McLaren_Field wrote:
There's a common thread - religious intolerance.
All religions preach intolerance, all religions deny that they preach intolerance, all religions seek to control their followers by means of intolerance in order to extract cash from them, if they had to register as a business in the normal way they'd have BBC's Watchdog down on them like a ton of bricks.
On of the things that strikes me is that people get understandably concerned/worried about Islamic fundamentalism, but there are plenty of others around who are little different.
I have little doubt that, were they to have such an opportunity, the Tea Party nutters like Limbaugh and many others would, for instance, act very little different to the Taliban or the Saudis.
You have to ask yourself, for instance, why contraception as a part of health insurance is even an issue in the US election campaign. Yet it is. Because Republicans – desperately trying to appeal to the religious fundamentalist part of the US electorate that is as organised electorally as it incapable of being swayed by facts – raised it. What does that attitude toward contraception tell you? Something similar to the message sent by Sarah Palin when she signed a local law ensuring that any woman alleging that she had been raped would have to pay for their own forensic tests, perhaps?
Here, we're seeing court cases about the 'conscience' of particular religious people who want to be discriminated in favour of by allowing them to be excused from (the latest specific case) even being near women going for an abortion. What happened in the days before all these court cases? Nobody had any consciousnesses – or the employers always automatically ensured that the slightest religious whim was catered to?
Everytime I hear from the Limbaughs of the world, I think of Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale.
