I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism." … This unrelenting obsession with a particular goal destroys the perspective of many decent people. They have become easy prey to manipulation and misjudgment. ~Barry Goldwater
I had to go out to my Mom's today. Her Jeep is broke and she needed some groceries. While we were taking a break from a project she needed my help with, I saw this.
Some school principal in Florida got fired because there was a replica of Michelangelo's David displayed in the school somewhere, and some idiot parent thought it was "pornographic."
Wut?
How many of these fuckers beat off to porn in the middle of the night??
(Don't answer that.)
Bitch, the subject matter is literally Biblical.
Of course I get that modern "Conservative" voters, not following history and never having lived under such themselves, aspire to be goddamned Italian peasants just as their goddamned political leaders aspire to be Borgias and De Medici's, and that both groups desire to kick out everything in the middle between the two.
Never mind how that shit ends, pretty much every time you run the goddamn experiment, though. Italy is perhaps more fortunate than most places in that it was forcibly unified by Giuseppe Garibaldi's Redshirts as a relatively secular state with a constitutional monarchy.
Lots of other places, Russia for example, weren't so lucky.
But these sons of bitches never think it's going to happen to them. They always assume or believe their church, their interpretation of it, they themselves, will reign supreme and unchallenged forever.
And you and yours or me and mine...won't.
(And, having been an addict myself, it doesn't matter if I agree or disagree with the source of such programs. Church helped me beat alcohol and drugs at the time. I'm not going to judge anybody else.)
There's at least twenty churches I can think of right off the top of my head in this town, and I know there's more than that.
So when people say "Every church should run their town" I ask "Which one?"
People fought wars over this kind of thing.
The whole point of the goddamned reformation was not only economic and political...throwing off the dominance of the nobility and the Church that they funded and through which they often exercised power...but religious and spiritual. It was, for many people, simply about being able to read the Lord's Word in their own languages and being bound by secular rather than religious laws.
The whole point of our Founding and of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was specifically that Europe's religious wars were still in living memory, the excesses and tortures of Europe's many still quasi-theocratic or outright theocratic monarchies were still an ongoing issue in global geopolitics.
The Founders wanted to avoid all that crap.
Of course preachers like Floyd Brown always think they're going to be the ones dictating rather than the ones being dictated to.
And they never, ever, EVER stop to think that in all their dry-humping with the radical medievalist Catholics or with Russian Orthodox Jihadist dictators that they're playing Just-The-Tip and "Imperialize me, Daddy!" with people who'll see the very idea of Evangelicals, or Independent Fundamentalist Baptists, or Pentecostals and the very (again, right or wrong, it simply is what it is) American ideal of the marketplace of ideas as both a heresy and a threat to the hegemony of the National Church and the State.
(Again, this is literally the purpose of America, per the First Amendment, that we are opposed to such things.)
And trust me, people like the Sovereign Military Order Of Malta and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill absolutely hate that this ideal of religious diversity has spread to many nations.
I saw...and wrote about...a video not too long ago where lots of bitter old Russians basically said that anybody who wasn't Russian Orthodox was merely in a "Sect." Chances are, "Conservatives" whatever church you go to it's not going to be the dominant one in that kind of world. I'd keep that in mind if I was you.
These people never, ever, stop to think about the fact that it's the religious people in Ukraine...especially the Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals...along with Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims...who are fighting the hardest against the goddamn Russian Orcs. This is for one simple reason, those people remember what the Soviet Union was like, or their parents taught them.
The American "Conservatives" literally aren't thinking about why all those eastern EU countries are busy arming up like a motherfucker right now even as they shovel everything they can at the Ukrainians in the hope that we all can stop it there.
(And I'll note their buddy Viktor Orban isn't rejecting the extensive amount of Western weapons that Hungary has got its hands on in recent years, either.)
Goddamn, it's almost like people who've had to live under an Empire...whether it was religious or (in the case of the Soviet Union) supposedly atheistic and secular...don't want to live under that kind of shit!
And I find it very interesting that it's the conservatives, the Republicans, who until just a bit over a decade ago were still believers in and defenders of things like civic pride and civil liberties (even if they did prefer things their way) and who constantly tout the Classical and Western values for which Michelangelo and his David sculpture stood for are now the same fucking people who want to brand this statue that meant those same things as simply "Pornographic."
Simply because the physical form of it is that of a naked man.
What it represents doesn't even matter to them Hell, it doesn't even exist.
And if they took the time to learn the truth, they'd be offended by that, too.
There are no higher ideals to these fucking people than atavism, fascism, and power.
They don't even give a good goddamn that the source material of the work is literally Biblical nor that the artist was commissioned to create many other religious works of art nor that the work in its time represented things that were integral parts of pre-Trump conservative values same as they were of liberal democratic values.
Because absolutely none of this stuff is about any of that, anymore.
And they not only don't care about whatever gross nasty shit may have transpired there, my bet is, if they knew they'd be intrigued by it, if not actively sexually aroused.
(And increasingly, they'll just come right out and admit that their own damn selves.)
After all, it's only grooming or porn or sexual abuse or this, that and the other goddamn thing when somebody else does it or when it's connected to values...like freedom or sexual liberation (for other people) that they don't like.
This whole "Western" thing...going all the way back to the Roman Empire...that they're supposedly so worked up about...is deeply interconnected with the ideals of citizenship. Civis Romanus Sum, after all meant "I am a Roman Citizen" and being able to say so was a thing of great civic pride, as was the concept of Manumission (the freeing of slaves) or military service, or the observance of religious ritual and festival.
And that was as true under good leaders like Julius Caesar or Marcus Aurelius as under the evil and the mad like Caligula or Commodus, because these ancient people understood what it was to be part of something greater than the Self.
Shit, I thought that's what conservatism was. (Once upon a time, it was, at least.)
Evidently, I was wrong.
Nowadays all these people want to feel "Special" and hell, fuck everybody else. Other people don't really exist to these fucking people, and they're all trying to one-up all the other nuts for attention and presumably, money.
Not sure what they think the money's worth without civilization, though.
If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen.
Civis Americanus Sum, and don't you ever forget it, motherfucker.
And this?
This ain't it, yo.
Слава Україна!
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan
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