The dialogue continues with my Red State friend:

I like your take on the definition of a Christian. I would only point out that I will help the poor, hungry, sick, but not the lazy. If one is able, go get a job! I have to!

I agree with you, but I think you mischaracterize the majority of people receiving public assistance. Sure, there’s a few shiftless people who cheat the system, but they are a tiny minority. Lots of these people are working two minimum wage jobs, or are in the military, or are mentally ill.

On gays in public: I don’t play grab-ass with my wife in public, what we do intimately is in private. Also I have children that I would like to instruct and explain things to at my speed. Most flamboyant gays do not. I ask for a little tolerance there.

How many flamboyant gays are prancing around playing grab-ass on the streets of of your little Red State town these days? Is this a huge problem you’re having to deal with? All I mentioned was gays holding hands. I think any extreme public displays of affection — straight or gay — are rude.

I suspect the tolerance of which you speak refers to actions subtler than “grab-ass”. Would you be upset if you’re walking along the street with your kid as two gay fellows pass by holding hands? Suppose one lesbian gives her partner a little goodbye kiss — not a make-out session — where your kids can see it. What if a transgendered male in full feminine dress, makeup, wig, and heels is your cashier at the grocery checkout? What you ask for as tolerance I interpret as “go ahead and be gay, just so long as me and my kids can pretend you don’t exist.”

I challenge you to prove when I have cursed, discriminated, or had any other offensive interchange with any homosexual. I ask they conduct themselves publicly similarly to the way I do.

Why, I have images from my own multi-billion dollar spy satellite showing that on March 7th, 1976, you called your effeminate classmate “a sissy” and refused to pick him for your team on “Red Rover”. -=grin=-

And again, you’re asking that “they conduct themselves publicly similarly to the way I do.” Diversity is OK, just as long as everyone acts just like you.

So, let’s address how you conduct yourself publicly. Do you ever give any public impression that you love your wife? Do you relate stories about your family life? Do you ever read in public magazines like Maxim or GQ? What is it that you don’t want the gay people doing in public?

(So much for the truce. But I just can’t get past it. I believe that gay rights is the single most important civil rights issue of our generation. I believe that my nieces’ kids will look back at the way we treat gays like the way we look at how our grandparents treated blacks.)

I kind of have my own “no spin zone” I am not a republican; I am an independent compassionate conservative. I am also not like many “Christians”. I’m learning not to box you in, watch that you don’t blanket-accuse me of bigoted closed minded actions. When you find specific offences I will take your crap.

I try my best not to paint anyone with such a broad brush. I think so far I’ve responded only to your points without any assumptions regarding any group to which you may belong. If I’ve not done that, please correct me.

On the other hand, you cannot avoid “boxing me in” if you call my reponses “crap”. The proper term is “liberal excrement”. 😉

(I loved this mental image) If you worked for me and I saw you dancing in public, in a Tutu with your dick in a mason jar full of liver…

No, no, I’m just carrying around the mason jar. I do the liver-porking at home where no one can see.

I’d fire you in a heartbeat! I won’t apologize for it! If you can be radical, I can be stubborn.

So it’s OK to fire people for what they do in their off-hours that has nothing to do with work? So, perhaps, if you worked for me and I saw you in your off-hours dressed as a businessman at a Bush/Cheney rally, I could fire you for that?

I see things like that in a context of survival. If a person is flaming they should act it out in private or in San Francisco only, as a matter of survival. There are things I shouldn’t do or places I shouldn’t go as a white guy. as a matter of my survival.

Wow, you stun me. There should be special places for gays and special places for whites, and should they stray from their like-minded enclaves, they deserve any threat to their survival. So much for the melting pot.

Quick history quiz: which 20th century country most successfully enacted the forced segregation of gays, cripples, and Jews for the betterment of straight, white, Christian society?

The word marriage. Yes it is as simple to me as the defense of a word. Or maybe part of a concept (so maybe not so simple). One reason it is good for a government to reward a man and woman for getting together exclusively and making babies, is a greater tax base (always about the money isn’t it?).

So my wife and I, who have no children and probably never will, are getting a special benefit we do not deserve? Should infertile people or elderly people past their fertile prime be allowed to marry?

Gay couples don’t make babies. (I hope that’s not news to you)

Melissa Etheridge and her partner had a baby, thanks to the donation of David Crosby’s sperm. Many gays and lesbians have their own children from previous relationships. Many straight people have babies without ever getting married, and some of those babies get adopted by gay people.

There are rewards offered to married people to encourage more of them, therefore more taxpayers.

The “marriage is to encourage making babies” argument is a red herring. Marriage does not require nor encourage procreation in any way. Marriage is a contract that binds together two people in shared legal support, responsibility, and benefit. It exists to enforce monetary and property rights.

What does reward procreation is the tax deduction one receives for caring for a child, and it applies to children of heterosexual parents, homosexual parents, single parents, and adoptive parents.

Now I think it’s fair to allow people the right to choose who gets their inheritance, shares in insurance benefits or retirement benefits. That’s why I think a civil union is a good idea.

But the amendments against gay marriage that are being proposed would forbid that! Also, a civil union would not have to be recognized in all fifty states. Finally, in 1952, the Supreme Court decided in “Brown v. Board of Education” that the concept of “separate but equal” is never equal. Civil unions would give gays a lesser form of marriage that would never provide the same framework of rights as marriage.

If you want civil unions, I’m fine with that, just so long as that is the only benefit that straights can get, too. It’s funny, during the last round of anti-gay initiatives, I heard the scream of “no special rights for gays”, but now we’re talking about extending special rights to straights.

Often times gays and lesbians spit in the face of religion, so why do they fight so hard for this right to a mostly religious title?

Who are these gays spitting in the face of religion? It’s usually religion spitting in the face of gays.

Marriage is not a religious title. Yes, churches perform marriages and ascribe all sorts of spirituality to it. And if gays were demanding that the churches marry them, I’d be upset about that.

Why do they fight so hard? Because it is a legal title that conveys hundreds of rights and responsibilities. Because government discriminates against them solely on the basis of who they are. Because gays just want to be treated like everyone else.

Now, for a personal aside: how many gay people do you know? Guess what? I’ll guarantee you the number is not zero.

A last word on abortion. I am hard nosed on this one. I am sorry for those few victims of rape or incest. I have made myself and my wife available to help in these situations; however the only girls we have ever helped were careless enough to let down their guards (or something) in a back seat on a dark road. Some kept the child; some gave them up for adoption. All those kids will have the right to become all God wants them to be. It isn’t easy, even in an ideal situation. God makes us this promise: You will never be given more than you can handle.

I’m glad you help people, it shows your compassion and Christianity, and I’m very glad you “walk the walk”. I worry about the “careless enough to let down their guards” statement, though. It sounds a little like blaming the victim. Or maybe it was God’s will that they got raped?

If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion? You just killed Beethoven.

I would never recommend to any woman that she have an abortion. I would ask her, “what do you want to do about your pregnancy?” If she chose to bear the child, great, if she chose to abort the pregnancy, that’s her right.

Once again, a zygote is not Beethoven. You’re confusing acorns for oak trees. I understand that this is a religious issue for you, and a one-minute-old twenty-celled non-viable embryo deserves rights that supercede the autonomy of a twenty-year-old living breathing woman.

Let’s take your side for a minute. Life begins at conception. Fetuses deserve the same level of protection as living humans. Abortion is murder.

OK, so no doctor can perform an abortion. But there’s plenty of things a woman can do induce her own abortion. Can we be sure that she won’t try to kill her fetus? And if she does, do we try her for murder? How do we prove that her actions killed her fetus? Was it a miscarriage? We’d better just lock up the pregnant woman in a hospital ward to insure that she eats right, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and doesn’t jump up and down vigorously.

Ah, but then women will just buy EPT tests and if they discover they’re pregnant, they’ll keep it secret and self-abort in private. (There’s nothing quite as compassionate as forcing pregnant women to avoid doctors.) We’d better force women, from the age of menses on, to submit to monthly pregnancy tests administered by the state. Life is precious after all. As long as they pass their monthly test, they’re free to go, but if pregnant, it’s off to the maternity ward. (I wonder who’s going to pay for that nine months of hospitalization?)

Then there’s those women who are taking the pill. The pill does not prevent conception. It creates conditions in the womb inhospitable to the fetus. It prevents an already conceived baby from attaching to the wall of the womb. The same can be said of the patch, the shot, and the IUD. So these birth control measures will have to be banned, as they kill conceived babies.

But wait, there’s more! Anytime a man and a woman have sex, there is a non-zero chance that the woman’s egg will become fertilized (condoms break, sponges leak, etc.) Most fertilized eggs, a.k.a. conceived babies, never do attach to the wall of the womb and are flushed out during the woman’s menstrual cycle. Think of the hundreds of dead babies contained on Tampax throughout a woman’s lifetime!

OK, so maybe this has gotten a bit ridiculous. No sex? No birth control? Dead babies in periods? Maybe we should revise the definition a bit. Life begins at conception when a fetus attaches itself to the uterine wall. This way we still allow the pill.

The problem with this is now a conceived baby must meet a physical condition for which it is considered life: attached, it’s a baby; unattached, it’s a period. Now we have to argue about how long it has been attached — a minute? a day? a month? — and we’re saying that at some point during a pregnancy, it’s a life we must protect, but before that it is not a life. At some point we need to lock that woman up and force her to complete her pregnancy, but before that it’s her body and she can smoke, drink, and jump up and down vigorously.

Also, if it once was attached (a baby!) and then detaches and exits with the menstrual flow (a miscarriage), how will we know the blood on the Tampax contains babies who were once attached and not just fertilized eggs that never attached. In addition to those monthly pregnancy tests, perhaps we should have the women collect and turn in their tampons for inspection, and if there are cells thereon that have multiplied enough times to indicate that the baby was once attached, we’ll need to begin the investigation into whether she simply miscarried or she self-aborted.

I’m just looking for consistency from the pro-life crowd. If it’s a baby at the moment of conception, we’re going to have to do a whole lot of intrusive things to protect that baby. Like I said before, pro-life means forcing women to have babies at gunpoint.

I’ve rambled, and you probably think the last eight paragraphs were stupid. So let me close with this: Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one. Encourage others not to have one. Provide alternatives (like you do) to women other than abortions. Preach that abortionists are going to hell.

But it is not your body. If freedom means anything, it means the right to control your body so long as it harms no one else, and legally speaking, a fetus is a “no one” — not yet, anyway.

Also I know of a handful of women who would gladly carry any fetus. Life is too precious to make light of or let others flush away.

Do you know enough of them to take every unwanted fetus in America?

You never answered me on whether life is so precious that we should abolish the death penalty. Is life so precious that we should guarantee health care coverage for all Americans? What about Dr. Kervorkian; is life so precious that people should not be allowed physician-assisted suicide? (Oregon is the only state that allows this, by the way.)

I might consider doing a few left and right collaborated columns. Kinda like Hannity and Colmes, but with shorter hair and text only.

But unlike Hannity and Colmes, this liberal won’t be a sideshow afterthought token mealy-mouthed liberal like Colmes.

I take it you watch a lot of FauxNews Channel. You do realize that “fair and balanced” is an attempt at irony, right? Here’s an example of how FauxNews creates phony analogies meant to mislead viewers to phony assumptions:

FauxNews once said: “277 US soldiers have now died in Iraq which means that statistically speaking US soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California which is roughly the same geographical size.”Which would be a valid assertion, if there were 140,000 soldiers in California and they were the only ones being murdered (i.e., you can’t say deaths of hundreds from among thousands of soldiers in a certain land-mass area equates to murders of hundreds from among millions of citizens in another land-mass area of roughly the same size.)

That’s a swell obfuscation meant to convey an image to viewers who may be thinking that dead American boys in Iraq is a bad thing. “Hey, folks, it ain’t so bad! Why, our soldiers are no worse off than if they were living in California!” If you gave the viewers an accurate statistic, like “247 soldiers dead out of 140,000 over a four-month period is equivalent to two murders a day in Canyon County, every day, for four months straight,” why people might start to vote for Democrats!

A survey once compared the answers by FauxNews viewers versus PBS/NPR’s audience with respect to factual, non-partisan current events. Here’s the results:

“Did we find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” (Fact: We never did.)

FauxNews: Yes = 33%

PBS/NPR: Yes = 11%

“Does World Opinion Favor the US Invasion of Iraq?” (Fact: The world overwhelmingly opposed it.)

FauxNews: Yes = 35%

PBS/NPR: Yes = 5%

“Has The US Found Links Between Iraq and al-Qaeda?” (Fact: There was no link, even Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have said so publicly.)

FauxNews: Yes = 67%

PBS/NPR: Yes = 16%

So apparently, the more you watch “fair and balanced” FauxNews, the less you know about current events and the more likely you are to believe the Bush administration’s spin. Amazing!

I sometimes work on new-construction, residential job sites here in the Valley. One day, I was feeling felony grouchy anyway, and this Mexican kid came scuffling through the house I was prepping for painting inside. He only knew a little English and obviously thought he could blend in by studying MTV before jumping the fence and crossing the desert.

So, you’re sure the kid was an illegal immigrant, yet someone hired him anyway, in violation of labor laws? And you didn’t report this? Is it not possible that he’s was born an American citizen, son of migrant workers from out near Homedale, and just doesn’t speak English?

His hat was sideways and his pants were at half staff. He was a part of the insulation crew, looking for access to the attic.

Now, I look a little different than you might remember. I’m a little thicker and sport a flat top that’s pretty high and tight. This poor kid finally approached me to ask something, but before he could finish stuttering I was in his face like a drill sergeant, he’d already pissed me off two ways.

What was it he’d done to piss you off, not speak English and dress in a way you don’t like?

I said something like: “Boy, you’d better screw that hat around straight and pull your pants up before you address me!” He decided he would rather talk to someone else about the access. My helper was on the floor laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. I didn’t think it was funny till sometime later. I hope the kid learned to blend in better and to take English lessons somewhere. You know how I feel about that already.

Yes, you’ve made that clear. Act like I act, speak like I speak, dress like I dress, love like I love, and we’ll get along just fine.

Thanx for the give and take. it is good even we don’t see every thing eye-to-eye.

“Radical” Russ — Anytime, friend. I completely agree — more dialogue is what this world needs, not less…

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