April 14, 2007

How I became a Liberal Democrat.

I was a Republican. My brother, parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents were Republican. Like most of my family I would vote for a candidate just because he or she was a Republican.

August 1986 I was transferred to the engineering department at the company I worked. One of my co-workers in his paranoid delusions told me that the Republican party was being taken over by the fundamentalist Christian movement with the idea that everyone will have to bow down to their beliefs.

Naturally, I didn’t believe him and I told him that. He said “just watch, listen and learn”. He was right. I paid attention to what I was reading and hearing on the news and I found out a few things that I find disturbing.

I noticed over the last twenty years how the Fundamentalist Movement has been taken over by the extreme right. Some of the things I learned scare me. Like (and these are just some of the latest):

At the Grand Canyon National Park visitors center all books that describe the canyon as being created several million years ago by erosion of water and weather have been replaced with books that claim the canyon was created by Noah’s flood and dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark because “it says so in the Bible”.

Global Warming, although the vast majority of the world's leading climatologists and scientists studied and know is real and happening is called “junk science” the fundamentalists want to have only creationism (now called intelegent design) taught in schools as fact because “it says so in the Bible”.

Using unwanted fertilized eggs from fertility clinics cannot be used for stem cell research to help cure diseases like diabetes, heart desease, Parkinsons and Alzheimers even though they will be destroyed anyways because that would be murder. Besides, there has not been any cures using them so, why even try. However, capitol punishment is good because “it says so in the Bible”.

Pat Robertson of the 700 club is the chancellor and President of Regent University a “Christian” law school is using his school to forward his agenda of controlling the US government to make this a fundamentalist Christian country where everyone has to pray to his version of god.

There are about one hundred fifty graduates of Regent University (about one sixth of all graduates) working in some form of government work.

John Ashcroft former Attorney General teaches at Regent helped to start the ball rolling by systematically gutting the Civil Rights Division of the justice department by firing or forcing out career lawyers and replacing them with members of conservative or Christian groups or people with little or no civil rights experience.

Monica Gooding now former counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department Liaison to the White House, a 1999 graduate of Regent, continued the tradition of the replacing talented experienced lawyers with junior people that were loyal to the Bush White House and the Christian movement. Rather than tell the truth about her role in and what she knows about the prosecutor purge she “took a bullet for the team” by pleading the fifth and resigning her position so she wouldn’t have to testify in front of Congress.

There are many examples of the corruption in the govenment by self-described Christans doing "God's work".

I thought being a Christian ment telling the truth, and accepting others as they are.

Silly me.

About four or five years ago on my way home from work, I was listening to a conservative radio talk show host blast the liberal Democrats and how terrible they were for not blindly believing everything President Bush and the Republican Party said. The radio host said that it was time for all his listeners to take a stand and “do what’s right”. I went to the town hall and now I’m a registered Democrat. I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.

That is why I am now a Liberal Democrat.

1. An environmental policy that totally ignores the reality of environmental damage.
   
   
2. A policy that takes this country into an unwinnable war in the middle east based on lies and arrogance .
   
   
3. A policy that ignores the real nuclear (as he pronounces it nukuler) threats by calling the leaders of other countries evil and refusing to talk to them.
   
   
4. A policy that tells anyone that disagrees with him is un-American and cannot speak.
   
   
5. A policy of putting the most incompetent and inexperienced people in positions of power.
   
   
6. A policy of disregarding the Constitution to satisfy the agenda of your friends.