Kidnapping Jesus

It's time to once again reproduce the latest cover story by Frosty Troy (the Molly of Oklahoma) at the Oklahoma Observer. As always, The Observer is 0% web-based, but this is good enough for me to take the time to type out...any typing errors are mine, not his...


The Republican Party's Shame: Kidnapping Jesus
by Frosty Troy

There is no end to the wanton misdirection of the Bush Administration which is determined to turn American into a theocracy even if it means kidnapping Jesus.

The White House is paying down its political debt to the religious right (which is neither) by using billions of your tax dollars.

The Bush Administration says it is making steady progress in steering more federal taxpayer dollars to religious bodies, despite the fact that the country is broke.

In the last budget year, religious bodies received $2.15 billion in federal grants including Pat Robertson's misnamed Operation Blessing and Jerry Falwell's university. That represented 10.9 percent of the total grants from the seven federal agencies such charities were eligible to apply to in fiscal 2005.

Meanwhile, a war that Pope John Paul said was unjust has passed the $210 billion mark, with no end in sight. Corrupt contracts are revealed on an almost daily basis, spewing from an utterly corrupt Defense Department. This is Bush Christianity in action?

We take issue with the president's insistence that religious bodies that receive taxpayer dollars retain the right to hire and fire based on religion. It is rank discrimination.

We dropped our support of the Salvation Army when they announced they would discriminate in employment. As Catholics, we quit contributing to the Bishop's fund when he used the church newspaper to politick for George W. Bush. We support Catholic Charities and our parish.

We dropped out of the American Legion when the leaders turned the magazine into a cheering section for the Republican Party--especially Ronald Reagan, who holds the record for heading the most corrupt administration in history.

Oh, how Reagan could play the religious card while seldom attending church, donating virtually nothing to charity.

How can the VFW and American Legion give standing ovations to Bush, a combat-dodging coward while veterans returning from Iraq are treated like dirt? Who died in Bush's place while he was AWOL working in an Alabama political campaign? No greater love hath any man....

Talk to the Norman couple whose wounded son (he can never have children) suffers from severe post traumatic stress syndrome. The VA would pay for only half of his prohibitively expensive medication.

Look what Bush has done to the public schools under his faux reform, No Child Left Behind, all in the interest of vouchers for private and parochial schools.

Governing Magazine's national survey shows it would take $30 billion in new funding for public schools to break even under NCLB.

Please don't take our word for it. Check his '07 budget--a $4 billion cut in education funding. He's added as much as $1,500 to a student's cost of a college education.

Bush's gravest offense is to zero fund CareerTech, the most successful education program on the planet, one modeled by nation after nation. CareerTech is mostly high tech today but it still includes carpentry, an honorable profession practiced by a young man from Nazareth.

That $1.5 billion cut may not sound like much, but it's the $1.5 billion funding CareerTech needs to upgrade equipment, buy new tools and train the people who are the backbone of the economy. Even Congress told him to take a hike.

We're not putting down English majors, but don't compare them to auto mechanics, aviation mechanics, electricians, nurses, plumbers or computer managers.

When Tinker Air Force Base, the nation's air logistic center, found itself an alarming 200 aviation mechanics short, they turned to Oklahoma's magnificent CareerTech system who filled the bill.

I dream of a press conference called by [Oklahoma] Gov. Brad Henry to attack George Bush by name because he won't let the states negotiate for prescription drugs such as the VA does. What would Jesus do for 40 million uninsured?

I yearn for legislative Democrats who draw a line in sand on mindless federal mandates--The message should be what Utah sent: Mr. President, in all due respect, you can kiss our rear. God bless Utah. They told him to buzz off and take his NCLB mandates with him.

If the man is a Christian, why would he grossly underfund mental health for the sickest and most vulnerable among us? If he is a Christian, why would he propose abolishing all training programs for our youth and the after-school programs that keep kids out of gangs? Would Jesus oppose an increase in minimum wage?

Only Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson has had the grit to slam the president for defunding drug enforcement money at a time when Mexican meth is reaching our states in unprecedented amounts.

Bush's "faith based" initiative is designed mostly as a political tool, since the plan is popular with religious leaders who are influential in the Republican Party, his core base in the GOP.

GOP historian Kevin Phillips' terrifying new book, American Theocracy, points out that for the first time in our history, we have a religious party--one based on intolerance, greed and false piety.

He's funding fundamentalists and D.C. Catholic schools--often no consultation with Congress, no mandate from the majority of Americans who firmly oppose it.

It's a payoff to his 30 million fundamentalist supporters and the Catholic hierarchy. Like everything else he does, he thumbs his nose at the critics and dares them to do anything about it. Nice to know your tax dollars are going into their collection plates.

If you think you don't have a stake in this fight, guess again. Bush has put our country on the low road to a political theocracy--precisely the kind of politics the Colonists fled.

Bush is not the dummy he's pictured by the midnight comics. His rhetoric is garbled but he's very clever, especially good at manipulating the Catholic hierarchy who want abortion abolished and yearn for vouchers. Their silence on the war is a disgrace to their Roman collars.

The late Pope specifically declared Iraq an unjust war to Bush's face, yet the Catholic hierarchy in America has yet to open its mouth and the new Pope is mum. War is obviously far down on their list of priorities.

Bush has a lock on the Bible-thumping fundamentalists who would censor the Internet and libraries, gut the arts and turn public schools into holy roller Sunday school classes, teaching kids the earth is only five thousand years old.

The worst crime against humanity is not what Bush is doing, it's the cowardice of the silent American majority who know it is wrong but "support the troops" and don't want to have their patriotism or their religious beliefs criticized.

An Oklahoma City minister, Robin Meyes, is one of the few clergymen we've heard take off the gloves in secular public forums. If there are others, we applaud them.

As for the Democrats in Congress, not a single Democrat would sign Sen. Russ Feingold's resolution to censure the President for clearly violating the law by illegally eavesdropping on American citizens and by approving torture of American prisoners.

This nation needs a rebellion similar to that which finally ended the putrid Vietnam killing--a war that took 55,000 of ours and several million of theirs--and for what? Today they are a valued trading partner.

Every time the news comes on, more have died in that fruitless war in Iraq--a place we should have never been and a place we will never leave until enough of us find our conscience. Blessed are the peacemakers.

We think we can't lose this beautiful little experiment called America. We can and we are.