Friday, April 06, 2007

Good Friday

Why is such a sad day called "Good Friday", anyway?

We are constantly told by the leftist liberal types that "Chimpy Bushhitlerburton", and those of us who voted for him over the candidate those Commiecrats had to offer, are trying to make this country into a "Christianist theocracy", in the words of that pansy boy leftist who pretends to be "conservative", Andrew Sullivan.

Actually, this leftist pap precedes even Bush The Younger. It has been harped on for years, even becoming the basis for a stupid movie, based upon an even more stupid novel.

And yet, all of us have to work on Good Friday, and all of Holy Week, even the government employees. Easter is reduced to a pathetic Sunday.

Even the "Spring Break" that students get, "students" ranging from wee rugrats to nubile "Girls Gone Wild" coeds, does not necessarily fall during Holy Week.

Gee whiz, Christianist brothers and sisters, how are we ever going to get everyone attending mandatory right-wing indoctrination church camps if we can't get ALL of Holy Week off from work?

Passover fits in at the same time, so the Jews will work with us on this! We all know we need the go-ahead from the Jews before we do anything, right? Michael Moore says so.

Seriously, how can we go about creating theocracy if the week of the arrest, trial, torture, execution murder, and resurrection of The Man In Whose Name We Christian Fascists Act ISN'T a week long work-free holiday with the strictures and prohibitions on the level, of, say, Ramadan?

Or maybe, just maybe, the liberal Demunists are full of crap.

Eugene Volokh summed it up well:



Forcing their religious opinions on us: I must have blogged about this a while ago, but this trope keeps bugging me. "Those fundamentalist Christians are trying to force their religious opinions on us," the argument goes. But that's what most lawmaking is -- trying to turn one's opinions on moral or pragmatic subjects into law.

Gay rights activists are trying to force their opinions on us by making employers give out benefits based on sexual orientation, or by making taxpayers pay for various marriage-related benefits for same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples. Civil rights activists forced their opinions about race and sex discrimination on private employers, landlords, and business owners.



Ah, the argument goes, but those laws are backed by secular arguments, not religious ones. Well, as it happens, many laws -- civil rights laws, for instance -- were motivated by religious opinions (it's the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., you might recall). But more importantly, all of our opinions are ultimately based on unproven and unprovable moral premises. For some of us, the moral premises are secular; for others, they're religious; I don't see why the former are somehow more acceptable than the latter. And the slogan "separation of church and state" hardly resolves anything here: Churches may have no established role in our government, but religious believers are just as entitled to vote their views into law as are atheists or agnostics.

Just the other day on the freeway, I was cut off by a car with an utterly obnoxious bumper sticker reading: The Last Time We Mixed Politics With Religion....People Got Burned At The Stake. (You guessed it, the car was a Subaru, although you get partial credit for guessing a Volvo, and yes, she was a dykey looking driver).

Oh really? So the whole Civil Rights Movement never happened? Or Abolitionism?

(In the dummy dyke's favor, I suppose it would be nice to believe that whole foolish, and religion based, Constitutional meddling mess called Prohibition never happened either. But it did, at a time when more permanent constitutional meddling was also taking place, like direct income taxation and direct election of Senators.)

Of course, it's perfectly sound to disagree with people's views on the merits: If I don't agree with the substance of someone's proposal, whether it's religious or secular, I'll certainly criticize the substance. And naturally people will often find others' religious arguments unpersuasive -- "ban this because God said so" isn't going to persuade someone who doesn't believe in God, or who has a different view of God's will. (Likewise, many devout Christians may find unpersuasive arguments that completely fail to engage devout Christians' religious beliefs.) But there's nothing at all illegitimate about people making up their own minds about which laws to enact based on their own unprovable religious moral beliefs, or on their own unprovable secular moral beliefs.

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