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Chrishayden
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Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1168
Registered: 03-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 26, 2005 - 01:45 pm: | 
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>>RPT: dr. hager's family values
============================
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050530&s=mcgarvey
Dr. Hager's Family Values
By AYELISH MCGARVEY
The Nation Magazine
Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent
obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee
to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as
the featured speaker at a morning service. He stood in the
campus chapel at Asbury College, a small evangelical
Christian school nestled among picturesque horse farms in the
small town of Wilmore in Kentucky's bluegrass region. Hager
is an Asburian nabob; his elderly father is a past president
of the college, and Hager himself currently sits on his alma
mater's board of trustees. Even the school's administrative
building, Hager Hall, bears the family name.
That day, a mostly friendly audience of 1,500 students and
faculty packed into the seats in front of him. With the
autumn sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows,
Hager opened his Bible to the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel
and looked out into the audience. "I want to share with you
some information about how...God has called me to stand in
the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding
ethical and moral issues in our country."
For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to
revolve around sex: In both his medical practice and his
advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety
anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception,
abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books--which
include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As
Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy
Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's
health and relationships--he has established himself as a
leading conservative Christian voice on women's health and
sexuality.
And because of his warm relationship with the Bush
Administration, Hager has had the opportunity to see his
ideas influence federal policy. In December 2003 the FDA
advisory committee of which he is a member was asked to
consider whether emergency contraception, known as Plan B,
should be made available over the counter. Over Hager's
dissent, the committee voted overwhelmingly to approve the
change. But the FDA rejected its recommendation, a highly
unusual and controversial decision in which Hager, The Nation
has learned, played a key role. Hager's reappointment to the
committee, which does not require Congressional approval, is
expected this June, but Bush's nomination of Dr. Lester
Crawford as FDA director has been bogged down in controversy
over the issue of emergency contraception. Crawford was
acting director throughout the Plan B debacle, and Senate
Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray, are
holding up his nomination until the agency revisits its
decision about going over the counter with the pill.
When Hager's nomination to the FDA was announced in the fall
of 2002, his conservative Christian beliefs drew sharp
criticism from Democrats and prochoice groups. David
Limbaugh, the lesser light in the Limbaugh family and author
of Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging Political War Against
Christianity, said the left had subjected Hager to an "anti-
Christian litmus test." Hager's valor in the face of this
"religious profiling" earned him the praise and lasting
support of evangelical Christians, including such luminaries
as Charles Colson, Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham, son
of the Rev. Billy Graham.
Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious
persecution in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on
in this country," he said gravely. "And I'm not speaking
about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against
Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn't my
scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It
was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me
to stand in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use
you."
Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded
solemnly in agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth
Davis--co-author with Hager of Stress and the Woman's Body,
and, more saliently, his former wife of thirty-two years--was
enraged. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard,"
she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.
According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual
matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during
their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their
divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her
consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that
she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse
within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I
probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so
abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the
time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful,
invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that
was so horrible."
Not once during the uproar over Hager's FDA appointment did
any reporter solicit the opinion of the woman now known as
Linda Davis--she remarried in November 2002 to James Davis, a
Methodist minister, and relocated to southern Georgia--on her
husband's record, even though she contributed to much of his
self-help work in the Christian arena (she remains a
religious and political conservative). She intermittently
thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of
respect for her adult children. It was Hager's sermon at
Asbury last October that finally changed her mind. Davis was
there to hear her middle son give a vocal performance; she
was prepared to hear her ex-husband inveigh against secular
liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak about their
divorce when he took to the pulpit.
"In early 2002," Hager told the churchgoers that day, "my
world fell apart.... After thirty-two years of marriage, I
was suddenly alone in a new home that we had built as our
dream home. Time spent 'doing God's will' had kept me from
spending the time I needed to nourish my marriage." Hager
noted with pride that in his darkest hour, Focus on the
Family estimated that 50 million people worldwide were
praying for him.
Linda Davis quietly fumed in her chair. "He had the gall to
stand under the banner of holiness of the Lord and lie, by
the sin of omission," she told me. "It's what he didn't say--
it's the impression he left."
David Hager is not the fringe character and fundamentalist
faith healer that some of his critics have made him out to
be. In fact, he is a well-credentialed doctor. In Kentucky
Hager has long been recognized as a leading Ob-Gyn at
Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital and a faculty member at
the University of Kentucky's medical school. And in the 1990s
several magazines, including Modern Healthcare and Good
Housekeeping, counted him among the best doctors for women in
the nation.
Yet while Hager doesn't advocate the substitution of
conservative Christianity for medicine, his religious
ideology underlies an all-encompassing paternalism in his
approach to his women patients. "Even though I was trained as
a medical specialist," Hager explained in the preface to As
Jesus Cared for Women, "it wasn't until I began to see how
Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor,
should treat them." To underscore this revelation, Hager
recounted case after case in which he acted as confidant,
spiritual adviser and even father figure to his grateful
patients. As laid out in his writings, Hager's worldview is
not informed by a sense of inherent equality between men and
women. Instead, men are expected to act as benevolent
authority figures for the women in their lives. (In one of
his books, he refers to a man who raped his wife as "selfish"
and "sinful.") But to model gender relations on the one Jesus
had with his followers is to leave women dangerously exposed
in the event that the men in their lives don't meet the high
standard set by God Himself--trapped in a permanent state of
dependence hoping to be treated well.
In tandem with his medical career, Hager has been an
aggressive advocate for the political agenda of the Christian
right. A member of Focus on the Family's Physician Resource
Council and the Christian Medical and Dental Society, Hager
assisted the Concerned Women for America in submitting a
"Citizen's Petition" to the FDA in August 2002 to halt
distribution and marketing of the abortion pill, RU-486. It
was this record of conservative activism that ignited a
firestorm when the Bush Administration first floated his name
for chairman of the FDA's advisory committee in the fall of
2002. In the end, the FDA found a way to dodge the
controversy: It issued a stealth announcement of Hager's
appointment to the panel (to be one of eleven members, not
chairman) on Christmas Eve. Liberals were furious that they
weren't able to block his appointment. For many months
afterward, an outraged chain letter alerting women to the
appointment of a man with religious views "far outside the
mainstream" snaked its way around the Internet, lending the
whole episode the air of urban legend.
Back in Lexington, where the couple continued to live, Linda
Hager, as she was still known at the time, was sinking into a
deep depression, she says. Though her marriage had been dead
for nearly a decade, she could not see her way clear to
divorce; she had no money of her own and few marketable
skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable. As
his public profile increased, so did the tension in their
home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of
abuse. "I would be asleep," she recalls, "and since [the
sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I
acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster,
and sometimes I tried to push him off.... I would [confront]
David later, and he would say, 'You asked me to do that,' and
I would say, 'No, I never asked for it.'"
I first heard of Davis's experience in 2004 through a friend
of hers. After a few telephone conversations, she agreed to
have me fly down to see her in her modest parsonage in
Georgia, to tell me her story on the record. With her mod
reading glasses, stylish bob and clever outfits, Davis, 55,
is a handsome woman with a sharp wit. She spoke with me over
two days in January.
Linda Davis (née Carruth) first met David Hager on the campus
of Asbury College in 1967. "On the very first date he sat me
down and told me he was going to marry me," Davis remembers.
"I was so overwhelmed by this aggressive approach of 'I see
you and I want you' that I was completely seduced by it."
Davis, a former beauty queen, was a disengaged student eager
to get married and start a family. A Hager-Carruth marriage
promised prestige and wealth for the couple; her father was a
famous Methodist evangelist, and his father was then
president of Asbury. "On the surface, it just looked so
good," she remembers. The couple married in 1970, while Hager
completed medical school at the University of Kentucky.
"I don't think I was married even a full year before I
realized that I had made a horrible mistake," Davis says. By
her account, Hager was demanding and controlling, and the
couple shared little emotional intimacy. "But," she says,
"the people around me said, 'Well, you've made your bed, and
now you have to lie in it.'" So Davis commenced with family
making and bore three sons: Philip, in 1973; Neal, in 1977;
and Jonathan, in 1979.
Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager
embarked on an affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a
friend of Davis's. A close friend of Davis's remembers her
calling long distance when she found out: "She was angry and
distraught, like any woman with two children would be. But
she was committed to working it out."
Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though
it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon
learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long
day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too
much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said.
Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal
sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to
have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis
recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're
in the wrong business.'"
By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to
let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She
consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex
that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example,
$2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often
because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more
painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a
check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some
embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for
several years.
Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept
an iron grip on the family purse strings. Initially the
couple's single checking account was in Hager's name only,
which meant that Davis had to appeal to her husband for cash,
she says. Eventually he relented and opened a dual account.
Davis recalls that Hager would return home every evening and
make a beeline for his office to balance the checkbook, often
angrily summoning her to account for the money she'd spent
that day. Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis's friend of twenty-
five years and her neighbor at the time, witnessed Hager
berate his wife in their kitchen after one such episode. For
her part, Davis set out to subvert Hager's financial
dominance with profligate spending on credit cards opened in
her own name. "I was not willing to face reality about
money," she admits. "I thought, 'Well, money can't buy
happiness, but it buys the kind of misery you can learn to
live with.'"
These financial atmospherics undoubtedly figured into Linda's
willingness to accept payment for sex. But eventually her
conscience caught up with her. "Finally...I said, 'You know,
David, this is like being a prostitute. I just can't do this
anymore; I don't think it's healthy for our relationship,'"
she recalls.
By 1995, according to Davis's account, Hager's treatment of
his wife had moved beyond morally reprehensible to
potentially felonious. It was a uniquely stressful year for
Davis. Her mother, dying of cancer, had moved in with the
family and was in need of constant care. At the same time,
Davis was suffering from a seemingly inexplicable exhaustion
during the day. She began exhibiting a series of strange
behaviors, like falling asleep in such curious places as the
mall and her closet. Occasionally she would--as she describes
it--"zone out" in midsentence in a conversation, and her legs
would buckle. Eventually, Davis was diagnosed as having
narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that affects the brain's
ability to regulate normal sleep-wake cycles.
For Davis, the diagnosis spelled relief, and a physician
placed her on several medications to attain "sleep hygiene,"
or a consistent sleep pattern. But Davis says it was after
the diagnosis that the period of the most severe abuse began.
For the next seven years Hager sodomized Davis without her
consent while she slept roughly once a month until their
divorce in 2002, she claims. "My sense is that he saw [my
narcolepsy] as an opportunity," Davis surmises. Sometimes she
fought Hager off and he would quit for a while, only to
circle back later that same night; at other times, "the most
expedient thing was to try and somehow get it [over with]. In
order to keep any peace, I had to maintain the illusion of
being available to him." At still other moments, she says,
she attempted to avoid Hager's predatory advances in various
ways--for example, by sleeping in other rooms in the house,
or by struggling to stay awake until Hager was in a deep
sleep himself. But, she says, nothing worked. One of Davis's
lifelong confidantes remembers when Davis first told her
about the abuse. "[Linda] was very angry and shaken," she
recalled.
As Hager began fielding calls from the White House personnel
office in 2001, the stress in the household--and, with it,
the abuse--hit an all-time high, according to Davis. She says
she confronted her husband on numerous occasions: "[I said to
him,] 'Every time you do this, I hate your guts. And it blows
a bridge out between us that takes weeks, if not months, to
heal.'" She says that Hager would, in rare instances, admit
what he had done and apologize, but typically would deny it
altogether.
For a while, fears of poverty, isolation and damnation were
enough to keep Davis from seeking a divorce. She says that
she had never cheated on Hager, but after reuniting with a
high school sweetheart (not her current husband) in the
chaotic aftermath of September 11, she had a brief affair. En
route to their first, and only, rendezvous, she prayed aloud.
"I said to the Lord, 'All right. I do not want to die without
having sex with someone I love,'" she remembers. "'I want to
know what that's like, Lord. I know that it's a sin, and I
know this is adultery. But I have to know what it's like.'"
Davis was sure that God would strike her dead on her way home
that weekend. But when nothing happened, she took it as a
good sign. Back in Lexington, she walked through her front
door and made a decision right there on the spot. "I said,
'David, I want a divorce.'"
Marital rape is a foreign concept to many women with stories
like this one. Indeed, Linda Davis had never heard the term
until midway through her divorce. In Kentucky a person is
guilty of rape in the first degree when he engages in sexual
intercourse with another person by "forcible compulsion"; or
when the victim is incapable of consent because she is
physically helpless. The same standards apply to the crime of
sodomy in the first degree (equivalent to rape, and distinct
from consensual sodomy). Both are felonies.
In sexual assault cases, the outcome hinges on the issue of
consent. A high-level domestic violence prosecutor in
Kentucky confirmed that a scenario such as this one, in which
Davis was in a deep sleep from the narcolepsy, could meet the
"physically helpless" standard required for a first-degree
offense. A prosecutor could also argue that Hager engaged in
sodomy with Davis by means of forcible compulsion, even
though the alleged encounters did not involve violence.
According to the Kentucky Supreme Court's decision in 1992 in
Yarnell v. Commonwealth, a climate of abuse involving
"constant emotional, verbal, and physical duress" is
tantamount to forcible compulsion. In that case, the victims
submitted to the sex acts to avoid a loss of financial
security, as well as to maintain peace in the household.
Historically, the legal system has long been indifferent to
the crime of marital sexual assault; as recently as twelve
years ago in some states, it was legal for a man to force his
wife physically into sex, or commence having sex without her
consent--actions that could land a stranger in jail. Until
2000 the Kentucky Penal Code still contained archaic
procedural obstacles for prosecuting marital rape, including
a requirement that it be reported within one year of the
offense. (No other felony--including "stranger rape"--
contains a statute of limitations.) Even today, marital
sexual assault is a notoriously difficult crime to prosecute.
Women like Davis often have strong financial incentives to
stay with their spouses; those who speak out frequently face
an uphill battle to convince people that their husbands, who
may be well liked and respected, are capable of something
this ugly at home. Also, because marriages play out over many
years, some sex is consensual, while other sex is not--a fact
that may complicate matters for a jury in a criminal
proceeding.
Linda Davis chose not to bring allegations of marital rape
into her divorce proceedings; her foremost desires at the
time were a fair settlement and minimal disruption for her
sons. Nonetheless, she informed her lawyer of the abuse.
Natalie Wilson, a divorce attorney in Lexington, asked Linda
to draw up a working chronology of her marriage to Hager.
"[It] included references to what I would call the sexual
abuse," Wilson explained. "I had no reason not to believe
her.... It was an explanation for some of the things that
went on in the marriage, and it explained her reluctance to
share that information with her sons--which had resulted in
her sons' being very angry about the fact that she was
insisting on the divorce."
As it turned out, when the dust settled after their divorce,
nearly everyone in the Hagers' Christian and medical circles
in Lexington had sided with Hager, who told people that his
wife was mentally unstable and had moved in with another man
(she moved in with friends).
Davis had only told a handful of people about the abuse
throughout her marriage, but several of her longtime
confidantes confirmed for this article that she had told them
of the abuse at the time it was occurring. Wilson, the
attorney, spoke to me on the record, as did Brenda Bartella
Peterson, Davis's close friend of twenty-five years. Several
others close to Davis spoke to me off the record. Two refused
to speak to me and denounced Davis for going public, but they
did not contest her claims. Many attempts to interview nearly
a dozen of Hager's friends and supporters in Lexington and
around the country were unsuccessful.
As for David Hager, after repeated attempts to interview him
for this story, we finally spoke for nearly half an hour in
early April. That conversation was off the record. "My
official comment is that I decline to comment," he said.
As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis's
allegations take on even more gravity in light of Hager's
public role as a custodian of women's health. Some may argue
that this is just a personal matter between a man and his
former wife--a simple case of "he said, she said" with no
public implications. That might be so--if there were no
allegations of criminal conduct, if the alleged conduct did
not bear any relevance to the public responsibilities of the
person in question, and if the allegations themselves were
not credible and independently corroborated. But given that
this case fails all of those tests, the public has a right to
call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis's charges
before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few
women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their
gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable
with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on
women's health issues.
(Lest inappropriate analogies be drawn between the Hager
accusations and the politics of personal destruction that
nearly brought down the presidency of Bill Clinton, it ought
to be remembered that President Clinton's sexual relationship
with Monica Lewinsky was never alleged to be criminal and did
not affect his ability to fulfill his obligations to the
nation. This, of course, did not stop the religious right
from calling for his head. "The topic of private vs. public
behavior has emerged as perhaps the central moral issue
raised by Bill Clinton's 'improper relationship,'" wrote
evangelist and Hager ally Franklin Graham at the time. "But
the God of the Bible says that what one does in private does
matter. There needs to be no clash between personal conduct
and public appearance.")
Hager's FDA assignment is an object lesson in the potential
influence of a single appointment to a federal advisory
committee that in turn affects thousands, even millions, of
lives. Witness the behind-the-scenes machinations that set
the stage for the FDA's ruling against Plan B, a decision
that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
called a "dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based
agency like the FDA."
On December 16, 2003, twenty-seven of the FDA's advisers on
women's health and nonprescription drugs gathered in
Gaithersburg, Maryland, to evaluate the safety and efficacy
of emergency contraception for over-the-counter use. (The
Plan B pill, which drastically reduces the risk of pregnancy
when used within seventy-two hours after intercourse, has
long been available by prescription only; its advocates say
its greater availability could significantly reduce the
nation's abortion rate.) After a long day of highly technical
deliberation, the advisers voted 23 to 4 to drop the
prescription-only status of emergency contraception. "I've
been on this committee...for almost four years, and I would
take this to be the safest product that we have seen brought
before us," announced Dr. Julie Johnson, a professor at the
University of Florida's Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine.
But on May 6, 2004, the FDA rejected the advice of its own
experts and refused to approve the sale of Plan B over the
counter. In his letter to Barr Laboratories, Steven Galson,
acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and
Research, claimed that Barr had not provided adequate data
showing just how young adolescent women would actually use
the drug.
That issue was never voted on by the committee. It was,
however, broached by Hager at the meeting; he mentioned his
concern for these "younger adolescents" several times.
In his private practice back in Kentucky, Hager doesn't
prescribe emergency contraception, because he believes it is
an abortifacient, and, not surprisingly, his was one of the
four votes against widening its availability. But rather than
voice his ethical opposition to the product, Hager emphasized
his concern about adolescents, which other committee members
have since called a "political fig leaf." According to Dr.
James Trussell, who voted in favor of Plan B, the FDA had at
hand six studies examining whether teens as young as 15 would
increase their "risky" behavior if they knew they had a
backup emergency contraceptive--and none of the studies
showed any evidence for that contention.
In his sermon at Asbury College last fall, Hager proudly
recounted his role in the Plan B decision. "After two days of
hearings," he said, "the committees voted to approve this
over-the-counter sale by 23 to 4. I was asked to write a
minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the
FDA.... Now the opinion I wrote was not from an evangelical
Christian perspective.... But I argued it from a scientific
perspective, and God took that information, and He used it
through this minority report to influence the decision."
[Emphasis added.]
None of the four panel members I spoke with for this article
were aware of Hager's "minority opinion." An FDA spokeswoman
told me that "the FDA did not ask for a minority opinion from
this advisory committee," though she was unable to say
whether any individual within the agency had requested such a
document from Hager. This past January the FDA missed a
deadline to respond to a new application from Barr
Laboratories, and any forward motion on making Plan B more
widely available has completely stalled.
Meanwhile, David Hager's stock has been rising among
conservatives. Though his term on the FDA panel is set to
expire on June 30, observers on both sides of the political
divide anticipate his reappointment. In March I spoke with
Janice Shaw Crouse, executive director and senior fellow at
the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the research arm of Concerned
Women for America. She is one of Hager's staunchest advocates
in Washington (some credit her with engineering his FDA
appointment); Crouse sits alongside Hager on Asbury College's
board of trustees. In May, when informed of the allegations
against him, she declined to revise her earlier statement. "I
would not be at all surprised to see Dr. Hager elevated to a
higher position or to another very influential position when
it comes to women's care," she told me. "Because he has shown
that he does care about women regardless of...the [religious]
issues that people want to try to raise.... When people try
to discredit him, he continues on. He hasn't caved in, and he
hasn't waffled. He has been a gentleman. He is a person of
character and integrity, and I think people admire that."
|
Mahoganyanais
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Mahoganyanais
Post Number: 497
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 26, 2005 - 02:46 pm: |
|
Thanks for posting this, Chris. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1172
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 26, 2005 - 04:14 pm: |
|
As you can tell the title I posted under was sarcastic. And while we try to free women in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Sudan--right--the President's stauchest supporters are giving their wives hell. It shows that women are getting the shaft everywhere-- |
Cynnique
Unregistered guest
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 26, 2005 - 04:49 pm: |
|
I am extraordinarily repelled by The Christian Right. They are dangerous and their judgmental rigidness has an undercurrent of evil. |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3042
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 26, 2005 - 05:38 pm: |
|
Chris,
Like I say: Christianity would be okay if it was NOT for all those crazy@$$ Christians.
And, really, what should we expect to happen?
There’s only so much self-deception, hate, racism, duplicity and hypocrisy that a human being can endure before they blow a gasket and start rapaciously sodomizing his wife (especially when such is probably indicative of some latent, if not active, homosexuality).
Hears another one along the vein of the above: Kids who take abstinence oaths – another product of the wacko religious right – are in many instances MORE likely to contract STD’s than others. Why: Because, to remain virgins, they’re going oral and anal like nobody’s business...sans a condom!
And why aren’t they using condoms? Because maniacal right-wingers thwart the dissemination of safe/effective rubbers and Sex Ed.
You ever think 100 years from now Americans, assuming such still exists, are going to look back at us and think "Dayam! How the H*LL did THAT happen?" |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1175
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 - 11:19 am: |
|
Abm:
I think what you bring up is one of the reasons I was so adamant on the whole celibate thing. These idiots think they aren't having sex just because they haven't had genital to genital sex. All in the quest of some moral standard based on what they DON'T do.
You hear some moral paragon talking about I don't do this and I don't do that--then you ask what DO you do? It is just insane! |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3053
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 - 11:28 am: |
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Chris: "You hear some moral paragon talking about I don't do this and I don't do that--then you ask what DO you do?
ABM: That's just it, Chris. They endeavor to "do do" over me and you.
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Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3054
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 - 11:53 am: |
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Chris,
And come on now. Yawl almost act like yawl don't even know.
There's all kinda freaky-deaky behavior going on in the Bush Administration and the GOP as whole.
What about how former US House Speaker [Gingwich] self-righteous @$$ led the impeachment against Clinton for getting a BJ while he himself was steppin' out on the missuhs (and cheating on his income taxes)?
THEN it turned out the guy the GOP tried to replace [Gingwich] with - I think he was from Louisana - was a bigger skirtchaser than Clinton/[Gingwich] combined?
What about Fox's Bill "The Thrill" O'Reilly getting caught with his pants down around his ankles while potty talkin' with one of his producers?
What about Bush making it a blatant point to KISS all his female cabinet appointees as he introduced them? I'm sorry ladies, but where I come from - the way he did THAT - that means to me "Hey yawl. How you like my b*+%#es?"
Or, you should LOVE this one, what about they discovered (just a couple of months ago) some guy had been given clearance to White House press conferences only to discover that not only was he NOT a trained/educated journalist, dude was entering the White House at wee hours of the night, yet was NOT being listed amongst the official Secret Service visitor records?
And this guy was moonlighting as a GAY Internet porn star!
Lemme tellyah. Show me some self-righteous, Bible Thumping, fingerpointing son-of-a-b*+%# and I'll show a guy who's MOST likely to stab you in the back with one hand while fingering your wife's behind with the other one. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1176
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 - 12:07 pm: |
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Abm:
This is it. I mean, when Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount and told folks who thought they were good because they hadn't killled anybody that they were just as guilty if they were angry at their brother without cause, he was saying none of us is good. No not one. We can all try, and it is great if you refrain from actually committing sin, but it is all in attitude, since the sinful attitude often precedes the sinful act.
But here we are at a place where we just tolerate this hypocrisy!
Christian politicians? Come on!
My dad, God rest his soul, told me in the past that the fundamentalists stayed out of politics because they knew it was a dirty game--you lied, cheated and stole. Now, though they want to play the game but deny they are--
I think this schizophrenic hypocrisy is tearing this society up--I mean, I was lying awake in bed thinking of how here we got White Supremicist Black People, Nazi Jews, Christian killers, Female Woman haters, etc etc etc. You either got to be psycho or blow up! |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3056
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 - 01:27 pm: |
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Chris,
Not to agree or disagreeing with you. But in truth, what we’re talking about here has ZERO to do with what that good man was talking about 2,000 years ago.
This is about the most basic human sins: greed, pride and lust.
A HUGE Part of the problem is there’s all this misinformation that has been spread about how ‘pious’ the nation’s forefathers were. The Right is essentially attributing religious-based lies, inferences and omissions to the nation’s founders so as to convince the legions of armchair-patriots out there to obey their divine bidding.
As we discussed 2 - 3 months, the country’s founders were VERY suspicious of religion. Probably because they were acutely aware of the deadly affects of man’s onerous attempt to enforce ‘God’s’ will throughout Europe, the Middle East and rest of the world (which, in part, explains why Europeans smartly eschews inclusion of religion/faith within their official state/governmental systems/discourse).
Yet, the Religious-Righters conveniently cheery pick segments of the founders’ writings/statements in a way that suggest this was intended to be a Christian nation when in truth this nation was founded by a group of profoundly brilliant/flawed White men, some of whom were Christian and others almost wildly agnostic.
But the powerful know religion is perhaps the most potent of all forms of rhetoric because it need never – and often does not – subscribe to any rational scrutiny. So they emphasize anything said by any shaper of this nation that so much hints at Bible thumping then wield it into +$100M moneymaking and political/charitable fundraising schemes.
The Right is basically working the formula below for the desired effect:
Unsubstantiated Religious dogma + Charming Snake Oil Salesmen + A $#*+load of Money + A largely Fearful, Illiterate & Historically Ignorant Populace = Social-Political-Economic-Cultural Predominance!
Really. When you think about it, WHAT the GOP is doing and WHY it’s doing it is actually quite understandable. |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 3057
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 - 01:29 pm: |
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...cynical, sad and calamitous...but "understandable". |
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