Stunned!

One of the cool things about being part of the Washington County ARES/RACES group is that I'm just a young punk to most of them. I'm the target of friendly jokes about youth, inexperience and being out past my bedtime. I give back my share with questions about living with the dinosaurs and life during the last ice age.

Since most of the ARES members are old I've gotten used to the messages about folks going to the hospital for hip replacements, pneumonia or other age related ills. It still saddens me to get a message with the subject of a callsign and the letters "SK." SK is a Morse code abbreviation for silent key, that means another one of my friends has passed on.

Today I was stunned and greatly saddened by the message "KD5PZO SK." Pat Kusch was always smiling and a fun to be near. She and her husband, Kevin KD5ONS, taught the emergency communications classes that I took and she always pushed me to perform beyond what was just required to pass. I will miss her.

Dammit, Stand Up for Yourselves!

This was in reply to a post in cheesentoast's journal about the Christian Left website. It is growing beyond just a reply to her post and since thanoslug and I are going at it I thought I would move the discussion here. I've been silent about a lot of my feelings on these issues for far too long but I can't stay silent any longer. So here we go.

The site says, "In our current political climate where an anti-poor, anti-gay, xenophobic right-wing agenda is draped with the cloak of Christianity, we need to use words to change the debate to promote our progressive social justice agenda." They didn't say that Christianity was anti-poor, anti-gay (they are though) or xenophobic. They said that those who are anti-poor, anti-gay, xenophobic and (I'll add) warmongering use Christianity as an excuse to perform their atrocities. Just as I blame Democrats for cowering in the corner instead of attacking the problems I blame Christians who do not come out and fight for the truth of their beliefs and exposing the hypocrisy of Bush, Alito and others in power or soon to be in power.

Maybe you don't discriminate against gays but a hell of a lot of Christians created laws that discriminate based solely on the words of their scriptures. So you don't want gays to be married, I can see that with the rules you live by, but that doesn't mean you should deny them the rights that they should get for committing their lives together. Financial benefits. Visitation rights. Property rights. None of these have a damn thing to do with religion and they shouldn't be denied because of some views. For a group that claims to hate the sin but love the sinner I sure see a strange way of showing it.

I know some very wonderful Christians. Men and women I have love and respect greatly. I pray that they become fruitful and multiply. We all need more of them in the world.