An Open Letter to Sean Hannity by Candace Chellew-Hodge

A letter to Sean Hannity (in response to the Knoxville shootings) from Rev Candace Chellew-Hodge , the founder and editor of www.whosoever.org .
In sharing her letter with the Whosoever community Candace explained " In light of the shootings at the Unitarian church I have written an
article called "An Open Letter to Sean Hannity." News reports say
Hannity's book along with books by other conservative authors were
found in the shooters home. This is where he got this twisted idea
that "liberals" are to blame for the world's woes.
I know Sean Hannity. I worked with him in Atlanta back in the 90s
right as he hit the big time, so I addressed a letter to him. "

http://religiondispatches.org/Gui/Content.aspx?Page=AR&Id=382#
RDEpistle: Open Letter to Sean Hannity
Candace Chellew-Hodge
"If the Left succeeds in gaining and retaining more power, the well-being of future generations will be at greater peril. I fear (our children) will inherit a nation that is less free and less secure than the nation we inherited from the last generation. It is therefore our job to stop them. Not just debate them, but defeat them." — Sean Hannity
Dear Sean:
I found these words on page 11 of your book Let Freedom Ring. This book, and similar ones from your conservative colleagues Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage, was found in the home of a man who read those words, internalized those words, and then loaded his shotgun. He took 76 rounds of ammunition with him to a place of worship—a place where he knew he could do his job to stop and defeat some liberals. At the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jim Adkisson, a fan of yours, killed two people, wounded five others, and left an entire congregation and country shaken by his actions. Actions prompted, as he testified in his own written notes, by the ideas contained in your words.
I don't know if you remember me, Sean, but I worked with you in Atlanta in the early 1990s, right as you got your big break with FOX News. I was an anchor and reporter (under the air name Candace Petersen) at WGST, your last low level stop before hitting the big time. I remember your last night on the air before you left for the big leagues. I approached you in your office, a cramped back room that I'm sure resembles a hovel compared to your FOX digs. I asked if you, during your last show, would tone down your rhetoric against gays and lesbians—stop demonizing our community for just one night. You refused. You explained to me, as if I were a child, that to do so would be to let your audience down. They expected you to go on the air and rant about how liberals, minorities, women and especially gays and lesbians were ruining our country. You simply had to oblige.
Even though you explained it simply, I still didn't understand. Your Girl Friday—your most trusted assistant on your show was a young lesbian. She admired you, for some strange reason, and you two were close friends, lunching together, spending time together outside of work. You didn't seem to have a problem with this particular lesbian. She wasn't the one you kept blaming on the air for the downfall of democracy. No, you had two different lives then—one on the air, where you performed your outraged conservative act and one in real life, where you enjoyed your lesbian friend and seemed like a decent, sane fellow.
I don't know if you've bought into your own shtick or not these days. If you truly believe half of what I could manage to read in your book (thank God the quote I found was in the early pages), I feel sorry for you. I don't know how a person who obviously has no problem with homosexuality in their friends (or used to have no problem, anyway), can rant about how disgusting homosexuality is on pages 156 to 157. (Many thanks to your editors for the index.) I would call you a hypocrite, but if you've become a true believer, I guess the label no longer applies.
I hope you are not too far gone, your conscience too eaten away with greed, to understand the violent and vile object lesson that Mr. Adkisson has provided for us in Tennessee, because it's a lesson you need to learn: Our words matter. Our words have power.
If you tell a child long enough that they are stupid and will never amount to anything, it won't be long before they'll believe that and live up to those words. If you tell the whole population of a country that their woes can be blamed on something called "liberals" who hold different ideas than you do, it won't be long before those "liberals" will become the scapegoat for all social ills. Those words matter—they have power. Adkisson was a true believer.
Your book is rife with paragraphs bashing "the Left"—an enigmatic group of "liberals" painted so broadly that your label for them must be capitalized. These are the people to blame if anything goes wrong in the world. Terrorism? "The Left" didn't hunt down the terrorists before they struck. War? "The Left" didn't do enough to protect us from our enemies and have opposed our military readiness. Job losses? "The Left" taxed the corporations so much they moved overseas.
In your world, and the world you convinced Adkisson of, "the Left" is the bogeyman under the bed. But your book never mentions how the last eight years of Republican leadership has already left our children a nation that is less free, less secure, and as a special bonus, deeply in debt. Republicans are responsible for bankrupting our country, chipping away at our civil rights, sending our monetary and human treasure to waste away and die in the desert, leaving us paranoid and afraid of anyone who may look different, undermining social safety nets like unemployment and food stamps (which Adkisson had recently just lost), and generally making us a more selfish and divided nation. You have done this with your words, Sean—words of division, words of hate, words of war, and words of greed.
The sad irony here, Sean, is that if Mr. Adkisson had gone to that Unitarian church and told them he was out of a job and his food stamps had just ended, they would have helped him. They would have fed them from their food pantry and used their network of friends to help find him a job. Not because they're liberal socialists, but because they understand that it's not "us" against "them." Instead, what made this country great is that we pull together in times of crisis—we bear one another's burdens and put aside our differences in order to be of service to one another. They would have reached out to Mr. Adkisson without asking him if he was Democrat or a Republican or a liberal or a conservative. Labels don't matter when someone is in need—or they shouldn't.
But, Mr. Adkisson did not know that about the Unitarian church. You didn't tell him liberals could help him. You only told him they're to blame for his misfortune. His mind had already been poisoned by the words of hatred and division from you book. He saw the Unitarians down the road, not as fellow human beings who would generously help him in his time of need, but as enemies—the very reason his world had gone to hell. His job, since he had no other because of a bad economy created by Republican policies, was "to stop them. Not to debate them, but defeat them." And so he loaded a gun.
Sean, you occupy a position of power. All words have power, but some words are more powerful than others simply because they are amplified from a larger stage. With power comes responsibility. If there is any of that old Sean left—the one before the big office, the popular TV and radio show and best selling books—I appeal to that man. Understand the power of your words. I know that words of division are profit-making words for you. We human beings apparently love to see a good fight, or feel our views justified by a good argument. But I hope this incident will give you pause and help you begin to choose your words more wisely. I hope, in choosing future words, you'll consider not what's best for the Hannity bank account, but what's best for humanity.
I long for the day when profitable words are words that uplift, encourage, and inspire people. The strength of this nation has always been our unity in diversity and our unity in the face of adversity. By using your words to create a world of "us" and "them" you only perpetuate violence and discord in our society. I am asking you, Sean, to examine yourself and your words. You don't have to agree with liberals and their views, but you can oppose liberal ideas without painting those who hold those beliefs as enemies who need to be stopped or defeated. If conservative ideas are truly superior, then a compelling case can be made for them without resorting to the politics of personal destruction.
Sean, your words have the power to heal and the power to destroy. The choice is yours.
Sincerely,
Candace Chellew-Hodge

Gay Republicans? Say What?

For years I have been trying to describe Gay and Lesbian folks who vote Republican. Finally an Arizona state Representative Kyrsten Sinema put it in focus for me when she recently said “It’s kind of like being a deer and joining the NRA. Because come hunting season, they’re going to shoot you”. Indeed they will.

I understood being Gay and Republican, the “Big Tent” thingy, before the Republican Party decided to enter our bedrooms and started preaching that Jesus was offended by gays, as if Karl Rove, George Bush and John McCain have a full comprehension of what Jesus thinks. Jesus to Republicans is a means to an end, the end being, win elections at any cost, including their “immortal souls”. Democrats who believe in the Word of Jesus believe it to be a life style, feed the hungry, heal the sick, shelter the homeless and most of all love one another, pretty simple stuff.

I almost understood being gay and Republican when I thought about Republicans touting “fiscal responsibility”, but that certainly has gone down the tubes.

I thought well maybe Republicans are good for the security of our National Defense and that some gay people are afraid that the Mullahs will come here and start hanging Gays as they so in Iran. Hence, I started checking out the Military history of Republicans and realized that the best they could do is send some other persons kids to fight their “Republican Wars”.

I am convinced that Gay men and women, probably more men than women, who vote Republican are suffering from a “me too” syndrome. They want to be the model that Republicans seem to project, sort of like so many women want to be that skinny model that “Fashion” projects . They want to be really rich, they want to be “different” from Gay People yet have all the benefits of being gay, but in a closet.

The bottom line, in my mind, about Gays voting for Republicans is that they are ashamed of who they are and are desperately wanting to be something different, something they will never be. For sure a sad commentary about their lives.

Bart

3 Facts That Could Change This Election

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6430781
3 Facts That Could Change This Election (If We Share Them With Enough People)

Here are 3 Stunning facts that could not only change the outcome of this election, but with regard to the first two points, they could change the results of every election for years to come *if* we make enough people aware of them.

I want to keep this as simple and short as possible, so that the people who need to read this actually do. And again, I encourage you to share this information with as many people as you can, either by recommending and commenting on this thread, by emailing these points out and or by posting a link to this thread on the appropriate websites.

1)-Over 70% of our National Debt was created by just 3 Republican presidents.

Go ahead, get out your calculator and add up debt by president/party. Apparently the party that claims fiscally responsibility thinks it's ok to borrow massive amounts of money from foreign countries like China. Consider that we spend hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments on this debt each year. That means more and more of your hard earned money is going to make interest only payments on what is basically a Giant National Credit Card. Not to mention the fact our debt/deficits are largely behind the weakness of our dollar, which in turns makes gas more expensive and creates other serious problems.

If you want to learn more about the National Debt, check out these links:
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock /
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...
http://zfacts.com/p/447.html (A running clock with the cost of the war)
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/business...

2)-According to new research from Larry Bartels out of Princeton, real middle class wage growth is double when a Democrat is president compared to when a Republican is president.

"...Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families...grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike...": http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-ideal...

Here is a short summary of this research: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008...

And here is a good, short audio interview with Larry Bartels: http://youngturks.wmod.llnwd.net/a591/o1/4-25-08Bartels...

3)-90% of Americans would pay less taxes under Obama's proposed tax plan compared to McCain's.

This is according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Institute as reported by CNN:http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates...

People making under $112,000 a year in individual (not household) income would pay less taxes under Obama's plan.

By contrast, John McCain's tax cuts mostly benefit the top 10% of Americans. Under McCain's plan, people making over 2.9 million dollars in individual annual income would get almost a million dollar tax break.


Conclusion: Countless millions of Americans vote Republican because they believe they'll pay less taxes and that they'll have their money spent more responsibly. As you can see, those beliefs are directly contradicted by the facts. Of course we can choose to ignore the facts and instead focus on which candidate is wearing a flag pin (you ever notice that Hillary and McCain don't wear them? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi5nbZvS9cg ) but I think we're a smarter country than that.

PS---If you're not sure how to respond to those laughably bad, factually inaccurate anti-Obama smear emails and or you want more information on John McCain, here is a nice resource guide of articles, videos and commentary:http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

Whose Freedom are we talking about? And Free to do what?

As we celebrate our Independence I am sure that all Americans will remember those who have secured our freedoms. The most recent are the unnamed and hidden from the public men and women who have died on the premise that invading Iraq was an effort to secure our freedom and spread “democracy”.
I suppose a convoluted logician may think that to be true if indeed one believes that securing the oil fields of the Middle East secures our freedom. Securing those fields may secure our economy, but does it secure our freedoms, at what price and who pays the price?
A couple of years ago I understood that the war in Iraq was going to cost this nation over a trillion dollars. The current direct cost of the war is a little under a trillion dollars but the indirect cost, veterans care and the demise of our own national infrastructure is well over a trillion dollars.
Sadly the real cost of the war is the human cost, not just the soldiers who have been killed, hidden from the public but the severely wounded, also hidden, and the tragic toll that this Republican war of convenience for the really wealthy in America has taken on our military families. Our Soldiers are sent over and over again into a god forsaken experience and their family members are forced to suffer years of constant worry.
I know that the families of our military personnel will be steadfast and keep their heads up high and always proud of the sacrifices they, their spouses, their children and their parents have made. Unfortunately the bottom line in this so called war, this hidden war, is that no one other than our military and their families know the real pain yet others are profiting from their pain.

Bart

True Prayer

There are two things that I admire in the human spirit: fortitude and patience. I don’t have fortitude, which definitely challenges my patience. My partner has fortitude but depends on me for the patience. I guess that’s how we make it through the day and years.
Recently an editor expressed a comment about a politician offering prayers at a public meeting. Subsequent letters to this editor, which were freely printed, really lambasted her. As the former leader of the Dignity [GLBT Catholics organization] chapter in Sarasota, I totally agree with this editor and her position. Religion and prayer have no place in the public forum. Politicians have made prayer a cliché. If you want to or need to pray, you should do it in silence, and for those Christians who would challenge this, I refer them to Matthew 6:5-8. Politicians on both sides are diminishing the importance of the human spiritual experience. Government in the United States should be oblivious to religion and take no particular religious stand. Most of all, politicians should not be judged based on their religious upbringing. On the other hand, religion, at least Christian religion as I understand it, should be about securing the dignity of all of God’s creations, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the veterans of war, our natural environment, the creatures that are struggling for existence as a result of human greed. Honest Christians should not allow the “professional Christians” the scum who use Jesus to acquire wealth and avoid the laws of this land to diminish their faith and most of all, should never allow those so called leaders to impose guilt, shame and fear on innocent people.
The people of Christian Faith, who have been led astray by those who seek to control them and in turn set this Nation back two thousand years, need to re-evaluate the message of Jesus; His message of Love, Peace and tolerance.
Jesus said “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites” Matthew 6.5. Amen.

ANWR

One would think that a man who is about to leave the Presidency of the United States with the lowest favorability rating, ever, would make some attempt to redeem himself and act responsibly. Instead George Bush, after having been told a few weeks ago, and to his surprise, that gasoline prices were approaching $4.00 a gallon repeated the mantra of his oil cronies and insisted that we begin drilling for more oil in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). The following facts can be found on the Energy Information Administration’s website; If drilling were to be approved no oil would come out of ANWR for at least ten years, that’s 2018; The biggest field in ANWR would produce, at the maximum, 1.4 billion bbls (barrels), total, secondary fields would produce another 2.8 billion bbls., which is maximum total of 4.2 billion bbls. In 2007 the U.S. imported approximately 4.9 billion barrels of oil, 2.2 billion bbls came from OPEC nations and of that 800 million bbls were imported from the Persian Gulf and the rest from various supplier nations. Considering these production and consumption figures, the most we can expect by drilling in ANWR is to sustain our economy’s thirst for oil for less than one year, ten years from now, but the potential environmental damage is immeasurable. My opinion is that the President should not be promoting the continuation of oil dependence; instead he should, for once, be a trail blazer and initiate a project to promote alternative energy and energy conservation. We’ve been through this before, back in the early 1970s. Had the President and Congress acted responsibly by creating an energy task force we probably would not be in the position we are today.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/anwr/methodology.html
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm

Catholic Marriage

There is a conflict when the Catholic Church demands that “Marriage” should only be between a man and a woman. In the twelfth century Pope Alexander III gave the doge of Venice a ring and told him “Receive this ring as the symbol of your empire over the sea…You and your successors be married to her each year, so that succeeding generations may know that the sea is yours and belongeth to you as a spouse to a husband”. And so each year afterwards the succeeding Doge’s of Venice, Italy, dropped a wedding ring into the sea to renew his vow to Venice’s wife, the sea.
After the newly professed nun receives a blessing from a priest, she receives a blessed profession ring, a wedding ring. This ring is to symbolize her contract of virginity and perpetual chastity. The ring is the seal of the Holy Spirit. Through the reception of this ring, she is espoused forever to Jesus Christ. In other words, she is married to Christ.
These things are good things, both examples talk about love. In the case of Venice it is the love of the sea and the great wealth, material and knowledge that the mariners of Venice were able to achieve. Their exploits and the exploits of mariners all over the world gave us the beginnings of good science.
In the case of the good nuns married to Christ, despite all the funny Broadway shows, I personally will always be grateful for their love, their sacrifice and their marriage to Christ. I am not sure where I would be without them.
So there you are, two examples of marriage in the Catholic Church that is not between a “man and a women” but have produced great things, myself excluded my life relationship included.