California has a Super Majority of Dems in Both our State House and Assembly

Californians have elected a 2/3 majority in the Senate and a super majority in the state assembly. And as we’ve all heard, “as California goes so does the nation.” I think this, as much or more than the presidential election show that people are waking up to the fact that the Republicans are double talking southern strategists who protect the interest of the 1 percent and the 1 percent only. It is heartening. I believe this is what spirit was referring to in the summer when it gave me such high numbers for the assembly and senate in CA and maybe referring to the mid-term election. CA will be a petri dish for the nation. It has always been “conventional wisdom” to split the house and senate in order to, I guess, keep balance? But this strategy I think we are already seeing has been a stupid one with the new radical right wing Republican party. It may have worked when rational thought was still in vogue but alas now days it’s passe’ among Republicans as there are no longer any moderate ones.

I do want to go into some darker things about visions I have had about the backlash. As all my readers can see there are some seriously psychotic, nasty, delusional people who populate the far right. They seized control of the Republican party and in essence have dismantled it ,because lets face it, most people are not psychotic, nasty, delusional people who want to see others starve while the upper crust pick the bones of the dead from the rotting corpses after the self induced Rapture. 

Most people are reasonable – and it used to be that the Republican party (many years ago in a long lost time) were reasonable, normal people. They even did some amazing things like Lincoln who freed the slaves. They used to be a moderate party who just had different ideas on how to get things done but alas they have been highjacked by the birthers, tea-baggers, plutocrats and religious zealots who have EVERYTHING in COMMON with the Muslims zealots they are so “afraid” of, yet they believe exactly the same things – that women should be chattel, have no rights to their own bodies, and government should be a theocracy.

Yet somehow they don’t see the irony, or similarity between their desire to merge State with Church as those zealots in the Middle-East who started a similar movement back in the 70s and turned countries like Iran from moderate western leaning countries into theocracies that we now are horrified by. I ask these people why they believe merging Christianity with State business would be any better – that experiement was tried during the middle-ages and was an abysmal failure similar to what we have seen in the middle-east. Or the merger of the  made up, bizarre Nazi religion that was merged with their government.

THEOCRACY really DOESN’T WORK. Seriously, just look at the history.

Problem is most people who support a theocracy think that theocracy will be a theocracy that looks like their religion – but what if it isn’t? What if you were a Christian and had to convert to Buddhism – would that be OK?

Yeah, no, we all know the answer…

This is why the founding fathers seperated church and state. And those who say they were “Christian” should do a little digging into what those of us who read call “history” as it turns out most of them were occultists.

Yes, they believed in God (used as a general term for a higher being) but they weren’t all Christians – Ben Frankly I’m pretty sure was an atheist.

Controlling religious belief is what the COMMUNISTS did to their people. They would NOT ALLOW ANY RELIGION. They REQUIRED a belief in ATHEISM because of the statement by Marx that “Religion was the Opiate of the masses.” What the extreme right are proposing is in essence no different than what the Chinese do to their people (but on the other side of the same coin) by disallowing personal freedom to choose how many children to have. This is the same thing the right-wing Christians want to do – they just want to take the choice away on the opposite side. Ironically, both the far right’s ideas truly mirror the very things they are terrified of.

Government – at least in a DEMOCRACY – has no right to invade people’s bedrooms, privacy or lifestyle. I have a ministerial credential and have married Gay couples many times because I believe that being GAY IS COMPLETELY NATURAL and people shouldn’t be punished or disallowed rights that other people have because they fall in love differently than the majority. Just as being Wiccan, Buddhist, Mormon, a Spiritualist or whatever religious or non-religious persuasion one has – should not be discriminated against – nor should it be the business of the public or the government.

It states plainly in our BILL OF RIGHTS. We have the right to:  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

So unless those rights impinge on the welfare of others than case closed. THE END. NO more discussion should be had – it is not the business of those who are straight to decide the fate of gay people anymore than it is the right of men to decide what women do with their bodies or for women to decide that male pattern baldness should be punishable by law. It’s all ABSOLUTELY ABSURD. There is NO MORAL arguement to be made – sorry folks on the right. Give me one actual MORAL arguement not the lame “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve,” crap. Actually God did make Adam and Steve because 10 percent of all animals on this planet are homosexual. My beloved cat Geb was gay and lucky for him he wasn’t born human or he would have been made to feel like crap about himself for the way GOD made him.

You can’t have it both ways – God = all powerful and loving and God = makes mistakes and creates horrible suffering and evil. (And don’t try making the Devil argument he’s a later invention.) He’s an amalgamation of many other demonic figures, old Gods/Goddess and even the word Hell comes from the Ancient Goddess of the Hell Fires up in Scandinavia where souls crossed over into the next world. Maybe that was like heaven to them – it is REALLY REALLY COLD there. 

All I ask from the far right wingers is they stop watching their daily zombie diet of FOX News and just do some actual research using BOOKS and CREDIBLE sources. It’s not a coincidence that the more educated one is in the bible the more one sees inconsistencies and questions their religious beliefs. In fact many great theological scholars end up Agnostics and all the priests I knew back when I was quickly converted to Catholicism after my father’s death were openly so. 

However the urge to be ONE WITH GOD is absolutely and totally human and noble. I absolutely get the need to merge with this mysterious and beautiful force that is so beyond our understanding that we have hundreds of different interpretations of the same religion in each organized religion and in older religions like Hinduism there are thousands not to mention how abstract and esoteric the ideas get. 

I totally applaud the desire to be close to God/Creator/Goddess/Great Spirit/Life Force/Universe/Multivesre whatever you want to call it. I get it. I have it in excess. This is exactly why no one way works and why we should never NEVER judge or associate right/wrong or hatred with this SACRED FORCE.  We have to allow each soul to find his/her way to the Great One. 

As Rodney King said, “Can’t we all just get along.” I mean really. God has a plan for everyone and the truth is if you are judgmental and nasty for sure you don’t know it. In fact you are lost yourself. God doesn’t work through fear because fear is the opposite of love not hate. I say this because love brings compassion and understanding and fear brings intolerance, hatred and disconnection and the source of all love is GOD/SPIRIT/UNIVERSE/CREATOR/MULTIVERSE/PLACE YOUR WORD FOR IT HERE. 

I am heartened today by the fact that the stars (which reflect the Great Spirit’s plans for us) have been abided.

I however am not naive to the very strong and powerful forces of greed, selfishness and shortsightedness which fuel the motives of those who must feed their need to feel important by lording over other human beings – aka plutocrats (think of Trump as the inadvertent spokesman for their subconscious thoughts as he appears to be a walking Id.) These dark forces will rear their ugly heads again and we have a long way to go to correct the many years they’ve had to game the system. 

One must always be vigiliant against these forces everywhere. Lets not forget Germany was a Democracy before Hitler was elected.

And for those who said it couldn’t happen here (those I argued with as far back as HS) take heed – ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Many blessings and peace be with all of you,

Denise

The Mosque Debate… Dr. Laura & Sarah Palin

Being of Jewish origin during the revival of the Nazi movement the whole Mosque debate stirs up great emotion for me. When I was a 3 year old my mother put me in a cooking class at the local JCC (Jewish Community Center – which is very much the same as this proposed center which will be primarily a community center with Muslim religious affiliations) and while I was taking the class there the Nazis actually lit a bomb at that center. Luckily, no one died. However this act of terrorism took me out of my connection to my roots and made my mother fearful of having me and my brother participating in our culture of origin.

I actually lived in the area where the Nazis in the 70s marched through, a mini-series of the event was called “Skokie.” The same polarization that exists now between the Muslims and the Tea-Bagger McShaggers, are the same sort of people who participated in the anti-Semitism I experienced as a child against the Jews in the Chicago area where I grew up. Those idiot Nazis where actually given a permit to have a rally and parade through Skokie (an entirely Jewish area of Chicago at the time.) However, back then, during my childhood it appeared we as Americans knew what our forefathers had fought and died for – the rights that are part of our constitution. The 2 great wars were but a couple of generations away and we seemed generally to tolerate one another in a way we don’t anymore. Those who were the Nazis back then were marginalized and given no power and were the butt of people’s scorn and jokes – there’s actually a reference in the Blues Brothers movie which sums up the general feeling people had for those sorts of intolerant jerks, it goes something like, “Nazis, I hate Nazis” and they run the Nazis parading on a bridge off and into the water.

We have always had those who were scared sick of the “pinkos,” or the anarchists, the witches or whatever other version of silliness people felt threatened by. This mentality leads to the believe that all people who participate in the Muslim religion – a giant organized religion (1 of the 3 largest in the world) are all terrorists. It’s as stupid as thinking  Catholics are equivalent to all Christians, and they are all evil tortures due to the abhorrent and evil deeds done during the Spanish Inquisition by the Catholics (who killed about 25% of all women during the middle-ages, serious genocide there.) If one were to say that would be beyond absurd, yet it seems to be the mantra of the extreme right. All organized religions have different sects and operate under a generic umbrella.

Christianity for example can be preached to by someone who has no formal education about the bible and has been ordained through the mail, drinks poison and lets snakes bite him while talking in tongues oppose that style with a Christian who sits tidily in a row of austere wooden benches and is preached to by a minister (with a doctorates degree in religious studies) about the abstract meaning of some remote passage of the bible. Those are pretty different experiences of the “same” religion. The same could be said of the orthodox or Hasidic Jewish people compared to those who uphold the religion as more of a cultural experience and/or are reformed Jews.

I personally am not fond of any sort of religious zealotry no matter what color or shape it comes in, as it always seems to include violence – the natural antithesis of spirituality.  I believe the enemy of any religious or spiritual system is intolerance of others belief systems as this leads to hatred, violence and ultimately away from God.

If I were the people who were starting the community center however my fear would be that some horrible zealot would do what happened to my JCC back in the early 70s in some sort of bizarre retaliation for 9/11 – despite the fact that there is NO relationship. This property isn’t actually even that close to the actual site, the whole thing is just a bunch of right-wing racist, fascist scare tactics and we as Americans should stand against this disgusting behavior of the far right nut jobbers.

It’s really getting old our tolerance for allowing these idiots to have such a huge cultural impact on our America. Their America resembles Nazi Germany and if I could build a time machine and send them back there, I’d do it. They seem to think the past was where the glory days lie. I think they’d find that it was really not too glorious, especially for the moronic women of the right who would find their collective voice of stupidity silenced, relegated to the jobs that perhaps befit them best, being home makers and child bearers and nothing more. I think this is where Dr. Laura (Dr. of physical education that is) should be, she should go back to being a mean gym teacher and practice the BS she preaches. Why are we listening to what she has to say? Or the narcissistic, quitter Sarah Palin?  After all they have lady parts which make them inferior according to the line they supposedly tow.

One can not be a patriarchal woman of power without being a hypocrite and a moron, both of which disqualify them for giving advice. Oh, and Dr. Laura is Jewish and I doubt very much she’d like it if someone repeated the word Kike repeated over and over again at her while the other person pretended that they didn’t understand the difference between trying to take the piss out of a word by those who are called that name and those who say those words with hatred and violence in the context of a history of murderous hatred. And if she doesn’t get that, I just feel sorry for her inferior intellect.

We all know Dr. Laura is a “morally inferior person” (by her standards) who yells at other people for her own perceived weaknesses – being that she’s had at least one known affair while married and has herself been divorced and I believe has been estranged from her mother and has done everything she has railed on against on her show while presenting herself as if she were an expert on morality and a trained psychologist. She is a despicable human being whom I’m happy to see leave the public specter.

But going back to the debate about the community center several blocks away from ground zero. If I were in the position of running that organization my main concern would be for the people who would be serviced by my organization. Frankly, I would be worried about their safety which is ironically a form of terrorism! And I would point this out in the public sphere, explaining in the most rudimentary way how the right-wing crazies are stirring the hatred pot and are in effect doing the very thing we were supposed to be against – terrorism.

The right-wing are trying to block people’s rights like gay marriage, blocking this community center and taking federal law into their hands in Arizona illegally – kind of like having to wear a star of David on your outfit at all times, and countless other insane and uncompassionate policies, including trying to make it seem like “taking back America” is anything more than an anachronism for having only white presidents, or the evil thing of trying to disallow a person’s right to citizenship when they were born on this soil.

And where were all these right-wing fruit cakes when the boarders were opened and they could exploit the truck loads of illegal immigrants, creating a new slave class? Oh, yeah they were all for that. They’ve used propaganda, hatred, racism and all the awful things we supposedly have fought for, and turned it back around onto other innocent people.

Who is going to use that community center? Primarily children and are they expected to be responsible for what some idiot zealot did before they were even born? We have to stop the madness of grouping human beings together as a unit based on color, creed or religion – because we are all individuals – isn’t THAT the AMERICAN WAY? And how can one fight for pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps if we can’t even agree that we are individuals with the potential to think, feel and move apart from our class, race, color, creed or religious affiliation? It’s all just so insane and ridiculous.

I ask only this – When will we evolve into human beings? Because right now those who show no tolerance or empathy are nothing more than shadow people.

May the light prevail through our darkness,

Denise