Death And Intolerance By Believers Of God.

My last editorial touched a raw nerve (It’s Time To Take On The Religious Right Saturday, March 19, 2005), as I knew it would.

The following (unedited letter) is an e-mail I received from a very upset reader who did not identify himself/herself.

The only identifier I have for this writer is his/her email name – Teresa C.

Don’t you just love people who are so full of opinions and vitriol, who lack the strength of conviction to sign their own name?

LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER:

Well I have read some publications on your site, and I think its a fantastic example of why I couldn’t agree more with having your ass shipped out of Canada. Hell we can let you go hang out with your Zionist friends, including Bush, this way when all their dispicable deeds blow up in their faces, and get them strung up, you’ll be with them. The people of the world are good, they won’t tolerate yours and your friends selfish and greedy thinking for long.

Where you would be afforded the right to your own opinions, you guys don’t seem to feel that right is mutually for all, and that you people “just know better”, but it goes both ways. So do us all a favour and get the fuck out of Canada, because my Canada is not going to be another US or Israel, the world loves Canada, because it and its people are friends to all, it will stay that way.

With all due, have a nice day, and get out.

PUBLISHER’S RESPONSE:

Teresa C seems to have forgotten how “tolerant, loving, and forgiving” the Religious Right likes to portray themselves.

I don’t read much of any of that in his/her letter. To the contrary: I read hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism, derision for Israel and the United States of America.

Even though I have NEVER advocated any personal restriction on the right of anyone to believe in God, you’d think I blew up a church and murdered the religious at prayer to earn the venom of this writer.

I received another letter (which is posted in the Letters To The Publisher) written by an American who believes that I should not have an opinion on moral issues in the USA because I am not an American.

This letter writer: Robert Franklin Jeffers of Richmond, Virginia represents the mind-set of many Religious Far Right Conservatives.

It’s OK with him that the USA has more than “just” an opinion on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea AND Canada. But no one should have a contrary opinion on any facets of America.

In his defense of God in public life, Robert Franklin Jeffers quotes the US Constitution, especially the passage accredited to Thomas Jefferson:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

He forgets to mention that these “truths” accepted Africans as slaves, and women as chattel. And that some of the Framers of these “truths” were themselves slave owners; including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

It should also be noted that Thomas Jefferson professed no religious affiliation.

And what about America’s First President? Wasn’t George Washington a slave owner?

The fact that European elites and their respective Churches believed the world was flat until Columbus proved otherwise, is as irrelevant to what we think of the world today, as to what people might, or might not have believed about religion some 200 years ago when the USA was established as a Republic.

It seems to me that the Religious Right is only tolerant when you agree with them. It is also quite revealing how all-over the board they are when defending their contradictions.

They want government out of their lives. And they want more Individual Rights.

So why are they so much in the face of people who want to live their own lives in a fashion that is different from the principles of the Far Right? What happened to Individual Rights?

The Religious Right are all for state sponsored murder by the death penalty for certain criminals. But scream all about the sanctity of life when they obstruct an Individual’s Right to die in peace and dignity.

What they’re doing to Terri Schiavo and the rule of law in America is nothing short of criminally immoral.

They are amongst the last to accept social policies to help deprived children. But the first to fight against a woman’s right to abort an unwanted fetus.

They preach love and kindness. But cringe at same sex marriages.

Where I see the business of others, as being just that: THE BUSINESS OF OTHERS. They see everyone’s business as their own.

No one group on this planet frightens me more than the Religious Right.

They will kill you if your opinion is aggressively contrary to their own: just like Al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and all the others whose religious vision of life on earth is the only way it is.

And they will completely justify whatever atrocity they commit or support in the name of their God.

I need no lecture from the Religious Right on morality and the concept of RIGHTS! And if they don’t like what I write, they shouldn’t read it. That’s their right.

Or is all of this just a little too complicated for them?