Meanwhile in Judaism

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, the committee vice chairman and rector of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, has argued that the verses in Leviticus refer to promiscuous sex, not monogamous relations between adults. He said telling gays to be celibate would be “cruel” and “un-Jewish” because Jewish tradition says sexual desires should be channeled into “legitimate modes of expression” not suppressed.

“I think the general thrust in American society has been toward recognizing not only the right of gays and lesbians to form committed relationships but almost their duty to do so, in the same way that heterosexuals are both medically and morally better off if they form monogamous relationships,” Dorff said.

Death Penalty Advocates - For Gays etc.

A scary quote from a Salon article about a conference called "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" an anti-judicial right wing event attracting the likes of Jerry Falwell and Tom Delay.

Christian Reconstructionism calls for a system that is both radically decentralized, with most government functions devolved to the county level, and socially totalitarian. It calls for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of "unchastity before marriage," among other moral crimes. To be fair, Phillips told me that "just because a crime is capital doesn't mean you must impose the death penalty. It means it's an option." Public humiliation, he said, could sometimes be used instead.

This is the group hinting not all that subtly about killing judges as well. Citing Joseph Stalin...

"Death solves all problems: no man, no problem."

These people are also trying to rewrite history claiming the Ten Commandments as the foundation of the US Constitution. It's not. And democracy is not a Judeo/Christian creation - it is Greek.

And yet another quote from the article...

Nor is DeLay this crowd's only firm ally in Congress. Michael Schwartz, the longtime right-wing operative who now serves as Sen. Coburn's chief of staff, made The Hammer sound soft. "This problem that we're dealing with fundamentally is a question of sovereignty," he said. He went on to argue that, "when the Supreme Court says that there is a right to kill babies in the Constitution and therefore we can't have laws against that, or there is a right to commit buggery in the Constitution and we can't have laws against that," it implicitly asserts that "the people have no right to make laws."

As my friend calls them... the American Taliban.

Exploitation

A wonderful quote I came across....


Religion can help us be kind, sincere, and honest. But all too often we cherry-pick its teachings to condemn those we don't agree with. Religion also comes handy in other less-than-sublime purposes. What could be better than exploiting religion for a politician to sway people and strengthen his hold on power?

As many rivers flow to merge in one ocean, many paths for spiritual enlightenment can achieve the same goal. The problem begins when we want to portray our religion as the best: "mine is the one true religion and all others are false." Such religious fervor leads to endless violence.No other cause in human history has resulted in as many killings.

Imagine a world where we don't feel a need to condemn anyone because "the book of my religion says so."

Anu Garg