Homosexual Liberal Atheists ~ What's UP with that?

[green 6]

My hunch is that the man thought that it was a dreadful indecency to keep his former wife, now an existence entirely lacking a brain, alive for all those many years. And he was right, I think, the poor woman should have been laid to rest years before she was and it should have been done with respect instead of under those zoo-like conditions of publicity. Would anyone of you wanted anything different for yourselves?

[WASaBubbleButt 41]

My hunch is that the man thought that it was a dreadful indecency to keep his former wife, now an existence entirely lacking a brain, alive for all those many years. And he was right, I think, the poor woman should have been laid to rest years before she was and it should have been done with respect instead of under those zoo-like conditions of publicity. Would anyone of you wanted anything different for yourselves?

I have had a POA for years, it's the kind that is good regardless of my medical condition and I have a non-family member that is my POA. I don't want my family going through what TOs family did. It was more of an issue when my Mom was alive but still, there is no reason for them to have to be responsible for pulling the infamous plug.

[myfoursons 0]

Would anyone of you wanted anything different for yourselves?

When I would look at her and the condition she was is, and then add in all the publicity and controversy behind it, I knew damn well that I would never want that to be me.

I think I told everyone in my family, and made it clear, do NOT ever let me live that way, under any circumstances.

[green 6]

Yep, I have given POA to one of my nieces in the event that my husband, a guy who is 9 years younger than me, should cash in his chips first. I have warned both of them that I do not want to be kept alive after my mind has long since left the nest. It is degrading and both morally and environmentally wrong. Better to spend the energy, knowledge and the cash assisting someone who actually can be rescued, eh.:rolleyes

[WASaBubbleButt 41]

Better to spend the energy, knowledge and the cash assisting someone who actually can be rescued, eh.:rolleyes

Very true, we have kids in school using outdated books that are falling apart yet we are paying BIG bucks in taxes to keep dead bodies functioning.

Welcome to the US! :welldoneclap:

[green 6]

Very true, we have kids in school using outdated books that are falling apart yet we are paying BIG bucks in taxes to keep dead bodies functioning.

Welcome to the US! :eek:

Ah yes, this is so true. Sometimes a grrl finds herself wondering where the logic is..........:welldoneclap:

[WASaBubbleButt 41]

Just read this article written by Austin Cline. Thought others might be interested as well.

>>Conservative Morality is Not Moral or Ethical (Book Notes: The Cheating Culture)

Conservatives, and especially conservative Christians, tend to argue that everything which is wrong with America today can be traced to the predominance of "liberal" morality. According to such conservatives, we'd all be better off if we would focus more on restricting sexual, private behavior. Is there any evidence that the people who do this are, in fact, better and more moral than others?

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, David Callahan argues that just the opposite may in fact be the case:

It’s now more obvious than ever that being moral in narrow conservative terms is no protection from sinning in other ways. Take someone like Bernard Ebbers. As head of WorldCom, Ebbers was known as one of the most religious CEOs in the high-tech sector. He invoked God regularly in speeches and press interviews, and started each board meeting with a prayer. He was a deacon at his Baptist church, where he also led a weekly bible study class. According to those who took the class, he was remarkably fluent in scripture. If someone missed the class, Ebbers would be on the phone to see if they were okay.

And yet, Ebbers presided over the largest fraud in U.S. history, a fraud that wrought massive financial pain on present and future retirees across America. After the revelations of this crime, a tearful Ebbers told his congregation: “More than anything else, I hope this doesn’t jeopardize my witness for Jesus Christ.”

It sounds as though Ebbers was more concerned with whether public knowledge of his crimes would harm his ability to evangelize his religion than he was with whether his crimes caused actual financial harm to his employees. What a great guy, huh? He may have been a poster boy for traditional sexual and Christian morality, but that didn’t stop him from helping defraud those around him.

Or look at John Rigas, who headed Adelphia Communications, one of the largest cable television companies in the United States. The son of Greek immigrants, Rigas was a regular church goer guided by social conservatism. He raised his four children in a small town in upstate New York with a strict set of traditional values. His sons went to work with their father after graduating from the nation’s best colleges and they, too, became pillars of the upstate community where Adelphia was headquartered. The sons, like the father, were social conservatives. No porn channels were alIowed on Adelphia’s cable system.

A very different morality guided the Rigases in business. By the time investigators caught on, the Rigases had appropriated hundred of milions of shareholder funds for their personal use through various shady loans and frauds. Prosecutors accused father and sons of “systematically looting” Adelphia...

Pornography is bad, so they were pillars of their community in part for not allowing porn on their cable channels. Fraud and embezzlement aren’t so bad, though, so looting their own company and defrauding others was consistent with their conservative, religious morality.

Philip Anschutz is yet another business leader who publicly embraced religion and “family values” ‘ while indulging in greed and financial chicanery at the office. A billionaire who is the largest owner of movie screens in America, Anschutz is a religious man who has crusaded against homosexual rights and the medical use of marijuana. He has bankrolled a variety of Christian conservatives and invested in prayer radio.

Yet as the founder and chairman of Qwest Communications, a telecommunications firm, Anschutz ranks among the most corrupt insiders of the late 1990s. He sold nearly $2 billion of Qwest stock as it plunged in value from $63 a share to $3. As these sales took place, many in a secretive fashion, Qwest was encouraging its employees to hold on to their own stock and to build their retirement plans around 401(k)s heavy with Qwest shares. Anschutz was later investigated by Eliot Spitzer’s office and eventually agreed to give up $4.4 million in illegal gains from his shady business dealings without admitting any wrongdoing.

Homosexuality and drugs are bad, so he’s a good person for campaigning against them; deceiving his own employees in a manner designed to help him retain his massive wealth isn’t so bad so he felt he could do that while consistently upholding his conservative, religious morality.

Do you notice a pattern in these stories? There is one, if you look closely. In each case, what these men opposed and what their morality opposed involved private, consensual behavior which only harmed those involved (if anyone at all) — outsiders and innocent bystanders wouldn’t be significantly affected. The crimes which these men committed and which their conservative, religious morality either did not prevent or did not oppose involved public behavior which did significantly harm others — and for the sake of personal, private gain.

This suggests very strongly that the conservative, religious morality that men like these favor may be seriously deficient when it comes to considering how actions impact others. If we look at the causes that animate the Christian Right the most, what do we find? Causes like gay marriage, homosexuality, contraception, stem-cell research, evolution, sex education, and others don’t involve things that genuinely harm others. Abortion can at least be argued in good faith as something that causes harm, but the conservative religious position on this is not obviously and unambiguously one that prevents harm to others.

Let’s take a look at the causes which the Christian Right supports in a positive manner, opposing liberals and liberal Christians: invading and occupying Iraq, cutting back on welfare for the poor, cutting back on scientific research, ignoring evidence that global warming is happening, allowing the government to arrest without warrants and torture suspects, opposing the use of condoms in anti-AIDS programs, and so forth. In all of these cases, the harm caused to others is undeniable and unambiguous. Often, this harm is excused in the name of adhering to a narrow sexual morality designed to preserve some sort of spiritual purity — regardless of what happens physically.

So when the Christian Right talks about “values,” we have to keep firmly in mind exactly what sorts of “values” they have in mind: the value of denying full political and social equality to gays, but not the value of being a responsible company owner who treats employees well; the value of denying people access to marijuana for medical reasons or access to accurate sexual medical information, but not the value of telling employees the truth about the financial health of the company; the value of never having an illicit sexual liaison with someone other than one’s spouse, but not the value of telling the truth about foreign policy, not the value of not arresting people without warrants, and not the value of not torturing suspects.<<

[Tired_Old_Man 1]

I have had a POA for years, it's the kind that is good regardless of my medical condition and I have a non-family member that is my POA. I don't want my family going through what TOs family did. It was more of an issue when my Mom was alive but still, there is no reason for them to have to be responsible for pulling the infamous plug.

Put it on video tape or on a DVD, because they can misinterpret your written words or claim that you were under duress.

A picture is worth a 1000 words.

[green 6]

:rolleyesYea. We're a rotten lot, us Christians. lol.

This is an over-reaction, grrl. I hope that you realise that your contribution to the communal discussion is valuable. Indeed this is one of the miracles of the internet: it permits us to meet and greet and to swap information and ideas. I really do believe that the internet ranks up there with the Guttenberg press in terms of inventions that have changed humanity.

The Guttenberg press finally brought about literacy: this was through turning the written word into something which was cheaper to produce and thus much more easily available. Literacy drifted along with this increased availability of written material.

The internet really is extraordinary. The net provides a public forum and a place for the free and easy exchange of ideas for all of us who wish to engage. The internet is utterly democratic: everyone has a voice.

[anonemouse 1]

Why do these threads continue to highlight only those of the Right Wing Conservative or those of the Christian faith? What is the objective?

I would say it is a matter of hypocrisy. The reason the Conservative Christian Right gets so much publicity when one of their own does wrong is that they have generally been very loud about condemning people who they consider to have "sinned." Liberals who have done wrong don't really get as much mention, because they haven't been known as much to be criticizing what they have actually been doing themselves. Take that minister that was recently outed, for example. It wouldn't have made that much news if a liberal Unitarian-Universalist minister was outed, because they generally don't condemn homosexuality. This guy did, condemning homosexuality and homosexuals very loudly. What did we find? The guy was secretly gay and hiring male prostitutes.

So it isn't that they are being attacked and ridicules because they are Christian, it's because whenever something happens, it generally exposes the massive hypocrisy.

[BJean 16]

Well said, laurend.

[anonemouse 1]

I understand the hyprocrisy, but I still don't believe that Christians are the only people who ever say one thing and do another.

They're not, but they (at least a lot of the more conservative ones, anyway) are generally among the first to loudly proclaim how the actions of others are sinful. So I think it is understandable how people get a kick out of so many of them are being exposed as hypocrites of the highest order.

[anonemouse 1]

I guess that means if you stand for nothing, then you can't be held responsible for your shortcomings.

See, that bothers me. Conservatives are always claiming that liberals "stand for nothing", when we just stand for other things. I personally stand for being a good, moral, non-hypocritical person. If that's "nothing," then I'd hate to see your "something".

I stand for peace, whenever possible.

I stand for loving my fellow man and recognizing that he is worthy of all the rights that I have.

I stand for the poor being helped.

I stand for all people having access to equal health care and equal education.

I stand for supporting our veterans as much as we can.

I stand for protecting the environment.

Don't you dare tell me I stand for nothing.

[anonemouse 1]

And I don't believe ALL of any group of people are bad, or stupid, or liars, or cheaters, or hyprocrites.. or, or, or...

And neither do we. All Christians are not hypocrites. But it seems to me that the louder someone cries "sin!," the more likely they are to be a hypocrite. That's the entire reason there is so much publicity when a conservative Christian leader, because they've set themselves up for the scrutiny and late-night TV jokes. You know how it is, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."

[Lap_dancer 8]

There is quite a bit more to that story.

There was a lawsuit (I don't recall what it was for) that Terry, her parents, and her hubby all profited from. If he would have divorced her immediately he would have been able to keep Terry's and his money. He didn't. He used his share of the lawsuit money for extensive testing and therapy, even unconventional therapy to try to help his wife. He wiped out every dime trying.

After that money was gone (parents kept their share) the parents offered him their share of the money if he would just walk away. He declined, he then used personal money to finance the legal battles so he could do as his wife requested before she "died" and pull the infamous plug.

Money was not a motive for ANY of the family members, it just wasn't. The parents thought she was still a living person with a working brain. The husband did not. THAT is what it boiled down to, certainly not money.

The litiGATOR who took Michael's case did it pro bono because the attorney is a strong advocate of the right to die. (could forsee possibly this going to the Supreme Court) which threw it back to the state.

Yes, I know this story is very complex and involved over many years. for the sake of the readers I was attempting to stick tightly to the core issue which was who got Terri and the right for Michael to pull the plug.

..........................................................................................

To address the conservative Christian discussion. Most people had a negative experience with a church or someone representing some sort of religious affiliation. By and large, people do not like to be told what to do. When something is fun and enjoyable and a bit naughty, who wants to give it up? Who wants to be told it is morally incorrect according to a divine creator? Not anyone that I know of. So what tends to happy is the closer the issue hits to home, the more heated the response. You have a brother who is gay, you are gay, don't tell me God says laying with a man (and I'm a man ) is wrong! The fires start and the tar gets hot and someone goes for the feathers...where are those Bible thumpers!!(like they actually wrote it)

If you don't like that rhetoric, don't read it. Commandments too tight for your lifestyle? Sail on!