The longer I don't post here, the tougher it gets to post here. Which may just be another term for inertia, I guess. The problem lately hasn't been enough to say, it's been too much having to be said during the workdays/nights without any time to say something here.
And it's also just too much work to keep with the mendacity and duplicity of Republicans today.
But an article two weeks ago in the Washington Post caught my eye, which I couldn't let pass. It was reporting on the fact that 55 House Democrats had issued a joint statement "on the central role that the Catholic faith plays in their public lives."
They said their faith influences their views on many issues: poverty, war, health care, education, etc. And, basically, they were fed up with having a single issue — abortion — define both their politics and their faith.
What's most telling, however, is not their decision to stop letting others define them, but the responses of those who would like to. The article quotes Tom McClusky, a Catholic who is the vice president for government affairs at the conservative, anti-family Family Research Council.
He said: "While other issues are important — such as helping the poor, the death penalty, views on war — these are things that aren't tenets of the Catholic Church."
I'm not Roman Catholic, I'm an Episcopalian, but in sharing the same Bible, I'm pretty sure that opposition to abortion is not a central tenet in the historic Catholic faith, whereas helping the poor; forgiveness and mercy tempering justice; anachronistic, first-centry concepts like "peace" — these actually are tenets of the Catholic Church, and Christianity in general.
But it just shows you how far off the deep end hate groups like the Family Research Council have gone in their attempts to hijack Christianity.
Everyone knows Julius Caesar bought the farm on the Ides of March. For everyone who missed it with the first time around with Shakespeare, we got reminded last year on HBO's Rome. (LOVED Rome. It's apparently coming back in 2007.)
According to Wikipedia, here are other references you'll find to the middle of the third month:
Ides of March is also a novel by Thornton Wilder, describing, in a series of documents, the events leading up to the death of Julius Caesar.
"The Ides of March" is also an instrumental song by Iron Maiden from their 1981 album, Killers.
The Ides of March is also a band who performed the 1970 hit, "Vehicle."
"Ides of March" is the name of the season 4 finale of the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. The events of the episode roughly correlate with the key elements in the Shakespeare play, with Xena warning Brutus to beware the Ides of March, implying Caesar had become uncontrollably megalomaniacal.
Imagine: a country with a leader who had become uncontrollably megalomaniacal. Thankfully, those kinds of problems are completely historical, with no relevance to our situation today.
