2 posts tagged “politics”

I don't understand why the left is letting the religious right get away with being the "religious" right. If one looks at the lessons of the bible, the left is CLEARLY following the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament. Admittedly, the religious right does follow the bible, but it's the Old Testament that they revere.
I got into an argument with my mother one day about the relative "sinfulness" of various laws in Leviticus - you know the ones:

Don't eat shellfish, don't wear clothes of mixed fibers, men - don't sleep with other men (no prohibitions on lesbian sex - did you notice that - men are men no matter how far you go back in time, apparently), don't shave your beard, etc.

and Mom told me that when Christ came, he swept all of those laws (except for the gay ones) away. A few days later, she was talking about the 10 commandments, and I reminded her that when Christ came, all those laws were rendered null and void, remember? She, of course, insisted that she meant no such thing...
The point is that most fundamentalist, literalist evangelical Christians ignore completely the edicts by Christ to love your neighbor, support the poorest among you and "judge not" others. They tend to focus on the legalistic laws of the Old Testament. If a political candidate came out and confronted the religious right with that fact, they would win the moderate to left-leaning Christian base. I admit that it doesn't seem like there are that many of those types around, but I think that they are there - they are just being quiet because they don't want to admit that they follow the same religion as the right-leaning Christians.
This is, of course, just my opinion. I'm neither Christian, nor conservative, so my take on how to get Christian conservatives may be way off base - but I think it's worth a try...

In the Washington Post yesterday, there was a story about a draft proposal for "special" military courts. I'll let you all read the article to get the details, but I wanted to point out a couple of proposals that, quite frankly, scare the shit out of me.

• allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction
• defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations
• They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors
• not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials (trial in absentia!!! WTF!???!!!??)
• To secure a death penalty under the draft legislation, at least five jurors must agree

So, the upshot is that ANY crime can be prosecuted under this special military tribunal, defendants would have their constitutional right stripped from them - completely - and there would only need to be 5 of the 12 jurors in agreement to confer the death penalty on a possibly absent defendant who had NO DUE PROCESS RIGHTS. Sorry about the yelling there, but the idea that this is being considered makes me completely insane. I can't even imagine the state that this country would have to be in to allow this sort of thing to happen - I can only hope that I'm not seeing America and Americans through rose-colored glasses and I'm not overlooking the seeds of that sort of facist "court" system being planted right now.
I ran across this story on Fark.com and just reading through the comments almost made me cry. No, there are no *serious* defenders of this sort of thing posting yet (though I've barely read 100 of  the 800+ comments - there will likely be someone defending it before the end), but the confusion and the disbelief that this could be happening makes me nuts. As one Farker put it - Bush wasn't a stealth candidate - we all knew he was going to be a nut, but we allowed him to steal one election and then we allowed our fear to put him in office again.