a part of it as a “good Christian”.
I mean it probably seems that way to Kim, being that she’s so new to all this God stuff in the first place. Or second or third, or gracious goodness, four times. Yes, Oh you were unaware? Ms. Kim, the clerk has been MARRIED FOUR TIMES IN HER QUEST TO LIVE A GODLY LIFE. And the set of twins she conceived in her second marriage were actually with the guy who became the subject of her “until death do us part or you piss me off” on the fourth occasion.
Kim’s a bit confused and new at all this Christian stuff. You gotta cut her some slack and excuse that she just might be simply stupid and not duplicitously so.
So Kim follows “God’s law” which she couldn’t identify as being from where should you demand to know. She doesn’t, but the little preacher guy who baptised her in the blood of Jesus “sometime after her fourth and she swears final marriage, and after washin’ in the baptismal fount of forgiveness, told her it’s so. God don’t like Him no homosexuals, and no don’t ask Him why he created them thus in the first place.
So let’s leave Kimmy out of the equation, because she’s sorta not sure what is goin’ on anyway.
The people from Liberty Counsel are quite another thing. Schooled in the colosseum of colossal stupid, students who graduate from this den of dumb are admitted to the bar for reasons that defy logic and Thomas Jefferson. But they gotta know better.
Surely, they know that Kimmy’s lament doesn’t rise to the level of an actual defense of anything. Well, perhaps we wouldn’t vote to put her down since she’s too stupid to know better. But surely they know this.
Religious freedom is the freedom to believe what you want and to worship at a place that agrees with you,if one can be found. You can talk about what you believe, and you can try to get others to agree with you. That is religious freedom.
This is not about religious freedom.
Every job, federal, state, local, public or private, profit or nonprofit, has a thing called “job requirements.” They are the “things” an employed person does while at work. They can change over time. They can increase in number and type and they can shrink.
Ms. Davis has a job that now includes issuing marriage licenses to a larger group of people than a few months ago. She claims to do this would impinge upon her religious beliefs. It probably does.
However, the answer is not to deny the public the service their taxes pay for. The answer is for Ms. Davis to resign her post, given that she is now unable to do her job as required.
She cannot impose her self-determined opinion on what God might want to her job and claim that she can’t be forced to do it.
First and foremost her opinion is wrong, quite plainly. Any number (in fact the majority) of theologians and biblical experts would inform Ms. Davis that her personal conclusions about what God wants are not reflected by an accurate reading of anything in the bible. Therefore there are actually NO religious laws being broken by her new job requirements, only one that she creates herself.
Think about that.
Let’s ask 319 million people to all do or not do parts of their jobs based upon their religious interpretation of the relevant spiritual text of their faith. Can you see that this might be a tad unwieldy?
This is not remotely what the Founders had in mind.
Your religious freedom stops where mine starts.
Ms. Davis may be a perfect fraud. She may be nothing more than a willing dupe to a group of religious fanatics who are still trying to set up a modern-day theocracy in the US. Or she may be a true believer of the fundamentalist variety, where all personal bigotry usually finds a home somewhere in the bible as justification.
But it is not religious freedom, and Liberty probably knows that. It has its own agenda. See above.
I sit and watch as various GOP contenders for the rabbit’s foot award all weigh in. Jindal, Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Huckabee all jump on the “religious persecution” bandwagon and utter inanities that make one blanch. The rest hem and haw and go for a version of blah blah blah that hopefully will trigger no response.
Surely they aren’t this stupid.
But maybe they are.
It’s why livin’ in Merika is hard.
Hey, next time we create a new country, let’s set an IQ minimum okay?
Existential Ennui 