Thursday 3 September 2015

Yes/No/Whatever

I've been thinking about the clown car and Bernie Sanders tonight. I know very little about American politics, even at the presidential level. You all make your choices, and I have no say in that and nor should I. Reasons to vote or not vote are complex and local. They can be one issue and against that or for that and nobody knows and I hate you! But whatever way your vote goes, it's valid.

My government is currently killing people. Okay, you could argue that they might have died anyway, as if that's some kind of excuse to torment them further, but they are withdrawing benefits on the basis that some box-ticker with no medical qualifications said they should. No government that is willfully killing its own citizens has any moral right to power. Yay! Something we can hopefully agree on, because I try very hard to not make friends with sociopaths.

But I have to say this. All you No voters, you helped this to happen. Even if you don't personally agree with it, this is what you voted for. You might have thought you were voting No for greater unity, for the good of the currency, for the future of your children, for more powers, but the truth is you weren't. If you paid any attention to politics you knew that. If you didn't pay any attention, then you should have stayed the fuck home on polling day, because the politically illiterate decided our fate, and I really resent that.

Vulnerable people in Scotland are dying because you said No. We can't decide to pull drowning Syrians and Libyans out the Mediterranean and take them in because you said No. We have to pay taxes to maintain nuclear weapons because you said No. I have to watch the naked, psychopathic glee at the grinding down of the most vulnerable people in our society, because You Said No.

Yet I still don't want a UDI (unilateral declaration of independence), because I respect your democratic right. And I do and I will. But if the UK votes to leave the EU then we will have to do a UDI, because you people have tortured me enough already over things that don't even affect me. I'm not losing my worker's and human rights to you. So yes to the EU or we are really fucking done. You wouldn't be human to me anymore. Vote yes for something. Even if it's not what you should have done in the first place.

Monday 30 March 2015

Not jonesing for Indiana

This is not my place. I'm not American. I don't fully understand America's political or electoral systems. I've never even been there. So I know, this is not my place.

What just happened in Indiana could never happen in any EU country. The European Human Rights Act ensures no one gets to be so offended by another person's skin colour, religion, or sexual orientation that they can refuse service. Because no one gets to impose their misguided ideas about What Would Jesus Do on people who are in their life for the blink of an eye and then gone again. For as long as it takes for them to hand over a coffee or a cake and take their money, can they really not stuff down their revulsion? Is it so important to them that their constructed white Jesus gets to hate the same people they do?

What bible do they read? For me, all religion goes from benign pantomime to outright force for evil depending on where the scale is sitting, but why is fundamentalist Christianity a rollicking good idea but being a fundamentalist Muslim, when both religions have far more in common than separating them, the most evilest thing in the world? Why can't they realise that adopting laws Al Qaeda would be proud of makes them just as bad? Worse even, since the media and their holy high heid yins are always trying to convince us what barbarians the Muslims are, without thinking for one moment that when the nice white Christians seek to oppress people who Aren't Like Them they're doing exactly the same thing?

Exactly the same thing.

If I was any kind of Christian I would be furious - absolutely fucking furious - about what these people are doing in the name of my religion. I left the Catholic church 20 years ago because I couldn't bear to associate with a faith that wanted half my friends to be inferior because of who they want to have sex with. We always hear about Muslims not condemning terrorism strongly enough, but Christians get a media pass if they don't condemn utter inhumanity.

I'm not saying everyone should accept gay people. Much as anyone who thought they were immoral would never be a friend of mind, I accept that attitude exists, and I don't seek to talk people out of it. But religion does not bestow a right to be a bigot. It's a cover story, a mask, an excuse. They have to feel these things without blaming God or Jesus or Allah or Jehovah or whoever they want to pass the buck to.

And I think that's what bothers me most about this law. Conservatives are always big on personal responsibility, but they're happy to let a 2,000-year-old book tell them how to behave, even when they've quite clearly read it wrong. They want responsibility up until the point they can make a dickhead governor sign a law that abdicates them from their personal feelings. They scream about their rights while campaigning to strip others of theirs. As soon as a Muslim doctor refuses to treat an alcoholic they will howl, because these rights are only intended for Christians. And no one supporting this law has a right to that name.

So, not my place. But I said it anyway.