This is why.

Sixteen-year-old junior Matthew LaClair says he was shocked when history teacher David Paszkiewicz, who is also a Baptist preacher in town, spent the first week lecturing students more about Heaven and Hell than the colonies and Constitution.

He said Paszkiewicz told students that if they didn’t accept Jesus, “you belong in Hell.”

Part of the whole Evangelical tradition is “spreading the good news” whether or not your audience wants to hear it. And if that audience happens to be a public school classroom where you are the teacher with all the power over a room full of captive students- so much the better.

These kind of Christians are the telemarketers of the religious world. They don’t really give a damn about you as a person, they just want to make sure they get their quota of news spreading in so that they can get whatever heavenly door prize goes to the one whose most verbose.

This preacher/teacher went on to lie about what he was teaching in class when LaClair complained to the principal. It was only when LeClair produced recordings of the lessons that the preacher/teacher fessed up to what he had done. If what he was doing was good for the students, or if he had the actual convictions of his stated beliefs then he never would have had to lie about it. But he did lie. And in lying he not only did his beliefs a disservice, but he cast doubt on an innocent kid who just wanted his own freedom of religion respected. How mature and more importantly, how christian of him to lie in order to escape responsibility.

But you know, it’s ok for the preacher/teacher to lie about the kid- the kid is a believer in something “non Christian”. So ya know, the kid’s going to hell anyways and lying about him ain’t no big thing.

Nice, real nice.

… And what I hope the rest of the country learned about us.

I had been planning to compose this post in the past few days, partly in response to Deek’s Right-Wing Radioactive, and partly just because I have stuff to say on the topic.

Real life, however has intervened, and I haven’t been able to take the time to write what I wanted to articulately,

Obsessing over pooping rituals will kill you.

Having been dick slapped by the majority voters in the country, Bill O’Reilly is not content to lie down and die like a dead horse should. Last year he went on his idiotic rant about the “War on Christmas”, this year it’s the “War on Religion”.

As for the imaginary War on Christmas- it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and the stores are full of Christmas detritus already. Even Ikea, you know that godless, Swedish, commy store has sent out flyers advertising their Christmas baubles. The Kid brought me a list of things he wants yesterday and shoved it in my face like any demanding white male Christian child would (he was promptly put in his place by non-Christian, non-male me). Christmas is not in danger. Credit ratings, common sense, propriety and rationalism are in danger, but Christmas and the Ka-Ching sound we have all come to associate with the holiday are as firmly in place as that fruitcake your boss gave you last year that is now welded to the bottom of your cupboards.

Now to the War on Religion. I am an agnostic. Whenever this comes up in the company of religious folks, they assume agnostic means I “just haven’t been taught the wonderful ways of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ” and cannot come to terms with the idea that I have chosen to avoid dogmatic beliefs based on unproven ideas consciously. See, me and my types, agnostics and atheists (though I think most atheists are just as dogmatic as the fundies) only make up about 3% of the population.

People who call themselves Christian, regardless of denomination make up about 82% of the population. Now I know we all can’t be as cool as me (coolest cat in the litter box and all that) but even my vast coolness rays cannot influence the 82% of the people in this country who think the earth is only 6000 years old and that you can get knocked up by divine intervention. The truth is, rational thought is rarely as sexy as screaming dogma that lets you exclude large chunks of the population from your club.

Religion, for all the harm it has done many over the course of time, is in no danger from a culture war. Those who do not believe in the innate Christian-ness of our country may be in danger from those like O’Reilly who cannot fathom the idea that someone would rather think on their own and take responsibility for their own actions rather than give up individual thought for faith. Of course, I have to take responsibility for my own actions, fundy yahoos can blame God or the Devil, which ever one is trendy at the time.

So in honor of the holiday season I will once again change our little slogan. I still firmly believe that modesty is for people with nothing to brag about, but until New Year’s I think we need something seasonally appropriate.

Happy Freakin Holidays- I’m gonna get drunk and set a manger on fire. Of course I will then have to take responsibility for my manger arson, no blaming the Devil or the Catholics for it. It’s all me.

And just for fun- The Marines hate the Baby Jesus. It’s true.

I can’t help but think that this is so much better than giving corporate welfare to McDonalds to expand globally. But I am an Indy Pop Queen, so you all know where my loyalties would lie.

For the last month I have been fighting with the Seattle Housing Authority. Due to lax accounting practices they have been overcharging me for rent to the tune of almost $100 a month for the last 6 months. Last week I sent a large package to their office including proof of bad accounting and a request for a formal hearing.

Today I got a call from Seattle Housing and as soon as the guy announced who he I was I got terse and put on my “Don’t fuck with me” attitude. Then he let me know he was calling to see if I was interested in a position. Shit.

The job would put me firmly back in the tax paying middle class with a fat government benefits package.

He’s going to call to set up an interview early next week. There is a large part of me that would enjoy showing these people how to actually do accounting (mama was an accountant and I don’t play fast and loose with the numbers). Would you all still love me if I was even more of a government shill?

I’ve had a bad, really bad year when it comes to people dying. Last March, I lost 2 friends in the Capitol Hill shooting massacre. Two months later my grandfather suffered from a stroke and died slowly at home. Then yesterday was Veteran’s day. First thing yesterday morning I got a call that my Uncle Ed had died. He had served in Vietnam, but like most of the troops back then he wasn’t there by choice.

I’m not sure of the exact year or even of the truth of the story (my family being famous for the lack of truth in family stories), but the story I have been told is that my Uncle Ed ended up a paratrooper in Vietnam after he stole a 75 cent jacket from a thrift store and got caught. The judge gave him what was a pretty common choice back then- jail or the army. Had he gone to jail he just would have been sent to Vietnam when he got out, so he skipped the jail part and went to Vietnam.

He didn’t talk about the war to us kids, but I remember being 10 years old and sitting in the back seat of the car while we were getting ready to go somewhere. A car backfired and Uncle Ed lost it. This big grown man tried to climb under the steering wheel, pulling whoever was in the passenger seat with him for fear of what the backfire noise meant. “Flashback”, my mom whispered while I worried. “Let your uncle be”.

Most of my memories of my uncle involve a car. There were the “sailing trips” we used to take early on weekday mornings. This is where we all loaded up into a big van and went scoping out garage sales, but telling people we went “sailing” every weekend was Uncle Ed’s big joke. The last time I saw my uncle I drove him to a family reunion in North Carolina. This was the first time I had dealt with him as an adult (our family is not one for regular get togethers). I had my little red Toyota Corrolla, a car not known for power or speed, loaded up with 5 people and all their luggage. Ed didn’t think I could possibly have the car in the right gear because it was going too slow, uphill. He grabbed the gearshift while I was driving and dropped it into neutral. If it wasn’t for my mother I would have killed him. Shortly thereafter, he decided I was going to miss the exit and jerked the steering wheel hard to the right. I was pissed and had it been anyone besides my mother’s darling big brother, he would have been left walking on the roads of North Carolina with his luggage in tow. He found another ride home from the reunion, but that drive has tainted most of my relations with him since.

For the last few years, Uncle Ed has been fighting with the VA over his medical benefits. His kidneys were failing. He needed dialysis and a transplant. Like most government operations, the red tape to get assistance was meant to drive more people off than to actually help them. Uncle Ed, as you can tell by my driving story, was a guy who got what he wanted by charm and took it if he didn’t think someone was going to give it to him. I heard the frustration the few times I talked to him after he got sick. He went from being Ed the invincible, someone who really annoyed me but who I respected, to being broken by a system that was ungrateful for the services he had given.

We have a whole new slew of veterans coming home from another war that no wanted but the politicians and new stories about how poorly we treat them when they come home. Uncle Ed is gone, and nothing has improved since he came back from another war where the climate was unbearable and the terms of service were abhorable and no one could see the point in what they were fighting for. I don’t know if Ed meant for there to be symbolism in the date of his death or if at that point he was just to sick to care, but I know I am really tired of people dying who shouldn’t.

Especially for a grandmom of 66. Date of birth: March 1940.

Chart to follow.

Welcome back to the party of pragmatism and reality based results. Let me be, if not the first, then one of the many to say thank you for restoring my faith in the general population. Turns out that our country has not been quite as over run with red state yahoos as I thought.

But before you get all big-headed about your role in this election, let me say one thing.

WHAT THE FUCK TOOK YOU ALL SO LONG?

Seriously, Iraq was a quagmire in 2004. Science has been shoved under the rug since 2000. The budget has been careening out of control since the start of the Iraq war. The No Child Left Behind act was failing kids before it was enacted. The scandals being reported on now have been going on for years. We all knew the Medicare Rx plan was going to blow chunks. Where the hell have you been?

Were you too dazzled by the latest season of reality TV shows for the last 6 years to pay attention to the news? Did your education suck so badly that you couldn’t understand the middle-school level of writing done in most major newspapers? Did you miss the “Don’t believe the hype” lesson most of us learned as teenagers upon discovering that plucky girls in glasses don’t actually win the quarterback and skinny boys with greasy hair don’t get the head cheerleader in the back seat with her skirt pulled up? (Slight disclaimer- I was that cheerleader with the skinny boy- but I am the exception that proves the social rule). Did you think that voting with the frat boy party and beating up on gays and immigrants was gonna make you popular?

OK, admonishment done. I promise that as long as you all continue to act like thinking, rational human beings I will never again mention the 6 years of hell we have all been facing. We’ll just say that you were “going through a phase” and put it to rest. But you do have to prove that you are going to continue to use your brain at the ballot box and not let the self-esteem challenged inner teenager punch your card.

As a reminder of some of the rational things that will hopefully come from your vote:

Science will once again trump magic fairy dust and faith healing in dealing with the environment.

Women’s bodies will go back to belonging to individual women and we will, hope upon hopes, start valuing already alive children more than we value clumps of dividing cells.

Budgets will be balanced, taxes will be fair, incomes will go up. This is what Democrats do, by the way. The “tax and spend” liberal idea is so outdated that Eisenhower would cringe to hear it used.

We will stop giving swirlies to the EU and the rest of the world when it comes to international relations. I know it seemed really hilarious to you when Bush was doing it before, but you know the people that get swirlies and wedgies and are otherwise tormented are always the ones that come back 10 years later as gazillionaires who can lay off your entire division out of spite. We are starting the process by not allowing John Bolton permanent title to embarrass us on the floor of the UN. (Thank Lincoln Chaffee for that one, ousted as he is he is showing that the needs of the country are worth more than his need to stick it to the winners).

This is just the beginning of rational behavior. Again, thank you for coming to your senses or for finally being bored with Dancing with the Stars or Survivor.

Sincerely,

The Red Queen who has been a rational blue voter since my first registration.