Focus!

I know it’s the holidays and everyone’s got their mind on Bailouts, Nazis, and Jennifer Aniston (like we do every year) but I think, “we” and when I say, “we”, I mean you really need to focus here.

Every other liberal/leftie/progressive has his or her non gender-specific under clothings in a bunch over President-Elect Obama’s decision to have Rick Warren do the invocation at the super-historic-superlative laden-inauguration to end all inaugurations on Jan, 20th because it turns out Rick Warren is not the guy from Yes, like I thought he was but he’s actually some mega-church Christian Conservative guy who is against abortion and marriage equality. They feel it’s a slap in the face adding insult to injury after California’s Prop 8 vote (and the similar votes in Arizona and Georgia) and I can see their point.

However, moving past the divisive past 8+ years of politics means that we all need to move out of our little insular comfort zones. This means sometimes talking to people we don’t actually agree with on everything. Maybe it even minds finding common ground with these people to meet common goals. Remember how McCain and Clinton before him attacked Obama because he said he would meet with people he didn’t agree with? Yeah, this is kind of like that. And honestly 1/3d to 2/5ths of the people Obama will be president of have similarly fuckwitted morals as this Warren guy. Don’t we want to give the fuckwits some representation too? I mean at least we took the presidency away from them.

Also, it’s an invocation; religious voodoo that really shouldn’t be involved in federal politics at all anyway. If you’re going to criticize anything how about criticizing the invisible man in the sky part of this? Having a deluded man do this part of the thing, doesn’t seem that crazy to me. Rick Warren isn’t getting a cabinet post, he’s not minister of homosexual persecution, he’s not opening up the internment camps, he’s there to say nice stuff to Jesus.

Now let’s compare this high media stakes ballyhoo about the inauguration to something the actual president has done. Bush has enacted a policy that allows medical professionals to become conscience objectors to any particular medical procedure they don’t feel like doing or supporting. That’s right supporting. The janitor or cashier can stop you from getting your valve replacement or your anti-biotics. The big fear in this is that it will essentially make it legal for medical care providers to ban abortions or birth control; especially where they are the only health care provider in a geographical region. But hey, it could actually be way worse than that. Why should they stop at reproductive health once they’ve banned that. They could use such a ruling to refuse to perform expensive procedures or ones that don’t have a high enough success-rate to be malpractice-proof. They could decide not to perform treatment for particular illnesses that affect certain ethnic groups more than others.

Admittedly, they’ll probably not get around to persecuting everyone and just persecute those who have sex and aren’t rich enough to go to the next hospital over or the next state over… etc but this is something that actually has real and immediate impact on people’s lives and is an infringement on American constitutional values.

You see the difference here? One issue involves not shunning someone because of what their religious beliefs; the other involves restricting medical care based on religious beliefs. One is inclusive the other exclusive. One is reaching out with an open hand, the other is reaching out with a fist. I know at first glance we sometimes can mistake the open hand with the fist but like I said before. We really need to focus, people.