Are We Going To Fight All the Old Battles?

Why now?

For the last two weeks, as the contraception debate has consumed the media, I have been wondering why.  I thought contraception was a settled issue in America.

I guess I was wrong.

At this point, there is not a single Republican candidate for president who supports the use of contraceptives.  In fact in the entire primary cycle, with the possible exception of Jon Huntsman, all of the candidates have opposed it, as in, make it illegal, or at least almost impossible to obtain.

In addition to this, Virginia is on track to be the first state to pass Personhood, which defines life as beginning at the moment of conception.  This has the effect of outlawing all contraception that acts on a fertilized egg, which would include both the morning after pill and the regular birth control pill, both of which prevent a fertilized egg from implanting on the uterine wall.  This measure is also slated to be on the ballot in a number of states this fall.

Contraception was made basically legal in 1936 when the US Supreme Court ruled that federal law could not prevent a doctor from prescribing contraception.  It continued in 1965 when the Court struck down the last Comstock Law for married couples, allowing them access to contraception.  The process of legalization was completed in 1972 when that ruling was extended to unmarried couples.  Contraception has been legal for my entire life; we were even taught how to use it in fifth grade (Yes, they trusted 10 year olds with that information.)

And now, contraception is under the most sustained assault since 1915 when the architect William Sanger and his wife Margaret were charged under the Comstock Law for spreading information about contraception.  (They won under appeal)

I don't understand this.

Contraception has been pretty much universally accepted for decades.  With the exception of church hierarchies, no one has said much about contraception being morally or ethically wrong.  (There is a difference between the two terms)  In fact, as much as 80% of Catholic women have used contraception at some point in their lives.  The Pill is probably the most prescribed medication in America.  It is also considered the safest.  (And according to medical statistics, far safer than any pregnancy.)

It isn't like abortion, which does have ethical grayness.  I fully support choice, without question, but I also do acknowledge the other side's point.  They do have one, I just feel that the ethics, and honestly, the morals, are on the side of choice.  But, abortion has never been universally settled; it has always been contentious.

But contraception?  How have we come to this.  It is almost like they are attacking abortion from the other side; if contraception is illegal, then abortion must certainly be so.  I cannot imagine a world where abortion would again become the new contraceptive method, as it was before about 1950.

So why now?  Why is this fight at the front and center of American politics?

I know the answer that is out for public consumption is that Obama's ruling on contraception is a frontal assault on religious liberty; that it violates the first amendment.  But this is not a satisfactory explanation.  In actuality, it is a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy on the part of the media. (confusing correlation with causation)  They have enframed the entire discussion of the last two weeks as a result of the Obama initiative, when in actuality, the issue has been brewing for the last couple of years.  The Birth Control Ruling simply correlates with a larger narrative, it did not cause the discussion.  At best it brought it into public awareness.

The assault on reproductive freedom has been going on for the last few years.  You can see it in the Quiverfull movement and in the Personhood Amendments that have joined gay marriage as a staple of right wing ballot initiatives.  But why has this happened?

There are two possible answers, both of which, if true, are absolutely horrifying.  I do not know if what I am proposing is actual fact, so please do not assume that what follows is actually what is going on.  These are just two theories that fit the available data.  Based on my background in anthropology and sociocultural studies, these explanations fit the phenomena very well.  They are also not mutually exclusive, both could be operating concurrently in this movement.

The first draws from the Quiverfull Movement, which promotes large families (a full quiver) and traditional family structures.  This means a father that is the lord of the household, and obedient and subservient wife, and well disciplined, well mannered children.  It preaches homeschooling, devoutness, and Biblical Patriarchy.

In this model, the woman is essentially locked into a homemaker role.  With a dozen children, all homeschooled, how could she be anything but?  Her life, by necessity, must revolve around home and hearth.  In today's disintegrating traditional family, this idea has strong appeal to the traditionalist.  It harkens back to a nostalgic view of the world shown in Father Knows Best, and other sitcoms of the 1950's.  It is a nostalgia for what adherents view as a better America, before mothers works outside of the home, where the dinner was always on the table, there was almost no divorce and there were few problems with out of control children.

But it is an ideology that is never going to have a large number of adherents.  Women today want their careers, they find fulfillment in new roles, and men, more and more, find fulfillment by being an equal in the parenting and homemaking.  I know many men, for example, who do the bulk of the cooking in their house.  In 1952, that would never have happened.

You will never bring back the world of "Father Knows Best" under normal circumstances; culture has moved on.  This is a new world, with new social structures.  So how do you reinstitute the world of the 1950's?  Remove family planning.  If women have to have babies, because there is no way to prevent pregnancy, they will effectively be taken out of the workforce. 

You could never pass a law that would block women from employment, but you could achieve the same end by turning them into forced baby factories.  If they had ten kids, a career would no longer be possible.  With ten kids, I'm not sure that sanity would even be on the table anymore.

I do want to point out, if this is the impetus behind the assault on birth control, it has the possibility of backfiring dramatically.  I predict that if babies again become the punishment for sex, like they were a number of decades ago, you will find women just giving up on marriage and possibly even men.  You might find a dramatic rise in lesbianism, as women who want a career and someone to hold at night, turn to other women to fill those needs, since that would be the only safe sex.  And then, in response to a massive deficit in women, men would have to become "prison gay" out of desperation.  Always remember the law of unintended consequences.

The other possibility of this move to eliminate birth control is far more vile.  I think this may be one of the most offensive things I have ever written, so be warned.

Racism may be at the root of this.  America is poised to become a minority majority country in the next few decades.  The white majority is an endangered species because educated, affluent whites have a far lower birth rate than minorities and immigrants.

I personally think this is a good thing.  I think having a superpower that looks more like the rest of the world means that we might have more in common with them.  I think it is a recipe for peace and an antidote to racism.

But that said, the future does not look good for white people, especially Republican white people, who have built an entire political party on subtle and coded racism.  The demographic shift in America, almost guarantees years of Democratic majorities, unless the Republican party can retool their image to appeal to non-whites.  At this point that seems unlikely as they double down on the "Southern Strategy."

This motive to end birth control is not as wild of speculation as it might seem.   Many times in Savannah, I heard people talking about how the white race was breeding itself out of existence, with low birth rates and interracial marriage.  And this was not coming out of the mouths of people who regularly wear white robes and burn crosses.  They probably do not even think of themselves as actually racist, they just want this country run by people who look like them.

Think of the woman who cried on CNN, "I want my country back."  I would ask, back from who?  The implication is, I want my country to have a white president.  Obama is not an outlier, he is the vanguard of a ethnically diverse, multi-racial society.  In the coming future, we will see the government cease to be the plaything of rich white men.  The same holds true for the stock exchange, the country club, the Ivy League.  We will see a demographic shift where all of these look more like a diverse, multi-cultural America.

And, from what I heard while living in the South, this scares white people.

The only way to stop the demographic shift, short of importing mass quantities of European immigrants, is to dramatically raise the birth rate among white people.  (And that wouldn't necessarily work, because Europe is having the same demographic shift America is.)  Eliminating contraception would have the possible effect of maintaining a white majority, especially when coupled with draconian immigration laws, and could preserve the demographic status quo.

As vile as this is, remember, throughout history, mandated birth rates have been a tool of the majority to maintain their majorities.  The upshot is, eliminating family planning is a tool of abject control.  And as such, we must stand firm for reproductive freedom.  Losing this right is not just the loss of one right, it is be beginning of a cascade that ends in oppression, and totalitarianism.

There is no more important liberty to fight for than the right to control one's own body.

Who Is the Actual Prostitute Here?

Whores

I would like to pose a question: who is the true whore, a woman who uses contraception to prevent an unintended pregnancy or a politician who sells out a common liberty just to pander to a very small interest group in order to further their political career?

Today, Foster Friess, a prominent Santorum supporter, said that rather than using contraception, girls in his day just kept their legs shut.  The actual quote is "This contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's so... inexpensive. Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives."   This refers to the idea that in the past, a girl should hold an aspirin between her knees to prevent pregnancy.  If you do that, you can’t have sex, and if you don’t have sex, you are extremely unlikely to get pregnant.  (I’m not even touching the virgin birth issue.)

And later in the day, Santorum went on record supporting him.  Now I’m not going to accuse Santorum of pandering, he is a practicing Catholic, with many children, who has always supported criminalizing contraception.  Even though I disagree strongly with this position, I do respect that it has been his unwavering belief.

But many others on the right have not always held this opinion, but suddenly, ever since Obama came out with his new contraception rules for insurance companies, they have not been able to rise up against birth control fast enough.  Every candidate on the Republican side of the presidential race opposes legal contraception.  (With the possible exception of Ron Paul, who is contrary in almost every belief.  I don’t know where Ron Paul stands on this issue, but he is against abortion, which taints his pure Libertarian image a bit.)

First I want to address the contraception issue.  Women are again being painted, as they have throughout history, as either virgins or whores.  There is no grey area.  If you use contraception, you are a slut, unless of course, you need it for an actual medical problem.  However, things like high probablilities of ectopic pregnancies, which tend to kill both baby and mother, are not considered medical problems, so I’m not sure what they consider to be medically necessary contraception.

But the point is, historically, women have never been trusted with something as important as their own fertility: that was the property of their husbands.  In fact, throughout most of history, the woman herself was her husband’s property.  Even after we ceased race based slavery, gender slavery was the unquestioned norm. 

The consequence of women not being able to control their fertility was a horror where most women died in childbirth.  The stepmother in Cinderella was the norm, and she favored the daughters she had with Cinderella’s father, over the older daughter from the mother who died having her.   Even though the ugly stepsisters are often depicted as older than Cinderella, they would have been younger.  This also means that the bulk of Cinderella’s father’s estate would have passed to Cinderella, since no sons are ever mentioned in the story.  This is why the stepsisters would have hated her.  This story is important, because it depicted the reality of life before contraception.  It resonated because it illustrated a common experience.

Contraception changed that.  First of all, for the first time in history, women began to outlive men.  Before that, it was rare for a woman to live through menopause, unless she had a vastly older husband that died and left her widowed.  A women normally died in early middle age, worn out by childbirth that was too close to the end of her fertility.

Women were free from the chains that bound them.  They suddenly had the right to chose when, or even if, they became pregnant.  Sex could become a pleasure, not a duty, and a child could become a miracle instead of a burden.

The consequences rippled out.  Fewer unwanted babies reduced the crime rates.  (read Freakonomics for a detailed description of this)  Less babies born into poverty reduced starvation and after it was instituted, reduced the amount of welfare.  Fewer children enabled women to have careers, and find fulfillment outside of the home.

And men hated it.

From the start, they fought against birth control.  Countries made it illegal, the church made it a mortal sin, doctors refused to prescribe it, and insurance companies refused to cover it.  And yet, women continued to demand it.  They marched, they rallied, they stood up and refused to back down.  Suffragettes worked for contraception with the same passion that they pursued the right to vote.  And when they got the vote, they voted for people who supported contraception.  (And yes, I know, there were some anti-abortion suffragists, but most supported birth control.)

I read an op-ed from a woman who said birth control was a new device to enslave women, and the pill treated femininity as a disease, but that is a very rare view.  I read a statistic that up to 80% of all women use birth control at some point in their lives.

Babies are no longer a consequence.  This does not make a woman a slut, it gives her power and control over her life, and we must stop denigrating her for this jurisdiction.  There is no sin in her making personal decisions on her own fertility.

Now to contrast this with the actual prostitution: the prostitution of positions for votes.

When you sell something of yourself to another in order to receive compensation, you are a whore.  Whether you are buying a campaign contribution or a vote, you are actually prostituting yourself.

And this is what the Republicans are doing.  In issue after issue, the presidential candidates sell out their previous beliefs for ones that play better to the right wing base.  Whether it is gay marriage, taxes, abortion, contraception, or anything else, their personal beliefs are subject to change with the next poll. 

They pander for right wing votes for the nomination, then pander for independents in the general election.  They have no actual positions, they have focus groups.  They buy their position by selling their souls.

No wonder that Congress has a lower approval rating than some foreign dictators do.  This is not a joke, most Americans feel more positively towards Castro and Chavez than they do toward their own legislature.  How can you trust anyone that bends in the slightest political breeze.

A woman using contraception is standing up for something, her own rights to make choices in her life.  A politician decrying contraception is selling their soul for power.

They have become the Whores of Babylon.

What Would a Right Wing Christian Nation Look Like?

Theocracy

There would be very little difference between an America made in the mould of the religious right and Afghanistan under the Taliban.  The only major difference would be the Burqa.

I understand that is a very offensive statement.  It is offensive because most Americans believe the dominant religion of the country is Good and Righteous.  It is even more offensive because it is true.

Let’s examine some of the truths espoused by the religious right and their impact on the United States if they got the power to enact them.  I’ll start with the low hanging fruit.

Abortion – This would be outlawed, even in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother.  Some man forced himself on you; sorry, you must have your rapist’s baby.  Your dad and uncle raped you, too bad, have the baby.  Your pregnancy will kill you, that’s life, at least you have a few weeks to say goodbye. 

As an example of just how extreme this anti-abortion movement is, consider this.  For years federal abortion funding laws have permitted exemptions for rape.  In the current congress they are trying to remove that exemption. From an article on this issue:

“Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), introduced a proposal that the rape exemption be limited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion.  Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes.”

Apparently, unless a woman is beaten into submission, she asked for it.  Isn’t it nice when you can blame the victim?  And again, the general thought about rape is that the woman is asking for it if she gets raped.  I would like to remind you of Kathleen Passidomo’s statement, “There was an article about an 11 year old girl who was gang-raped in Texas by 18 young men because she was dressed up like a 21-year-old prostitute.”

Moving on.

Contraception – Alabama is attempting to enact a life begins at the moment of conception law, known as Personhood.  Colorado has twice defeated the same law because it literally outlaws any form of contraception that acts on a fertilized egg.  This includes the morning after pill, the regular pill and even IUD devices.  The only option available for women to control their own fertility would be a diaphragm, which is as unreliable as a condom; devices that are also under attack from the religious right.

From the Chicago Tribune:

“…an increasingly vocal group of Christian conservatives is arguing that it's time to mount a concerted attack on contraception." Anti-abortion activist Joseph Scheidler's argues that "Contraception is more the root cause of abortion than anything else."

Try to wrap your brain around that logic.

Continuing on to the third issue in unholy trinity of thought that you must ascribe to in order to be a good Christian conservative.

Homosexuality – Forget the discussions on gay marriage or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, many modern evangelicals want to re-outlaw homosexuality.  It is not only in Uganda where “Kill the Gays” bills are introduced.  Merrill Keiser, Jr., a DEMOCRAT (really, I can’t believe it either) ran a primary campaign against Senator Sherrod Brown advocating capital punishment against homosexuals.  "Just like we have laws against murder, we have laws against stealing, we have laws against taking drugs -- we should have laws against immoral conduct," Keiser says.

Even when not advocating killing homosexuals, many leading Republicans advocate returning homosexuality to a criminal status.  The Montana GOP has that as part of their party platform.  Then there’s Rick Santorum who said,

“We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.”

This is a candidate for President of the United States of America.  You can Google this statement, just don’t do it at work or around anyone else, because the results of a Google search on Santorum are not exactly acceptable in any sort of environment.

And by the way, if we don’t have the right to consensual sex in the home, where can we have it?

Which leads to the next tenant of the Religious Right.

No sex – except for procreation, and within the bounds of heterosexual marriage.  This includes pre-marital sex, affairs, or just recreational sex.  Forget abstinence only education, how about an abstinence only life?

From the Seattle newspaper:

“Extramarital sex and sex outside marriage should be made illegal and prosecuted, according to a nominee for the Alaska Judicial Council, which nominates state judges.  Don Haase of Valdez, a former president of the right-wing Eagle Forum of Alaska, was nominated to the post by Alaska’s Republican Gov. Sean Parnell.”

Let’s take government out of your lives and put it back in the bedroom where it belongs.  Without Telescreens and Thought Police, how will they monitor this?  I guess eliminating Big Government means something different to these people.

Now onto the truly Talibanesque concepts.

Women’s Rights – Forget them.  They are not acceptable in a biblically based America.  As Michelle Bachman (another Presidential Candidate, where do they find them, under a rock?) said “The Lord says be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands."  And this woman wants to lead the free world.  What if her husband tells her, no you can’t enact a progressive tax policy. (like she actually would.)  Would she submit to her husband like the bible orders her to?  Would she be a puppet leader?

That isn’t the scariest attack on women’s rights though.  This is from the From the Institute of First Amendment Studies and talks about the highly popular Promise Keepers Movement:

“In Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper Tony Evans admonishes men to "take back" the leadership of their homes from their wives, saying that "there can be no compromise" on this issue. Women are instructed to submit to their husbands, "for the sake of your family and the survival of our culture."

PKers are told that women want to be dominated by men in an affectionate paternalism. In 1993, when Dobson addressed a PK rally, he hailed his audience as "50,000 hairy-chested testosterone-driven males," and told them, "Nothing matters more to a godly woman than that a man accept spiritual leadership for her and her children."

His sentiments are echoed in PK-endorsed publications, which tell women that they were created by God for male enjoyment. The book Promises, Promises: Understanding and Encouraging Your Husband, is sold at PK stadium events and contains essays by wives of twelve prominent Christian leaders, many of them PK supporters. It characterizes Eve and all women since as "gift[s]" from God "designed especially" for men.”

Women may not have to wear the Burqa, but they will have to submit to their husbands in all things.  Is this America?

And the best for last.

This is a Christian Nation – This is the core of all of the others.  The religious right wants to make this a Christian Nation.  There have been calls in South Carolina to secede again to form the Christian States of America.  Others have set their eyes on a higher prize: making Christianity the National Religion.

From Politics USA:

According to David Barton, we’ve been getting it all wrong, folks. The First Amendment didn’t establish freedom of religion; it established Christianity as the official religion of the United States, even though it says “”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

If you aren’t a Christian, beware.  This from Mother Jones Magazine:

Last week, legislators in Tennessee introduced a radical bill that would make "Material support" for Islamic law punishable by 15 years in prison. The proposal marks a dramatic new step in the conservative campaign against Muslim-Americans. If passed, critics say even seemingly benign activities like re-painting the exterior of a mosque or bringing food to a potluck could be classified as a felony.

The Tennessee bill, SB 1028, didn't come out of nowhere. Though it's the first of its kind, the bill is part of a wave of related measures that would ban state courts from enforcing Sharia law. (A court might refer to Sharia law in child custody or prisoner rights cases.) Since early 2010, such legislation has been considered in at least 15 states.

And while fears of an impending caliphate are myriad on the far-right, the surge of legislation across the country is largely due to the work of one man: David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based white supremacist who has previously called for a "war against Islam" and tried to criminalize adherence to the Muslim faith.

Tennessee's SB 1028 goes much further, defining traditional Islamic law as counter to constitutional principles, and authorizing the state's attorney general to freeze the assets of organizations that have been determined to be promoting or supporting Sharia. On Monday, CAIR and the ACLU called for lawmakers to defeat the bill.

But it's not just Muslims who draw Yerushalmi's scorn. In a 2006 essay for SANE entitled On Race: A Tentative Discussion (pdf), Yerushalmi argued that whites are genetically superior to blacks. "Some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones," he wrote.

Yerushalmi has suggested that Caucasians are inherently more receptive to republican forms of government than blacks—an argument that's consistent with SANE's mission statement, which emphasizes that "America was the handiwork of faithful Christians, mostly men, and almost entirely white." And in an article published at the website Intellectual Conservative, Yerushalmi, who is Jewish, suggests that liberal Jews "destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite." Unsurprisingly, then, Yerushalmi offered the lone Jewish defense of Mel Gibson, after the actor’s anti-Semitic tirade in 2006. Gibson, he wrote, was simply noting the "undeniable Jewish liberal influence on western affairs in the direction of a World State."

Despite his racist views, Yerushalmi has been warmly received by mainstream conservatives; his work has appeared in the National Review and Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace. He's been lauded in the pages of the Washington Times. And in 2008, he published a paper on the perils of Sharia-compliant finance that compelled Sen. Minority Whip John Kyl (R-Ariz.) to write a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox.

And these are the people trying to take control of the United States?  If they gain power, would this even be America anymore?

Under this vision of this country, there would be no abortion, no contraception, no homosexuality, all of which could be punished by jail or even death.  Not only would women have few rights, they would be required to submit to their husbands.  (And trust me, they would have to have one, if only to avoid being denounced as a Lesbian)  Finally, you would have to be Christian.  Non-Christians, if they were even permitted to be here would be reduced to a second class citizen status. 

And if you are a Christian, you need to ask yourself, would you be considered the right kind of Christian.  (And if you’ve read this blog post this far, you probably are not.) 

It is time to throw off this kind of thinking.  This is a free country, there is Freedom of Religion.  As such the far right can spew this kind of hate.  However, their rights end at my body, at my mind and my soul.  It is time for us to reject the Medieval thinking that fundamentalist propaganda espouses.

One last thing, after researching this blog, and searching the terms that I used to find my documentation, Google now thinks I am a Republican. With their tracking system, every search I do now leads me to evangelical sites.  I think it was the last search I did on making this a Christian Nation.  I don't even want to think what the Santorum search did to the database.  I’m off to Google tons of info on Quantum Physics and evolution to try to clear the system. 

The Weighing of Worth

Sacred

When is life sacred, when is it profane?  Is all life valuable, or are some lives worth more than others?

Apparently in the America of the New Century, the answer is yes.

Some examples of the worth of lives:

A fetus is more valuable than a baby and definitely more valuable than a woman.

A zygote is worth more than an adult.

A senior citizen is worth more than a school age child.

A wealthy person is worth more than a poor person.

Any white middle age person is worth more than any minority, regardless of the achievements of said minority.

Examples of this in the news of the last few days:

In Florida there was an anti-abortion protest where the demonstrators were holding up signs saying “Kill women, not babies” (Does this mean that we should kill all women prophylacticly to prevent them from getting an abortion?  By the way, thanks to Patrick for this suggestion.  Read his blog post here:Would Bringing Back Post-Natal Abortions Fit with Your Ideology? )

Alabama is attempting to pass a law that would ban most forms of birth control (Just go ahead and actually criminalize all sex that is not for procreation, since that wastes the potential life of the sperm, and while you’re at it ban menstruation since that unfertilized egg could be a life.)

In order to win Tea Party support (Mostly older Americans) Mitt Romney, in the Republican debates, He said large class sizes are not a problem and that Pell Grants should be eliminated.  (Meanwhile, in Oregon, a rural school district superintendent now is responsible for cleaning the restrooms because the school budget is slashed so completely.  Why not just close the schools entirely; what kind of education do you need to be a fry cook?)

JP Morgan Chase donated 4.6 million dollars to the New York Police Department immediately after the Occupy Wall Street Protests began.  This donation is the largest in NYPD history, and very interesting considering the destination of the Brooklyn Bridge March was the Chase Manhattan Plaza.  (And sometime after the brutal police assault on the protesters, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said that they hope the donation shows how much they value the police department’s “hard work.”  Beating innocent protesters is so difficult, and takes so much out of a person.)

Dick Cheney demands that the Obama administration apologize for criticizing their use of torture.  (I guess that Obama, who banned torture, yet somehow got BinLaden, Al-Awlaki and so many other senior Al Qaeda operatives, and has repeatedly stopped significant terrorist plots, gets no credit for this.  If Cheney hadn’t ordered the torture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed all those years ago, Obama would not have been able to dismantle most of the leadership of Al Qaeda.  Apparently, Obama’s leadership and intelligence operations had nothing to with any of it.)

And while we’re at it, stop comparing people to Hitler, like Hank Williams Jr. did recently when he said  “That would be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu… They're the enemy... Obama! And Biden! Are you kidding? The Three Stooges.” 

Until you have incinerated something on the order of six million people, you don’t even come close to the horror that was Hitler.  It doesn’t matter what your political affiliation, or who you are trying to demonize, calling someone Hitler belittles the Holocaust, and minimizes the horrors inflicted at that time.  Comparisons to Hitler must be reserved for the most evil despots, if even then.  That monster represents the worst evil of the last two centuries.  (With Stalin a very close second.)  

It seems that our priorities are not just screwed up in this country, they have been completely upended.  The New York Times is engaging in revisionism only previously imagined in the book 1984.  The government is robbing the poor to give money to the rich, and then when the poor complain, they condemn the “class warfare.”  The police are setting up protesters to entrap them and arrest them for engaging in their first amendment rights.

Its time for us to demand our rights again.  We can no longer stand by idly and watch our country be dismantled.  The time has come to take back the dialog and call out the behavior of our leaders and those who would wreck our country.  We can no longer allow them to control the dialog.  It’s our country too.

The strange historical revisionism that the New York Times committed.  It is worthy of Minitrue.