Hallway to Nowhere

Tag: Jewish

  • Hitler Comes To North Carolina

    Hitler Comes To North Carolina

    First the state has the notorious HB2 bill that causes it to lose business and engenders bad press, rightly so. It then elects a new Democratic governor but he has almost no power to do anything. Then the HB2 bill is rescinded, sorta, kinda, in a compromise that is designed to bring business back but not to REALLY give legal protection to NC’c LGBTQ population. And now there is a bill being proposed again to ban gay marriage, something that has been settled as the law of the land by the Obergefell decision in the U. S. Supreme Court. Just to add insult to injury, the representative who is sponsoring it, compares Lincoln to HITLER. He is Representative Larry Pittman, and he did this publically on Facebook.

    I want to discuss this. The Hitler reference, coming as it did after Sean Spicer’s egregious Hitler reference, shows boneheaded stupidity. Spicer had ALREADY made an ass of himself by an inaccurate statement about Hitler DURING PESACH and his clumsy apology compounded it. For another lawmaker to go and then use Hitler as a referent still during Pesach is astoundingly idiodic. Had he not read the national news? There are many many reasons that Hitler and Lincoln are not equivalent, such that I believe them self-evident if you are a rational human being and not a Southern Republican North Carolinian. I won’t enumerate them here. But just for reasons of common sense,  THINK! It’s PASSOVER!!! You don’t go making HITLER references during a MAJOR JEWISH HOLIDAY!!! Get a clue!!! This is offensive!!! And I know that you have Jewish consituents! We do live in NC, too! And WE VOTE!  (For all you reading out, I’m Jewish, btw. Atheist, yes. But Jewish, nonetheless. Just not observant.) So for all the Sean Spicers and the Larry Pittmans out there, stop with the Hitler stuff! Oy gevalt iz mir!

  • Faith and Office

    So. I get an email from Hillary telling me how she has picked Tim Kaine to be her VP. As a Virginian  I’m happy, though I had hoped she’d pick Elizabeth Warren. But something has been irking me. She made a point of telling me how he and his had joined a church and built a home centered around faith. And this annoys me why? Because I do not think his faith has anything to do with his ability to govern, unless I’m missing something and churches ARE now teaching classes. (Given the current political atmosphere, I fully expect that some Evangelical churches probably are doing that very thing.)  I long for the day when a political candidate does not feel obliged to take a faith-based litmus test in order to run for public office in the US, as if being a good Christian automatically confers greater executive, legislative, or judicial skills. I say “good Christian” because, despite there being Jewish and even a few Muslim elected officials, we all know that Christianity is the religion that rules the land. Witness the RNC. And let agnostics and atheists beware! For a individual to come out publicly as a nonbeliever is the kiss of death. No-one currently serving in the Senate or House of Representatives admits to being atheist or even agnostic. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), the only openly avowed atheist, left office in 2013; Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) only came out as atheist after he had left office. No-one atheist has ever been elected to the Supreme Court. There are still states where it is AGAINST THE LAW for an atheist to hold public office.

    One of the many things I liked about Bernie was that I DIDN’T hear him talk about his faith. I never heard him say anything about how he belonged to this or that synagogue, how much god meant to him, etc. etc. Of course, he IS Jewish, and we tend to talk and think about religion differently than Christians. And, to give Hillary her due, she doesn’t beat you over the head with a religious schtick (pun intended), either. I think she mentions it about as much as she has to.  She might have her personal beliefs,  but I’m pretty confident that the government she runs will not be faith-based and  that the wall of separation between church and state will be respected. And that, I’m afraid, is about as much as we can ask for, given the current furor and frenzy that seems to sweeping the land.