Delaware Progressive

forwarded by Joanne Cabry

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch ( Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:

First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)

Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. “It is not the time” to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.

The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:

1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism. Thus do we deny global warming, or evolution, or biblical errancy. Reason is helpless before such abject faith.

2. It has the power to turn all our politicians as a class into invertebrate and mute attendants at the shrine. None dare suggest that Moloch can in any way be reined in without being denounced by the pope of this religion, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, as trying to destroy Moloch, to take away all guns. They whimper and say they never entertained such heresy. Many flourish their guns while campaigning, or boast that they have themselves hunted “varmints.” Better that the children die or their lives be blasted than that a politician should risk an election against the dread sentence of NRA excommunication.

3. It has the power to distort our constitutional thinking. It says that the right to “bear arms,” a military term, gives anyone, anywhere in our country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons. Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his “religion” of slaughter. Moloch brooks no dissent, even from the highest court in the land.

Though LaPierre is the pope of this religion, its most successful Peter the Hermit, preaching the crusade for Moloch, was Charlton Heston, a symbol of the Americanism of loving guns. I have often thought that we should raise a statue of Heston at each of the many sites of multiple murders around our land. We would soon have armies of statues, whole droves of Heston acolytes standing sentry at the shrines of Moloch dotting the landscape. Molochism is the one religion that can never be separated from the state. The state itself bows down to Moloch, and protects the sacrifices made to him. So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.

Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books  blog ,December 15, 2012, 5:25 p.m.

source

This editorial was a “Delaware Voice” column in The News-Journal (12/12/12):

The recent Supreme Court decision followed by the re-election of President Obama guarantees that the Affordable Health Care Act will be with us long into the future. As each day passes we have learned more about the law, what is contained in the bill and how states will play a major role in the implementation and funding of many portions of program. The Affordable Health Care Act requires everyone to have coverage but at a cost to be determined. Continue reading →

Here is a video clip that speaks volumes about our political system and where the Republican Tea Party has taken us –  it is one of the most moving clips ever offered on MSNBC. Click below to hear pundit extraordinaire Lawrence O’Donnell discuss how a significant majority of Republican Senators brought dishonor to the U. S. Senate.

http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/12/05/odonnell-rewrites-the-senates-day-of-shame/

by Joanne Cabry

Congress is still a white man’s club, but the freshman class of the 113th Congress will be the most diverse in history. It will be more representative of the United States from race to religion, and from gender to sexual orientation. It will look more like America with 4 new African American representatives, 10 new Latinos, 5 new Asian Americans and 24 women in the House or Senate. It will believe more like America with the first two Hindu congresspeople, the first Buddhist senator, and the first non-theist to openly acknowledge her belief prior to getting elected. It will love more like America, with 4 new LGBT congresspeople or senators, including the first openly bisexual congresswoman and the first openly gay congressman of color. And it will be younger, with four new congressmen born in the 1980s.   Source

The diversity itself isn’t significant to me.   It’s the fact that in 2012 more voters than ever  voted for someone who ‘wasn’t like them.’  They trusted someone to represent them who didn’t follow the tenets of the Judeo-Christian bible. They voted for someone whose ancestors didn’t come from Europe.  They didn’t think the candidate’s gender orientation was relevant.  And they voted for women.  There will be 24 new female members of Congress in January. When I cast my first vote in 1964  there was a total of 14 women in Congress. (12 in the House and 2 in the Senate) This year there will be 98. (78 in the House and 20 in the Senate)

So let’s celebrate the diversity — not for its own sake but as a sign that perhaps “we the people” are moving toward that “more perfect union” that our Constitution charges us to create.  But we can only get there if every one of  us believes that someone like us can be elected to represent all of us.

Over the last few months, Fox “news” has created some of the ugliest, most blatant propaganda ever, proffering story lines that have involved misinformation and fear mongering clearly designed to politicize the tragedy of the Sept 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and to smear President Obama. At the outset, their goal was to derail the President’s chances for reelection – in the weeks leading up to the election, Fox commentaries on the terrorist attack were especially relentless and they offered delusional conspiracy theories in an effort to directly tie the failings of our response to the event to Obama.  More recently, the Fox propaganda machine has continued to offer deceptive story lines to further defame President Obama and his administration. A variety of articles have debunked the Fox “news” propaganda on this topic, but the best summary report to date (which includes some comments on the first day of congressional hearings) was offered by pundit Ed Schultz on his November 16 show – click here to view his report — and share it with a friend!

We’ve made it through another presidential election cycle – cheers!  Indeed, there was much to cheer about, but there were also many problems and downsides to the various election activities across our country. Here then is a rundown of my choice nuggets for the past year, tidbits that reflect the best, and the worst, of the 2012 elections.

The Bad

Voter suppression activities initiated by Republicans were abundant and more bold than ever before – here is a summary – Continue reading →

by Joanne Cabry

I’m not having much success with Claire’s practice of ‘Counting Our Blessings on the Morning After” when I think about what happened on Tuesday in Sussex County.  (Claire’s post)

But after reading an  article in the NYT  (here) about the voter changes in Prince William County, Virginia maybe there is some reason to hope. When I lived in the DC area Prince William was a very conservative district, but this article quotes a Tom Davis, a former GOP Congressman for that district as saying, “There are just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win. There’s just not enough of them.” 

Continue reading →

Although I am very relieved that President Obama won the election, I woke up this morning feeling anything but happy because Marie Mayor, a strong progressive running in the 20RD, lost the election to a homophobic, good ole boy with a slim resume and the professed desire to protect Sussex County from all the new-comers who want to change it. Continue reading →

I want to encourage all of our readers to submit a “letter to the editor” in the next 30-40 days. The November 6 election is fast approaching, and publishing a letter to the editor is a great way to get potential voters motivated to get out and vote Democratic. In my letters, I typically try to appeal to all voters, including Democrats, Republicans and Independents – after all, many pundits tell us that  Independent and swing voters often determine an election.  I’m happy to say that in the last four months I’ve had letters published in the “Cape Gazette” and “News Journal”. For the “Cape Gazette” (letters sometimes reach up to 350 words), email your letter to newsroom@capegazette.com . For the “News Journal” (letter must be 250 words or less) –*Go to http://www.delawareonline.com/ ….*Click on “Opinion.”…..*Click on “Send a Letter to the Editors.”…..*Then copy and paste.

I’d like to share the letter I will soon be submitting to both papers: Continue reading →