The Republic of T. Archives

Get over to fullerbranter.com and check out the speech Matt posted today. It was given this past November, by a minister in Oklahoma, and it’s uplifting reading for an otherwise depressing day.

Here’s a taste.

Tonight, I join ranks of those who are angry, because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian.

We’ve heard a lot lately about so-called “moral values” as having swung the election to President Bush. Well, I’m a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral value — I mean what are we talking about?

Because we don’t get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does.

Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side:

– When you start a war on false pretenses, and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God’s will, and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral.

…

— When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

…

– When you wink at the torture of prisoners, and deprive so-called “enemy combatants” of the rules of the Geneva convention, which your own country helped to establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.

…

– When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.

Go read the rest. It’s a terrific message for today, a damn sight better than the one we got today, and should be heard far and wide.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20th, 2005 at 4:38 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.