In 1967 I interviewed for a part time job. “I want a good typist that can also take dictation,” the bespectacled elderly man explained. I could do that. “Well, here’s what I will typically have you do,” he continued as he began quoting Biblical passages that I took both in shorthand and typed directly to the electric IBM on the desk.
“Excellent work!” he exclaimed at my flawless transcription. “Will you take five-dollars an hour?”
Heck, yeah! That was an hourly fortune. “I can start tomorrow,” I confirmed. Some travel was included with the position. An unknown world unwrapped before me: The world of a racist.
My employer knew his Bible. He knew any biblical verse that could be stating the inherent evils of the dark man. When he wasn’t black cherry-picking, he was racial slurring and racial profiling anyone who was not a quintessential Anglo-Protestant American. He let my Catholic education slide, but let me know that much of what I “learned of God” was in grave error. He was a good “Christian man,” he said.
I self-terminated from this job before I had the chance to meet with his “fellow white Christian brothers” at an unspecified ranch near Las Vegas. He was a freak and an anomaly, I erroneously decided.
More than 40-years later, hate and racism thrive and feed off of each other. Religion is prostituted as a reason for the credence, and just as often not needed at all.
Besides national headlines, my small town headline recently read, “Police arrested a (local) man Friday in connection with arson and vandalism of a church known for…tolerance…”
Have we finally reached the point in the rat maze where there are just so many of us that self-survival drives us to reactionary behavior? Toss tolerance, patience, understanding, and curiosity out the window? If the guy across the street or across the world is different, hate the bastard because he’s different?
This is a simplistic take on a complex subject. But to wake up with a hateful soul, like the one that James von Brunn seems to possess, or to find jest with antiquated racial commentary about President and Mrs. Obama, or to toss acid in the face of young girls on their way to an Afghan classroom, or to fly jets into inhabited towers, or to enslave young children of a lesser advantage, or, or, or. The list runs thru the over-populated maze of crazed and un-emancipated beings screaming for what???
The Muse Pallet 
nicely done! See Scott Simon’s beautiful NPR commentary from this past weekend: Amid Ignorance And Fear, Anti-Semitism Thrives http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105366320
Good article. I too wonder how many racists have been using religion as a platform to promote their racist agenda. Have the racists learned how to hide by using religion? Attach the word religion to a racist agenda, racism becomes a little more tolerated. After all, one cannot protest religion as easily as one can protest racism standing by itself.
Before there is a misunderstanding, I believe religious tolerance is a beautiful thing. I believe a racist who uses religion is a bad thing. Agenda religion allows people to kill doctors because they don’t believe in killing babies who are not yet doctors. It allows people to fly aircraft into buildings and kill thousands of people. Using religion as justification. Wrong!
Strange that California Sue should refer to aborted fetuses as “babies who are not yet doctors.” Does that mean that the fetuses should be considered human beings? Should they have rights under the Constitution?
Or does that simply mean that the fetus should be considered trash until the mother decides what to do with it? It amazes me that most states have laws that say if an attack causes the death of a fetus, the perpetrator is a murderer. But, if the pregnant mother decides to do away with the fetus, she is “exercing her right to choice.”
If a fetus is not a person, how can we punish the person who causes it’s birth to be avoided? If it is a person, how do we allow a mother-to-be to decide to kill it?
And this is called “progressive?”
Perhaps a more simplistic explanation is in order. It is most confusing when a prolife religious agenda kills. Prolife vs kill – oxymoron at best.
I appologize if it appeared as though the right, or not, of abortion was mentioned or implied. It was not.
Sue, your arguement has me totally at a loss. I have no understanding of what your point is.
I am pro-life. Unfortunately, I have had to take a few lives in the line of duty. I took them out because they were a part of a threat to many other people. However, I have yet to meet, or even hear about, a fetus that plans to threaten the life of another person.
As for a “right of abortion,” you need to show me where that is in the Constitution. I know we were endowed by “our Creator” with certain inalienable rights. And I know that there are plenty of idiots who agree with having been “endowed” by a “Creator” who, somehow, doesn’t exist.
I will await your explanation of how the “prolife agenda kills.” (That should be as easy to explain as how Obama is good for America.)