I met one of my new neighbors in her front yard this morning, as I was looking through the collection of personal items she was selling in a weekend yard sale. I picked out two children’s chairs for my kids and gave my neighbor the four dollars she asked for the items. When she explained what the yard sale was for, I gave her all the money in my wallet.
My neighbor was collecting money for the Southern Tier AIDS Program, which works to prevent new cases of AIDS and provides free services to people in the Southern Tier of Upstate New York who are infected with HIV. Not only was my neighbor selling off many of her family possessions in order to help the Souther Tier AIDS Program provide comfort and assistance to people in the area with AIDS, but she was training to participate in the seventh annual Ride for Life, in which people pedal their bicycles around the full circumference of Cayuga Lake, one of the two largest Finger Lakes, situated in some very hilly terrain. My neighbor is making this difficult journey in order to raise yet more funds for the Southern Tier AIDS Program.
To me, my neighbor’s efforts are a sign of strong moral values, but to one right wing organization, my neighbor is only to be condemned as a part of an “assault” against America and the Catholic Church. You see, my new neighbor is a lesbian. She lives with her female partner and the daughter that they conceived together. For that reason, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property condemns my neighbor as an immoral conspirator in what it calls an “oppressive homosexual agenda”.
Working hard to gather money for sick people is oppressive, huh? So, if the people at the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property are such experts on morality, what do they suggest as a moral alternative to my neighbor’s actions? Well, while my neighbor was sweating and sacrificing to help vulnerable people in our community, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property was holding a conference in Austria at which attendees were exhorted to look to Vienna’s “centuries-old Spanish Riding School” and “the crypt-cemetery of the Hapsburg dynasty beneath the Capuchin Church” as examples of the moral excellence of Christian civilization.
Maybe an old cemetery and a riding school in Austria don’t seem morally relevant to you, but to the right wing activists at the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, they form the core of American moral values. How? Well, both institutions embody the Dark Ages, to which the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property is trying drag the United States of America back into.
You see, at the conference in Vienna, elders of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property were doing their best to teach students that people like my neighbor are part of a centuries-old cultural “crisis” that includes the Reformation, the Enlightment, and the Renaissance. The Renaissance is part of a crisis? Most of us regard the Renaissance as a step forward out of an era of profound violence, disease, ignorance, cruelty, autocracy and poverty. Not the people at the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property – they regard the Renaissance as a regrettable end to the medieval shadow over Europe. Why? The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property believes that the absolute power of the Roman Catholic Church over people’s lives in the Dark Ages was the epitome of moral values.
Heard of the anti-Jewish genoicides of the Crusades? How about witch burnings? Does the Inquisition bring anything to mind? What about the suppression of science through torture and execution? Surely you’ve heard of the Black Death, which killed off huge numbers of Europeans because the learning that could have stopped the plague was stifled by the Catholic Church? The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property believes that all these things were preferable to the Rennaisance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment.
Now, in the present, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property are involved in an effort to turn back all the progress that humanity has made in the last 500 years. They’re working against education, secular government, liberty, social security programs, democracy, personal privacy, and the separation of church and state, and doing so in the name of moral values.
By the way, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property is also one of George W. Bush’s big faith-based supporters. After the 2004 election, Raymond Drake, the society’s president wrote in a letter to Bush, “We believe that God has a plan for America and that His plan will be accomplished if we are faithful to His law. Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
The members of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property have declared “Cultural War” against Americans like me and my neighbor, Americans who refuse to swear obedience to their Dark Ages vision of morality. I’m not going to let their nasty threats and inquisition politics intimidate me, though. I know real moral values when I see them. My homosexual neighbor has more moral values in her little toe that the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property has in all its medieval castles, monasteries, cemeteries, and torture chambers.
People can get up to some rather astonishing tricks in the name of their beleifs and core “values”. I have heard people say that finding a cure for AIDS is, itself, an affront to god. Seems that this was sent to punish gay people for doing what they do, and interfering is a sin. Sort of like lightning rods: Franklin was excoriated for cheating god by inventing these items. I once asked how it was a punishment of gays when Ryan White, a local boy who committed the obviously greivous sin of being born with hemophelia died of AIDS contracted through his treatment for same. Among the rather nausiating answers I received was this, “Well, sometimes god pulls a flower with the weeds.”
You are quite correct in your assessment, though. A push-button life is the ticket for most people. The Renaissance and Enlightenment are things that happened to people who foolisly didn’t run away in time. Fundies remind me of a strand of spaghetti: they are either so rigid that they snap under pressure, or they lose all strength and can be pulled along by someone out front. I see this with the kids I deal with. I guess I’ll never understand the underlying fears that make people beleive and act in this way.
I am so sick of these Republicans and their insistence on being politically correct!
Hey, did anyone hear? The “war on terror” is now the “struggle against the fundamentalist religious extremist enemies of civilization.”
Sounds exactly like these TFPers, who are trying to undermine the Enlightenment value of reason that democratic civilization is based on, and sink us back into the Dark Ages.
These guys are enemies of civilization.
Francene, unfortunately “political correctness” seems to have its following on both ends of the political spectrum. I find both to be stifling, restrictive of thought and word, and generally nauseating. Granted, the Republinazi variety promotes projectile vomiting, rather than the light upset tummy than I’m normally left with; but both sicken…just a matter of degree, I suppose. The term “political correctness” has its roots in the former USSR, circa 1934, when it was a capital crime, punishable by death. The old Stalinist thing, you see. How little we’ve progressed….
“The Inquisition”? The Spanish one or the Italian one?
And am I the only one who gets a shudder sent down my spine through learning that there’s a group called the “American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property”? You can always tell an argument’s crap if it includes the mention of “tradition” as one of its main points, sort of a “we did it wrong before so now we’ll continue to do it wrong” approach…
Hm… Will “God’s plan” fail if we don’t all play along? Some plan he’s got there.
And Sarge; “sometimes God pulls a flower with the weeds” has to be the most sickening comment I’ve heard for months if not years. By the bye, what’s their explanation for why AIDs is now predominantly heterosexual?
HareTrinity, these folks aren’t going to be encumbered in their arguments by anything as irrelevant as logic or reason…they have GAWD, you see…these folks are the same ones who’s preachers all pronounce “Jesus” with three syllables (As in “JEE-zuz-ah!”) and “sin” with two syllables (SEE-in). Once you’ve seen them in action, all the rest falls into place. And, yes, I agree, the comment about God pulling a flower with the weeds reaches a whole new level in poor taste…In fact, calling it “poor taste” is rather like calling…jeeze, I’m having trouble coming up with an adequate metaphor…how about “like calling Dubya deceitful”?
“He loves everyone, even those the perfect being accidentally kills. Woops. He loves gays (despite branding them sinners to be executed), and women (despite the incredibly painful and sometimes fatal procedure of giving birth they’re expected to go through), and even the firstborn son of those who piss him off.”
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fundie in full action, but from the clips of Ann Coulter I’ve seen I sort of hope I never do. That woman is horrible.
Well, Hare, apparently (and this is from what I glean listening to what they say) the spread of AIDS to hetros is because hetros have allowed gays folks to be gay. It’s for being too liberal, y’see. So, to wake you up, your loved ones can be killed or suffer terribly to bring you to the light. So I hear, anyway
The junkies too, Sarge! Don’t forget about the junkies. When confronted about the high incidence of HIV/AIDS among the IV drug-using population, the Fundies simply overlooked all the scientific research that has taken place in the last 50 years and called their actions as a “lifestyle choice that keeps the addicts from the Sunlight of the Spirit” (Whatever the fuck THAT means…and I have 19 years recovery from active addiction) Folks, I have my own spiritual belief system… It works for me. I am probably right in my belief that it would never work for anyone else, but it does work for me. I refuse to ram it down anyone else’s throat. The old Golden Rule applies here. And I have found over the years that people who want to “share their religious views” with you do NOT want you to reciprocate…speaks volumes, that little observation, eh? Still we gotta watch ‘em… look what happened in Iran when the Fundies took over…and don’t ever think that it couldn’t happen here…that’s what the German Jews thought in 1930…
Spiritual beliefs are so much better left as something personal…
I was just in Vienna last month… beautiful city… damn shame the ASDTFP had to go and ruin it with their bigotry.
I love the TFP they ROCK the world!!
Have any of you ever talked to these people? Because I did last weekend.
I’m pretty sure they’ll tell you that AIDS is a diesease and the people aflicted with it need our compassion no matter how they got it. They believe in a small, secular govnernment and no one wants to go back to the dark ages and end science. All of you just flipped your shit about bigotry and then you judged people you’ve clearly either never met or had very limited contact with.
Has anyone ever heard this phrase: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you?” Let’s just forget for a moment that it came from the bible. Would it mean something different to you if your next door neighbor, co-worker, or boss invented that phrase? Probably not. However, I could bet my life savings that you would want your next door neighbor, co-worker or boss to treat you like you treat them. Unless, of course, you are one of those individuals that believe there is nothing wrong with stealing, lying or harming your next door neighbor, co-worker or boss.