So in the midst of an uproarious campaign season and foolishness beyond compare we are spending precious moments tweeting and twitting about whose religion is the best and most meaningful and deserves the most respect, as if this made the slightest difference in the big political picture. The idea that religion is a primary reason people decide whom to elect rather than an individual judgment individuals make about how to conduct their lives is so absurd it is remarkable anyone would attempt to justify a religious preference rather than old-fashioned common sense and logic. Unfortunately logic and common sense are in dangerously short supply these days so we are forced to get by on whatever belief systems and scraps of information come our way, unreliable as they may be.
What we have here is a media that tells us what they want us to know instead of what we need to know.
The Mormon Church discriminated against Black people and promoted segregation in the church for over 130 years. Black people were not allowed in the priesthood and were not permitted to enter certain Mormon Temples from 1848 to 1978. Darrick Evenson, a former Mormon Missionary and developer of the Black Mormon website, observes that “[f]or 130 years the Mormon Church taught that Negroes were the cursed and inferior children of Cain. This ‘Curse of Cain Doctrine’ was presented as ‘a doctrine of the Church’ from the days of Brigham Young in the late 1840s until June 8th 1978, when the Mormon Church ended the Priesthood-ban and allowed black Mormons into Mormon Temples and the Mormon priesthood (which all Mormon males hold).”
What we have here is a media who used to protect us from being lied to by our elected officials instead of helping them lie to us.
Compare their message to the Tea Party which favors “smaller government.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? It’s only two words and it fits on a car bumper many times over. The problem: how exactly do Tea Partiers suppose we reduce our government? Are they willing to pave their own roads? Educate their own kids? Extinguish their own fires?
Although the average Tea Party member may be armed to the teeth and willing to surrender the local police force to save a couple hundred bucks a year in taxes, that is of little comfort to me as a New Yorker whose greatest instrument for self defense was designed to cut steaks into more manageable bites.
Why, then, does media characterize the Tea Partiers as a legitimate political movement, yet trivialize Occupy Wall Street as “a bunch of hippies with bongo drums and no real point?”Why does sudden Republican primary leader Herman Cain feel completely justified in saying the reason these people don’t have jobs is, ostensibly, because they are lazy?
This is why the Occupation will not be televised.
