Semper eadem

Always the same.

We all know at least one person who forwards every hoary e-mail hoax they come across without taking the trouble to verify that the sick child who would like a post card has been dead for 15 years or find out whether the words “so help me God” actually were removed from the Veteran’s monument, but the impassioned albeit incoherent speech of Darryl Scott before the subcommittee on crime of the House Judiciary Committee on May 27 that I received yesterday really are the words the father of a Columbine High School shooting victim gave to congress – 7 years ago. The text in which the quote is imbedded, like a rabbit turd in a Tiffany setting is as deceitful a piece of propaganda as the Republican Right can produce.

Of course the e-mail I received tells you it never got any press coverage, which isn’t true, it’s just another gratuitous attempt to paint a false picture of the fake war on religion, but the gist of the message was that the reason for the tragedy was that God (his God of course) isn’t honored enough in this country. We are a nation founded on God, lies the anonymous writer who includes Scott’s rant in his e-mail.

Never mind that the USA is the most church-going of all the industrialized nations, never mind that we have God on our money and on billboards and courthouse walls and on the windows of pick-up trucks and porta-potties; never mind that religious organizations have more political power here than almost any modern nation save the Vatican. Never mind that your child is more likely to be killed in a sports accident, vastly more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a demented fellow student. Never mind that violent crime has been declining for two decades and never mind that highly secular nations like Holland and much of Europe have a vastly lower crime rate than one finds in the American Bible Belt, never mind that pagan nations like Japan and Singapore have practically no shootings, never mind that despite Darryl’s impassioned but tendentiously distorted assertions, our government has never told anyone they couldn’t pray – Darryl thinks honoring God by holding public prayer in school will make it stop. The problem as I see it is that we honor religious nuts and their lies far too much. We’re afraid to call a turd a turd. We’re so afraid we’d rather eat it than identify it.

I can forgive almost anything of someone who has lost a child like that, but I cannot forgive the sick bastards who use such things to sell religious extremism, denounce the very concept of a constitutional republic and to portray the NRA as a victim. Mohammed Atta died with a prayer on his lips.