Jesse and I watched little 6 day old Mckinlee last night for awhile.  I had put on the new Muppet movie because I didn't want to hear political commentary shows in the background while spending time with her.  The movie reminded me of the claims that I heard on FOX "Noise" that the Muppet movie is communistic and anti-capitalistic - gotta watch out for those muppets, trying to corrupt the country, one movie at a time! 

Voices

Every day I am reminded that there is so much goodness in the world.  The key way I am reminded is through other people - their kindness, compassion, their intelligence that is able to see beyond one little corner of the world, their world.  Seeing this gives me so much hope.  The important thing is for these people (myself included) to be heard, and not let the louder, uglier, more minor in number voices drown out all the other voices, or intimidate the other voices into silence.  I've never had much confidence in expressing a dissenting opinion, but I am learning in my old age!  This issue of equality is more important than my comfort level.

Check out website Faith in America

Okay, I've edited the last two posts, hopefully less typos and a bit more coherent.  I have terrible insomnia these days, but my sleep aid induces terrible spelling and run on sentences along with falling asleep. 

Check out the website Faith in America - really, really good info.  If we keep talking (respectfully) without backing down one of 2 things will happen, we'll piss people off and they won't talk to with us, or some, we can engage in a dialogue where we agree to respect and listen to each others differing views and we might actually learn something. 

Faith in America | Ending the Harm of Religion-based Bigotry ...

Religion-based bigotry is the No. 1 impediment to equality and full human dignity...Help us end it!

www.faithinamerica.org

http://www.faithinamerica.org/about-fia/

Hmmmm - what shall we choose to be extremists about next?

The religious right at one point were going after keeping blacks away from schools and colleges, and to keep interracial marriage illegal (read historical article below)   History shows that they needed some more issues and and one man tentatively suggested abortion, after religious leaders (excluding catholics) had previously said positive things about it.  Although the bible speaks very plainly in Malachi about divorce (God hates divorce) curiously divorce wasn't a hot topic for the men who met (no woman present) as they are usually the ones seeking divorces and benefit by not being so financially accountable (time to upgrade to a younger hotter wife or girlfriend), and now the big hot topic - discriminating against and demarginalizing gays.  Because life is not fully lived unless you're foaming at the mouth yelling and crazed about something.  Logic does not prevail in which that you might read, study, talk to people of the gblt community and have respectful, mutual exchanges of information and ideas.  Giving up your right to "be right" - from God's mouth to your ear, you're right, everyone else is wrong, even if a bunch of people got a totally different message from their Abba Father.  The history I read speaks for itself.  After all, I don't have to marry my rapist anymore, I don't have to have sex with my father to have children, I don't have to be married to a husband with multiple wives (all taken from the bible), so why on earth shoud it be a requirement for me to think ill and treat a population with disdain and disrespectfully just because some unloving, judgmental christians aren't cool with homosexuality?  I'm not buying what they (religious right) are selling.  (I'm not cool with their sins of self-righteousness and judgementalism and yet, I totally accept their right to be like that.)   And from recent conversations, I can tell a lot of other people of different ages, backgrounds, religions and politics, aren't buying it either.  In 10 years, it will be a mark of shame that this was ever an issue.  Love people - we have that choice!!  There are more out there like us that we know.  Let's stop being silenced by the loud, and the arrogant!  Even in our own quiet way, lets shine, let's not be silent anymore and avoid the subject.  I want to to say I am a proud straight ally.  I will vote for referendem  74 this November proudly.  It is my hope that everyone can know the friendship, mutual love, committment and admiration that my husband and I share with each other, whether the couple is opposite genders, or the same gender. I wish that kind of caring and love for everyone.  May it come to pass is my prayer, sooner rather than later.

Evangelical: Religious Right Has Distorted the Faith

Linda Wertheimer
NPR Morning Edition
June 23, 2006
President Bush and the Republican Party find strong support among evangelical voters. But in his new book, Thy Kingdom Come, author Randall Balmer says that allegiance is misplaced.
“I don’t find much that I recognize as Christian” in the religious right, says Balmer, a professor of religion at Barnard College, Columbia University and contributing editor to Christianity Today.
He says blind allegiance to the Republican Party has distorted the faith of politically active evangelicals, leading them to misguided positions on issues such as abortion and homosexuality.
“They have taken something that is lovely and redemptive and turned it into something that is ugly and retributive,” Balmer says.
He argues that modern evangelicals have abandoned the spirit of their movement, which was founded in 19th-century activism on issues that helped those on the fringes of society: abolition, women’s suffrage and universal education.
“I don’t find any correlation in the agenda of the religious right today,” Balmer says.

---

Book Excerpt: ‘Thy Kingdom Come’
by Randall Balmer
In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and “secular humanists,” who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court’s misguided Roe decision.
It’s a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn’t true.
Although various Roman Catholic groups denounced the ruling, and Christianity Today complained that the Roe decision “runs counter to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people,” the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision. W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote, “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” Indeed, even before the Roe decision, the messengers (delegates) to the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention gathering in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that stated, “we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” W.A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed his satisfaction with the Roe v. Wade ruling. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” the redoubtable fundamentalist declared, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
The Religious Right’s self-portrayal as mobilizing in response to the Roe decision was so pervasive among evangelicals that few questioned it. But my attendance at an unusual gathering in Washington, D.C., finally alerted me to the abortion myth. In November 1990, for reasons that I still don’t entirely understand, I was invited to attend a conference in Washington sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Religious Right organization (though I didn’t realize it at the time). I soon found myself in a conference room with a couple of dozen people, including Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition; Carl F. H. Henry, an evangelical theologian; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Edward G. Dobson, pastor of an evangelical church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and formerly one of Jerry Falwell’s acolytes at Moral Majority. Paul M. Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist, head of what is now called the Free Congress Foundation, and one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, was also there.
In the course of one of the sessions, Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.
Bob Jones University was one target of a broader attempt by the federal government to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sought to penalize schools for failure to abide by antisegregation provisions. A court case in 1972, Green v. Connally, produced a ruling that any institution that practiced segregation was not, by definition, a charitable institution and, therefore, no longer qualified for tax-exempt standing.
The IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school’s regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll. The university filed suit to retain its tax-exempt status, although that suit would not reach the Supreme Court until 1983 (at which time, the Reagan administration argued in favor of Bob Jones University).
Initially, I found Weyrich’s admission jarring. He declared, in effect, that the origins of the Religious Right lay in Green v. Connally rather than Roe v. Wade. I quickly concluded, however, that his story made a great deal of sense. When I was growing up within the evangelical subculture, there was an unmistakably defensive cast to evangelicalism. I recall many presidents of colleges or Bible institutes coming through our churches to recruit students and to raise money. One of their recurrent themes was,We don’t accept federal money, so the government can’t tell us how to run our shop—whom to hire or fire or what kind of rules to live by. The IRS attempt to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools, then, represented an assault on the evangelical subculture, something that raised an alarm among many evangelical leaders, who mobilized against it.
For his part, Weyrich saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers. Although both the Green decision of 1972 and the IRS action against Bob Jones University in 1975 predated Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Weyrich succeeded in blaming Carter for efforts to revoke the taxexempt status of segregated Christian schools. He recruited James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to the cause, the latter of whom complained, “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”
Weyrich, whose conservative activism dates at least as far back as the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion, or the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. “I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
During the meeting in Washington, D.C., Weyrich went on to characterize the leaders of the Religious Right as reluctant to take up the abortion cause even close to a decade after the Roe ruling. “I had discussions with all the leading lights of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, post Roe v. Wade,” he said, “and they were all arguing that that decision was one more reason why Christians had to isolate themselves from the rest of the world.”
“What caused the movement to surface,” Weyrich reiterated,” was the federal government’s moves against Christian schools.” The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, “enraged the Christian community.” That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. “It was not the other things,” he said.
Ed Dobson, Falwell’s erstwhile associate, corroborated Weyrich’s account during the ensuing discussion. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” Dobson said. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”
During the following break in the conference proceedings, I cornered Weyrich to make sure I had heard him correctly. He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. What about abortion? After mobilizing to defend Bob Jones University and its racially discriminatory policies, Weyrich said, these evangelical leaders held a conference call to discuss strategy. He recalled that someone suggested that they had the makings of a broader political movement—something that Weyrich had been pushing for all along—and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, “How about abortion?” And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.
The makings of a broader political movement—something that Weyrich had been pushing for all along—and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, “How about abortion?” And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.
Falwell and others who eventually became leaders of the Religious Right, in fact, explicitly condemned the civil rights movement. “Believing the Bible as I do,” Falwell proclaimed in 1965, “I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else—including fighting Communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms.” This makes all the more outrageous the occasional attempts by leaders of the Religious Right to portray themselves as the “new abolitionists” in an effort to link their campaign against abortion to the nineteenth century crusade against slavery.
Excerpted from Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America Copyright © 2006 by Randall Balmer.

Happiness is a choice

Reading some info by Dr. Martin Seligman (author of Learned Optimism, and Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification) today and ran across this and loved it!  Had to share.

From Diener and Biswas-Diener, Happiness, pp. 16-17
(Chapter 2: Two Principles of Psychological Wealth)

Caveat Emptor: Bad Stuff Happens … Even to Princesses

Take a moment and recall the classic story of Cinderella. Remember how she was cruelly mistreated by her stepsisters and their wicked mother? Do you recall how they made her slave away at the daily household chores? Remember how the dress she labored so hard over was torn to shreds in a fit of jealousy, and her hopes of going to the royal ball lay in tatters? Of course, you probably best remember the happy ending of the fairy tale: Cinderella’s magical godmother arrives in the nick of time, whisks her away to the dance, and engineers a quick infatuation, with the result that the beloved protagonist marries the charming prince. But is that the end of the story, or just the beginning?

It is interesting to consider what happened to Cinderella next, after she was betrothed and took up residence in Charming Castle. For people who believe that happiness is a matter of favorable circumstances, the story of Cinderella turns out to be a slam dunk. With a Hollywood-handsome husband, a royal title, all the riches she could want, and soldiers to guard her from the paparazzi, how could our belle of the ball not be happy? But for folks who are inclined to think of happiness as a process, the matter of Cinderella’s emotional fate is far from clear. Did Cinderella’s husband treat her well, or was he a philanderer in later life? Did she find some meaningful pastime to keep her occupied on the palace grounds? Were her children spoiled brats? Did she harbor resentment about her upbringing, or try to get revenge on her stepsisters? Did she grow bored with royal balls and court intrigue, or did she organize a dance program for the poor kids in her kingdom? Happiness, as we have said, is a process, not a destination. Just as Cinderella’s life did not end with her royal wedding, your emotional bliss is not complete once you have obtained some important goal. Life goes on, and even those great circumstances you achieve will not ensure you lasting happiness. For one thing, bad things can happen even to beautiful young princesses. But even if Cinderella’s life encountered few bumps on the fairyland road, she might have grown bored with the wonderful circumstances surrounding her, and needed new aims and activities to add zest to her life.

In the end, Cinderella’s quality of life was probably dictated less by her favorable circumstances and more by how she construed them. Hardships are an inevitable part of life, and having psychological wealth does not mean there are never any risks or losses. Of course there are. Happiness is not the complete absence of tough times, because that would be unrealistic. But, as we shall see later in this chapter and later in this book, negative emotions have a place in psychological wealth, and subjective interpretation plays an important role in happiness.

-Diener and Biswas-Diener, Happiness, pp. 16-17
(Chapter 2: Two Principles of Psychological Wealth)

Mckinlee's 3 day old feet - first pedi

 

There's really nothing quite so sweet as tiny little baby feet.

Mckin ~ 2 days old

"Every child begins the world again."

~Henry David Thoreau

mckinlee sue

A long hoped for and much anticipated little someone tiptoed into my heart very late Tuesday night and has nestled right in just like she has always been there. Miss Mckinlee Sue - so nice to finally meet you!

a must read - ashley judd's letter

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/09/ashley-judd-slaps-media-in-the-face-for-speculation-over-her-puffy-appearance.html

another "gem" from Richard Land

"Disney owns ABC-TV, ESPN, A&E and Miramax films which produced “Pulp Fiction” with John Travolta which glorifies blatant cocaine use and race-mixing" ~Richard Land

I have never watched Pulp Fiction, because I don't handle violent movies well in general (bad dreams), but seriously - "glorifies race-mixing?" How can anyone who says they love God be filled with so much hate?

If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.
~1 John 4:20



1 John 4:16b-21

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ¹⁷ This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. ²¹ And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

Unbelievable! EVERYONE has the civic right and duty to vote!

Trayvon Martin Case Used for Politics By President Obama, According to Richard Land

Posted: 04/ 4/2012 5:31 pm Updated: 04/ 4/2012 5:32 pmBy David Gibson, Religion News Service

(RNS) A top Southern Baptist official has accused President Obama and black civil rights activists of using the Trayvon Martin shooting to foment racial strife and boost the president's re-election chances.

"Rather than holding rallies on these issues, the civil rights leadership focuses on racially polarizing cases to generate media attention and to mobilize black voter turnout," Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and the denomination's top public policy official, said on his radio program on Saturday (March 31).

"This is being done to try to gin up the black vote for an African-American president who is in deep, deep, deep trouble for re-election and who knows that he cannot win re-election without getting the 95 percent of blacks who voted for him in 2008 to come back out and show they are going to vote for him again."

Land's remarks were first reported Monday (April 2) by the Associated Baptist Press.

Martin is the 17-year-old African-American youth who was shot to death in February by a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Fla.

Martin was unarmed and was walking back to his father's house with a bag of candy and an iced tea when he was confronted by George Zimmerman, who was patrolling the gated community where Martin was staying. What transpired next is a matter of dispute, but Zimmerman shot Martin once in the chest and killed him. Zimmerman was not arrested or charged, and because his father is white and his mother is Hispanic the growing controversy over the case has become racially supercharged.

Obama himself weighed in on the case, saying that as a parent he was pained by the shooting and adding: "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."

"The president's aides claimed he was showing compassion for the victim's family," Land said. "In reality he poured gasoline on the racialist fires."

Some activists and pundits have tried to broaden the focus in this case beyond race to include issues of gun control and Florida's "Stand Your Ground" self-defense law, which has been cited on Zimmerman's behalf.

But the racial aspect of the Trayvon Martin case remains the central flashpoint in the debates. NBC on Tuesday apologized for a "Today" show segment that broadcast an edited version of Zimmerman's conversation with a police dispatcher moments before the shooting to make it sound as though Zimmerman was prejudiced against Martin because the teen was black.

There have also been criticisms of predominantly white churches for not speaking out more quickly on behalf of Trayvon Martin and his family, though some groups -- including the National Council of Churches and the group Churches Uniting in Christ -- have subsequently weighed in with expressions of concern. Evangelist Franklin Graham also spoke out after a recent meeting with leaders of the NAACP.

"I had to admit I didn't know much about the cold killing of an unarmed teenager in Florida last month," Graham wrote this week in The Huffington Post. "It will likely take more time and information to determine if there was a racial injustice that Feb. 26 night, but it takes no time to conclude there was an injustice, one that snuffed out the earthly life of Trayvon after 17 short years."

By contrast, Land's remarks seemed to represent an escalation of the rhetoric by a religious leader.

In his radio show, Land described activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as "racial ambulance chasers" who, along with fringe groups like the Black Panthers, are fomenting a "mob mentality" that is akin to what the Ku Klux Klan used to do to blacks in the South.

"This situation is getting out of hand," Land said. "There is going to be violence. When there is violence it's going to be Jesse Jackson's fault. It's going to be Al Sharpton's fault. It's going to be Louis Farrakhan's fault, and to a certain degree it's going to be President Obama's fault."

RELATED ON HUFFPOST

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Freedom is subjective.

Freedom is subjective to most people, really. In Old Testament times a prayer many prayed daily was "Thank you God for not making me a gentile, a slave or a woman."

Some take pride in what they are not:
"The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector." Luke 18:11

Although Proverbs 30:12 states:
"Those who are pure in their own eyes and yet are not cleansed of their filth."

In the New Testament we find these verses:
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3:28

"Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all." Colossians 3:11

I suggest
Until we are all free, no one is free. When one is oppressed, we are all oppressed. Protecting the status quo (for whatever motives) is a trap and a prison. It's time to put away the hate of the past, and progress. Stop hating everything and everyone that is different and open our eyes to the possibilities. Then, we can move toward a freedom that embraces everyone.

We are all connected. If we have an enemy, let it be Apathy.

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." ~Bishop Desmond Tutu


No man is an island,
No man stands alone.
Each man's joy is joy to me,
Each man's grief is my own.
We need one another,
So I will defend
Each man as my brother
Each man as my friend.


“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak out for me.” ~Martin Niemoller

Everything Is A Miracle

~by Albert Einstein

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people; first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest -a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Only a life lived for others is worth living.

~Albert Einstein

A daughter is a gift of love

"A daughter is a day brightener and a heart warmer."