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| Y'all need to stop dreaming about yourself on FOX TV Mr Gohmert. |
There really are times when I am gob smacked by the rantings of the Religious right. This is one of those times. The following is an excerpt from Huffington Post and references a couple of articles that left me very angry and very speechless. I really appreciate Clay Naff for writing this response to the American Family Association's Reverend Jerry Newcombe and Texas Representative Louie Gohmert. I appreciate it because he says what I was thinking, but does it much better than I would have.
Religious Right Just Can't Resist Exploiting Aurora Tragedy for Political Gain
By Clay Ferris Naff - Huffington Post - 7/22/2012
......What I find utterly revolting and indecent, however, is the rush by the Religious Right to exploit this tragedy to trash their enemies, judge the victims, and bully people into joining their religious and political movement.
On the American Family Association's radio program AFA Today, the hosts wasted no time lining up a far-right Evangelical minister, Jerry Newcombe of Truth in Action Ministries, to tell the audience that among the dead in the theater only those who were true Christians have gone to heaven. The rest, he suggested, are already consigned to hell. (Yep, Christians are sure known by their love.)Thanks, Preach. Great message to share with the grieving families. Of course, AFA Today doesn't give a turd about their feelings; the lesson of the day was not of comfort or comprehension; it was yet another opportunity to scare their listeners into joining the flock. And not just any flock. The program went to great lengths to discredit any minister or church that deviates from the Old Time Religion view of God as a stern and wrathful judge. How, according to Rev. Newcombe, should we respond to the shooting? (Yep, it's like the Son never said anything at all about the Father being all about love.)
"This would be a good time to ask yourself, why have you not accepted Jesus Christ? ... Unless you repent, you know, you too will fall under God's judgment." That was, word for word, the take-home message broadcast with approval by the American Family Association before the families concerned had even had a quiet moment to come to terms with this awful event.
But for pure, unadulterated indecency, it's hard to beat Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas. Appearing on a radio program hosted by former Congressman Ernest Istook, Gohmert spared no time before politicizing the tragedy in the most irresponsible manner imaginable:
"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place. ... Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important. ... We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country."I'm not sure why he didn't come right out and blame Barack Hussein Obama and Nancy Pelosi for the shootings, but perhaps he was so caught up in his bloviating that airtime just ran out. Talk like this just adds one more piece of evidence to the case that the American Religious Right has sunk back down in the slime pit to the record depths it set back in the 1950s.
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But, Representative Gohmert did manage to imply that the sky rocketing suicide rate amongst Iraq and Afghani Vets is because they were all atheists before his airtime ran out:
"But, ya know, I might mention something else that had not been public yet, most of us that follow the military know we have had an extraordinary increase in suicide in the military –and it’s just heartbreaking. And, I’ve sat with families around their kitchen tables and they are going ‘we never saw this coming – ya know, we didn’t know.” And there was a study commissioned…
ISTOOK: And, Louie, we’re gonna have to finish...
GOHMERT: Well, let me say this very quickly – but its six thousand personality index profiles. And, what they found, and I don’t know if they will make it public – one of the participants told me ‘ the results may not go public’; but, all of the people who committed suicide, within their thousands of people studied, were part of the 2-percent most atheistic members of the military . We’ve lost our faith."
This last sentence in the Istook interview really red lined my anger meter. We are now losing our soldiers/vets at the rate of one a day from suicide. As with Viet Nam, at this pace the casualties from suicide will exceed battle casualties. But of course they won't be considered battle casualties and so their surviving relatives will receive no survivors benefits. According to Gohmert these soldiers who were psychologically crippled fighting his neocon wars are just hopeless atheists without the spiritual strength to survive the brutality they witnessed. They would have been better off if they had a very healthy dose of 'fear of the Lord'. I guess that means too terrified of the Lord to take their own lives.
Just how ignorant is Gohmert? He also mentioned the Aurora gunman could have been stopped if even a few people in the theater had been carrying concealed weapons. This conveniently overlooks the fact the gunman was in a dark theater in which he had thrown tear gas canisters and he himself was in full body armor. Perhaps this deranged gunman's thinking was just a little ahead of Gohmert's. And that is quite the statement about the current state of the Republican party.
