Democracy is Dead

I’m very disappointed, so disappointed that I am taking a break from politics. I’m almost to the point where I am about to give up. Nothing makes sense anymore and I see the fruitless efforts of people out there – including myself - who campaign, sign petitions, call Congress, go to protests and still nothing changes.

It really doesn’t matter how right your cause is, how many people support it and how beneficial it will be for the country. Whatever it is, it’s useless unless the fat bureaucrats in Congress and their masters – Wall Street, the Koch Brothers, Big oil, etc. – happen to agree with whatever you are fighting for. The chances that your causes are in synchronicity with theirs are basically non-existent.

Government is corrupt and they are not serving the people of this country. It seems that they are diligently working at crushing the middle class, oppressing the working class and if they could, if it was possible, they would eliminate the poor once and for all who they see as nothing but maggots, parasites that do not deserve to be alive to begin with.

I am fed up with what’s transpiring against women in every state of this nation. This unreasonable obsession with vaginas and controlling women’s right to decide for herself what’s best for her own life. I’m sickened about a handful of retrogrades, covering their actions under false religiosity, taken over the politics of this nation; they have crept into our lives, disrupting and destroying everything that we have fought so hard for such a long time.

I am repulse at the fact that if a woman or a man gets caught stealing a pack of meat to feed their children, they will be apprehended and possibly do time, even if it is a couple of days and, of course, will have a criminal record and pay a fine. However, those in Wall Street, the ones that crushed our economy and screwed everyone in the process not only are not going to jail, the government gave them money. No criminal record, no jail time and no fine to pay! They’re still going about their business and we have to hear them complaining about too much regulation! If the government is to be fair they either have to forgive those stealing money or food to survive, hand them some money so they can get back to their feet and let them be or, everyone gets the same treatment… everyone, especially those son of bitches that had all they could ever dream of having and still stole from those that were trying to survive… but no, no one touches big money.

I can’t believe that the airports got de-sequestered, that shouldn’t be and the President shouldn’t have allowed it. The whole country, those that need it the most are suffering the consequences of the sequester… but they have to endure it because a bunch of narcissists, filthy rich, son of bitches in Congress do not want to put an end to the sequester, only to the part of the sequester that affects them personally, the rest of us can go to hell.

The President, in order to end the sequester, placed the seniors and the poor under the bus when he agreed to make cuts to “entitlements” such as social security, which by the way, it is not part of the budget or the economy or an entitlement. The government has placed not one single penny in the social security fund; all of us have paid into it and many presidents – Democrats and Republicans alike – have taken money out of it to balance the books but none of them ever paid back the money they used. We keep increasing the defense budget to numbers many countries wish they had as their GDP, an obscene amount but they are claiming that social security is going broke and cannot be sustained, perhaps if they stop increasing the damn defense budget and return the money with interest back to the social security fund it would not be in the mess it is now.

So, let’s applaud the rich. Let’s continue giving them incentives to create jobs that never get created, at least not in these shores. They want to drill and contaminate our environment? Let them! Let’s give them a hand when they find themselves in deep shit because of their abuses and recklessness. Let’s throw anyone and everyone that doesn’t have an income above $100,000 under the bus, after all… we are not the ones filling their pockets with money, the rich is and Congress has sold their soul to them a long time ago and nothing we can say or do will ever change it.

RAPE

We are horrified when we read the treatment women get in traditional Islamic societies. We are quick to create petitions demanding for equal or at minimum, better treatment for women all over the globe… all over the globe except for the ones in our own backyard.

Women that are raped in our country are ignored, ashamed, mocked by their neighbors, abandoned by their so-called friends, questioned by their peers and victimized by the system; a system that more and more seems to think that women are not as valuable as men and if raped, she probably brought the act upon herself.

Those women that have the courage to take her rapist(s) to trial find themselves accused of provoking the assailant into sex. As if they lured them just like the mermaids in the legends lured sailors into doing what otherwise they wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t for their irresistible songs. We hear that the woman was a drunk, dressed provocatively, had had many sex partners in her life, everything you can think of and her name and life are dragged in the mud in order to blame her and spare the men that perpetrated the vile act.

The court system seems to accept what many of us have said for years: that men can only think with one head at a time and therefore the court and defense lawyers believe the perpetrators are the victims because they couldn’t control their penises.

I wonder if they ever stopped to think what rape entails. Not physically, that is not that much of a deal and will heal fast, pretty fast. But the psychological effect is different; more so when those around you instead of offering support, point the finger at you; especially today, where the pictures bearing your face and name can be found everywhere in the Internet and social media, pictures that were placed there with the sole intention of shaming you. Before the Internet you could simply move and start a new life somewhere else, where no one knew you or about what had happened to you. That is not possible today and even though everything pass with time, for some victims the shame is too big to bear and the time too slow to heal them and these victims, overwhelmed by the treatment they are forced to endure, decide to cut their lives short… and those that raped her, mocked her and shamed her go about their lives without a care in the world.

Rape, that four letter word that can change someone’s life. We sympathize with burglary victims, I’ve heard so often what the feeling of coming into your home and find it upside down and all your belongings either gone or thrown all over the house because the thieves searched for something of value. The disgust of thinking that the hands of these criminals were touching your personal belongings, your underwear… how violated one feels! We all sympathize with this, why then we cannot sympathize when the hands violating you where all over your body against your will?

Now imagine for just a minute that you are in a party with friends, those that you think you can trust. As any other would do in a party, you are enjoying a few drinks and perhaps that day your body couldn’t hold the same amount of alcohol and you pass out. Imagine that while you are out, the men in that party decides to have sex with you, and the women present did nothing to stop them. Obviously, you are not a willing participant, but they have fun with you, they take compromising pictures of you and spread those pictures all over the Internet and that is how you find out, days later, that not only one but many of the men in that party fucked you. I can’t say they had sex or made love because that isn’t what happened… What happened it’s basically Necrophilia but people will be outraged if they found out that someone fucked the corpse of a dead relative but they blame the victim if she was unconscious and fucked by those around her. No compassion for the living, outrage for the dead.

I wish those that are quick to judge a rape victim and victimize her over and over again would experience something similar. To perhaps feel what it is like to have the hands of a stranger, or worst a person you trust, all over you without your knowledge or approval, to have someone stronger than you force you into sex when you don’t want to. To know that sensation of filth that no soap can ever wash away no matter how much you try. To walk into a place and noticing the change of expressions, the exchange of looks at best or the open rejection at worse, it’s like having the scarlet letter burnt into your forehead and you are a marked woman by no fault of your own.

The punishment for raping an adult woman is very lenient, unless the rape victim was killed during the attack or if the victim is a child, the rapist(s) basically get a slap on their hands. This happens because the victims are trashed during the trial and basically share part of the blame in the eyes of the jury and, because “boys will be boys” and no one truly blame them for acting on their instincts. Not until there are more severe sentencing for these barbaric actions will anything ever change. Not until those involved in degrading the honor and good name of a victim get penalized along with the rapists will these shameful actions stop. In today’s society, those that participate in the destruction of the victim’s life go unpunished and that should not be. If you know a drug dealer, and hold drugs for them – but you are not selling them, distributing them or doing anything with them but hold them – you can rest assured that if you are caught, you will be punished a punishment as harsh as that of a drug dealer… so why do these people that shared the pictures of the victim, that laughed about it and that abused her afterwards go without any repercussions for their actions?

The laws must change. It is far more destructive to rape a person than it is to smoke a joint, but the jails are filled with pot users who are serving a far longer sentence than a rapist and a rapist is far more dangerous to society than a pothead will ever be.

Food for thoughts.

In Their Image

Ephesians 5:22-33

22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

For many, it is difficult to understand women serving at State or Federal levels who are diligently working against what took decades, if not centuries, for women to attain. No one can understand why these women are working against their own gender and benefit.

What everyone seem to overlook is that these women are religious fanatics, they will not object or go against men in their circle. Ephesians 5:22-33 is a clear example of what these women have been taught to believe since birth.

Many Republicans and all the members of the Tea Party are religious fanatics and in States where they have secured the Governorship or the majority of the State Legislature they are working frantically in passing laws aimed at crushing and destroying women’s rights.

They haven’t stopped at State level, but thankfully the Senate is still under the control of the Democrats and they haven’t been able to push their agenda nationwide.

These Republicans like to think they are “holier than thou,” most call themselves pro-life but in reality they are pro-fetus or as someone said, pro-pregnancy because most of them don’t give a damn about a child once it has been born. Perhaps it’s the proximity of the child to the vagina during birth that repulse them and make them lose interest on what once was their only objective; all I know is that while it was a zygote, an embryo or a fetus it was sacred but once is born it loses importance. If the mother is poor, then it is seen as a parasite or an excuse for the mother “to live in the lap of luxury” thanks to the government and their tax dollars. I don’t know which is it, all I know is that once the child is born, is no longer significant for them.

These people say that they want small government, if anyone mentions any restrictions on guns, as simple and logical as a background check, they’ll scream that the government wants to infringe on their rights and on their privacy – they’ll go berserk over a piece of metal – but they see no problem whatsoever in telling women what they can or can’t do with their bodies or their decisions. They have thought of everything imaginable to control what happens in a woman’s womb: ultrasounds, probes, mandatory waiting periods… you name it, they’ve thought of it and presented their ideas to the legislature in the form of a bill. If it involves a vagina, then it’s game and they believe it’s perfectly reasonable for them to have the right to decide, to invade and intrude a woman’s vagina, a woman’s life and a woman’s decision… Talk about rights and invasion of privacy!

These people are also against same-sex marriage.

Their hateful agenda doesn’t end with women, even when women are their main point of interest. No, their focus is also on same-sex marriages. These politicians like to think of themselves as righteous and God-fearing people. They are quick to mention the sanctity of marriage – even when some of them have been married several times (dragging that sanctity in the mud), even when some have been caught with prostitutes or some have even had a mistresses for years; it doesn’t matter because these politicians always find a way to excuse their behavior, by falsely apologizing with a well rehearsed speech then in an amazing act of general amnesia, they will at unison, forget the sins of their counterparts and rapidly transpose those “sins” onto a Democrat who they will viciously and inexorably try to destroy.

They compare same-sex marriage to incest and bestiality, they call it an abomination and they are keen to read passages from the Bible to validate their opinion. Leviticus is their favorite.

22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. Lev. 20.13

The Religious Right is crazy about that verse; they bring it up every time someone is debating same-sex marriage. As it’s common among these people, they pick and choose what remains unchangeable in the Old Testament and what has changed thanks to Jesus.

They completely ignore the following verses:

11 Ye shall not steal, Ex. 20.15 · Deut. 5.19 neither deal falsely, Ex. 20.16 · Deut. 5.20 neither lie one to another. I don’t think I need to dwell on this, we all know politicians break this law. 

13 Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbor, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning. Deut. 24.14, 15.  Should I mention that Republicans are against increasing the minimum wage? 

15 Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment; thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor. Ex. 23.6-8 · Deut. 16.19.  They only obey the part about not respecting the poor, but they waste no time in revering the wealthy!

33 And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. Most of them are against Immigration Reform and the Dreamers Act, and many of them simply hate undocumented immigrants.   

34 But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: Ex. 22.21 · Deut. 24.17, 18 ; 27.19 I am the LORD your God. Should I remind anyone about the electric fence?

No, none of the other commands found in Leviticus are to be observed, the first thing they’ll tell you is that Jesus came to change all that… all, except Leviticus 18:22. It is ironic that Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality, but we must believe that Jesus was a hater, just like they are. These people adore a God made to their image, completely ignoring that is supposed to be the other way around.

When Things Have More Rights Than Humans.

Over the Rainbow

I know that this is practically “old news,” but I needed the time to digest it and think about what took place at the Supreme Court last week.

Reading a transcript of the Proposition 8 case being heard by the Supreme Court, I was insulted by the attitude of Judge Scalia, the most arrogant and in my view, sarcastic of all justices.

What offended me the most was when he asked Mr. Olson when did excluding homosexuals from marriage became unconstitutional.

“You’ve led me right into a question I was going to ask. The California Supreme Court decides what the law is. That's what we decide, right? We don't prescribe law for the future. We decide what the law is. I'm curious, when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted? Sometimes — some time after Baker, where we said it didn't even raise a substantial Federal question? When did the law become this?” - Justice Scalia

What arrogance! “There's no specific date in time. This is an evolutionary cycle.” - was Mr. Olson’s response. I was not satisfied with Mr. Olson’s answer. My answer would have been that it is and it has always been unconstitutional, because the Constitution of the United States clearly states that Privileges should be equal for all citizens in all the States, not just a group of citizens. Article. IV, Section 2 clearly states that all Citizens should be entitled to all the Privileges of the other States.

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

That applies to Privileges and Punishments as well… marriage is a privilege and for some is a punishment. Seriously now, marriage and healthcare are privileges, privileges the Republicans and Teabaggers claim to be a State matter. I don’t think so and I am amazed that no one has ever mentioned this to debunk these bogus claims.

If Article IV isn’t enough, Amendment IX should deem the discrimination against homosexuals as unconstitutional: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Again, the Founding Fathers made sure not to differentiate – citizens and people are asexual terms that apply equally to every human being, and that just because a right wasn't written in the Constitution it didn't mean that if people thought it was a right not to be accepted, over 50% of the citizens of this nation approve gay marriage.

If you are not satisfied with the above, then I would have mentioned Amendment XIV, Section 1: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

None of the Articles or the Amendments defines marriage, not one. None of the Articles or Amendments segregates a group of people by their sexual preference or their religion, not ever. The original Constitution made sure to segregate natives, women and blacks, which thankfully was corrected by future amendments but nowhere, from the original signed back in September 17, 1787 to the present there is mention of homosexuals having different rights to those granted to heterosexuals, much less if they can or cannot get married.

I don't think that I have to remind everyone that homosexuality is not something new. Homosexuality has existed since the beginning of time; it exists even in other species. If the Founding Fathers were against homosexuality they would have made sure to include some type of rejection, separation or mention just like they did with women, natives and blacks… but they didn’t.

So my answer would have been that it was unconstitutional since September 18th, 1787. The fact that not until today the gay community had the courage to contest it doesn’t mean it was constitutional. Just like it was unconstitutional to exclude women and blacks since the beginning and that was changed when there was someone with the courage to demand a change. Just like inter-racial marriage was unconstitutional until Mr. and Mrs. Loving took their case to the Supreme Court in 1967. The country didn’t collapsed with those changes – which by the way, applied to the whole land and not just a State – actually, the country became a better place simply because harmony and progress can only be attained when everyone, EVERYONE, can enjoy the same privileges, after all no matter who you go to bed with, who you love… we are all the same, we are all humans and a society cannot advance when broken and where one group suffers just to satisfy another group – no matter how big or small the objecting group is.

Gay marriage will not affect one iota the marriage of heterosexuals, it will not make their marriage less valid nor will it make them unhappy. However, the actions and objections of those against gay marriage are sentencing a group of citizens, many of whom are their families, friends, neighbors or co-workers to be a lesser kind of citizens just because they do not agree with whom they love and want share their lives with. If that is not selfishness and senseless discrimination then nothing is!

With so much hate around us, isn't it time we rejoice in people loving each other and let everyone be equal?