In keeping with the previous post, I want to address those who continue to tell me to show "respect" for others' beliefs and to have "patience" and try to politely and quietly educate them as to the errors of their political allegiances. Patience has never been one of my virtues, especially with those who support politicians working to deprive me of civil rights and equality under the law. In a piece in Esquire, Charles Pierce sums things up well in the wake of Roy Moore's victory in the Alabama GOP primary. Pierce's remarks apply equally to Trump supporters. Here are excerpts:
[W]hen it comes to the people who voted for Moore, I don’t have to “respect their beliefs.” I don’t have to “understand where they’re coming from.” I don’t have to “see it from their side.” These people are preparing to make a lawless theocratic lunatic one of 100 United States Senators, and that means these people are about to inflict him and his medievalism on me, too. If you think that Roy Moore belongs in the Senate, then you are a half-bright goober whose understanding of American government and basic civics probably stops at the left side of your AM radio dial. You have no concept of the national interest and very little concept of your own, unless, as I suspect, you’ve made your own fears, and hating people and hawking loogies in all directions, the sum total of your involvement in self-government. You are killing democracy and you don’t know it or care. If you had any real Christian charity in your hearts, you’d keep Roy Moore in the locked ward of your local politics and not loose him on a nation that deserves so much better than him.
I’m out of empathy for this stuff. I’m out of pity. I’m out of patience. And, not for nothing, but Moore’s opponent is a guy named Douglas Jones. In 2001, Jones convicted two men for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, one of the iconic white supremacist terrorist acts of that period. One of those bastards already died in prison and the other keeps getting denied parole. If you’d rather be represented in the Senate by a lawless theocratic lunatic, rather than a guy that finally got justice for four murdered little girls, well, you deserve anything that goddamn happens to you.
Yes, I may "play the game" when required in social settings, but I will not respect beliefs that involve bigotry, hate, homophobia and/or racism.
No comments:
Post a Comment