An End to Hypocrisy
The hypocrisy of The Church is mind- boggling and California aims to do better.
From the time that you were very young, they put it into your head that a woman must only marry a man, and that anything else was an abomination in the eyes of some hypothetical deity.
They fall back on this tired and nonsensical mantra,* religiously (pun intended). They frequently use it, when they feel that one of their order has made them look bad, ………..again:
“We believe that any form of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, bestiality, incest, fornication, adultery, and pornography are sinful perversions of God’s gift of sex,” the website reads.”
“We believe that God disapproves of and forbids any attempt to alter one’s gender by surgery or appearance.”
That was their official response when they were asked to comment on the fact that another pastor had been caught with his pants down. ...Pun intended.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/07/anti-gay-church-pastor-confessed-sexually-abusing-underage-boys/
California will do better.
The Church also talks a good game about loving one’s neighbor, and showing kindness to everyone, while taking no responsibility for breeding the kind of contempt that leads to THIS, when they have made their hatred of “the other” clear.
Because of the teachings of The Church, families disown their own children and loved ones, when they exhibit signs of “sexual deviance”:
Up to 1.6 million young people experience homelessness in the United States every year. Forty percent of them identify as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender), according to a 2012 study conducted by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law. It's estimated that LGBT youth represent about 7 percent of the population, which puts that 40 percent figure into heartbreaking context.
The study's other findings are equally bleak: 46 percent of homeless LGBT youths ran away because of family rejection of their sexual orientation or gender identity; 43 percent were forced out by parents, and 32 percent faced physical, emotional or sexual abuse at home.
-Chicago Tribune
California can do better.
Before ostricizing their own children, some parents will first attempt an intervention, that sometimes entails something called “conversion therapy”.......Doctors shock the head or genitals of a male gay person, when they detect a positive reaction to gay videos:
https://www.livescience.com/25082-gay-conversion-therapy-facts.html
California is better.
It must be nice for a very religious Christian person to be able to argue that this is done out of love, or to “bring their family member back to God”. How wonderful for them, that they can sleep easy at night, by justifying the potential and actual harms including memory loss caused by the shock therapy.
Strange that I, a proud Atheist, could have more compassion for their gay children than they do, as well as for the asylum seekers and their children, currently in American concentration camps.
Are those asylum seekers, collectively, not the biblical “stranger in a strange land”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXs3_FwTnoA#action=share
How does any “religious” person face their own reflection in the mornings, after getting out of a soft, warm bed when they know that innocent people are in cages and sleeping on a cement floor, sometimes having to sleep sitting up, because there’s not even room to lie down?
California MUST do better.
We take for granted a bar of soap, toothbrush and hot showers that are being denied to innocent people, kept in tiny cages, for a month or more at a time, not knowing what’s become of their children. Their children are in similar cages, elsewhere, and many of them are being raped, and tortured with sleep deprivation, because lights stay on all the time, and we give our PETS better quality food, water and medical attention than these asylum seekers are given.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wZUZZNB1nE (Scroll in 9 minutes).
Religious people treat their pets better than our government is treating human beings and we are ALLOWING IT!! Some of us even CONDONE it, and mock the victims of this Nazi, pseudo- police group called ICE. They’ve been around for a while, but tRump has turned them into his personal henchmen.
Many “religious” people are even laughing about this heinous new brand of domestic terrorism, and supporting it. They say that immigrants are dirty, dishonest, and a drain on our economy. History has already proved that nothing could be further from the truth.
California DESERVES better…
…than to be saddled with the shame of a government that would sanction this.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/10-myths-about-immigration-in-the-united-states/
“But a preponderance of research suggests the overall benefits largely outweigh the costs, as immigrants like Ali drive innovation, enhance productivity and create jobs for Americans and visa-holders alike.”
There’s another point of interest that we like to conveniently forget, when we’re acting like entitled little punks.
Native Americans were here first. That makes US the immigrants. (Read: invaders).
That doesn’t mean that we should be expected to give back all the land that we stole from them, or that we should have done to us what we did to them: Massacres, bio-warfare with pox infected blankets that we called “gifts”, etc.
It just means that we need to take a good hard look at all the broken treaties, and all the land that is being damaged by our ignorance, and all the land that is just lying there unused, and start LISTENING.
We need to start LISTENING to how our Indigenous Populations would like to be treated, in return for showing us how to care for our land, such that we will have fewer wildfires, and mudslides due to the erosion and global warming that we’re causing.
Very soon, there will be a Listening Round Table, practically in my backyard. It will be at the Peace and Non-Violence Center, in Santa Rosa California. Members of many Tribes will be there, and some are Chiefs of their Tribes. They are hoping to hear that we are turning over a new leaf, when it comes to honoring treaties.
CALIFORNIA IS DOING BETTER.
It’s a start.
It’s starting over, as a nation made up of individuals guided by our principles, rather than those of church leaders, who tend, lately, to be in bed with the current administration. (Read: kleptocracy). The fact that we, here in California, are disincluding The Church and their bedfellow, the Federal Government, from our dealings with The Tribes, is already scoring us points with them, and many have replied to us, that they would be happy to come to our Listening Round Table, when the dates are set.
The Church was often the instigator/perpetrator of heinous crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas. Is it any wonder that they still distrust it?
In the eyes of The Church, the First Peoples were “godless savages”, and were to be converted. While The Church stole, adopted out and converted Native American children, the government went about stealing Native American land in a much less subtle way.
They did it through warfare and bio-warfare. They knowingly gave pox infected blankets as gifts to the Native Americans. They force marched them, over long distances to reservations where resources were scarce, and made them live there.
The NATION of California WILL BE BETTER.
We owe it to our Indigenous brothers and sisters to be better. We owe it to them to stop the atrocities.
Indigenous women are still being kidnapped, raped and killed at an alarming rate, and the media ignores the horror of it. They simply don’t report it, and never have. ...sort of like the atrocities that are being committed against the asylum seeking families in the ICE Concentration Camps.
We have long benefitted from the (often underpaid) labor of our brothers and sisters from South and Central America, while forgetting that they were here before we were, and that their land is also called “America” for a reason.
* Nonsensical Mantra: The existence of a superbeing has not yet been empiracally proved. On the other hand, archeologists and other scientists have found tangible evidence to support their theories of evolution.