Babe, You Been Used.

So, this is likely futile, but I'd like to talk for a minute to the fundamentalist, "evangelical," xians out there.

Babe, you been had. Exploited. Used.

The Republicans and the Dobsons, Fallwells, and Haggards of the world have used you. They've taken your faith, your desire for union with divinity, your hope for meaning in life and salvation from death, and they've used them in order to make themselves powerful and rich. And they've laughed at you behind your back while they were doing it.

This was obvious to some of us a long time ago and, I suspect, you yourself must have had inklings of this that you've had to ignore time and time again.

Karl Rove, we learn from Adventus, has no religious faith. He just saw some demographics and realized that he could use you to put George Bush in power, thereby making himself feel powerful and Haliburton rich. You ever see Dick Tax-Breaks-Are-Our-Due Cheney worship anything except the almighty dollar? Me either.

The faith-based-initiatives that Bush and Rove rushed through during their first days in office weren't a sign of their deep commitment to, say, Jesus. They were a cynical tool cynically used by a bunch of cynics in order to conduct cynical political manipulation under cover of "faith." The first director of that program, an erstwhile "man of faith," quit years ago, announcing that politics always trumped faith with the Bush junta, but you didn't want to hear that, did you? Nor do you especially want to hear it now, even though the man telling the story in even more detail is, again, a "man of faith."

When the rest of us look at you and wonder why you've allowed yourself to be used so shamelessly by the Bush junta, here's what we see. We see that your weird obsession with and hatred for gays (something startlingly missing from all of Jesus' teachings in the New Testament) and your determination to prevent women from having abortions (something again not found anywhere in the New Testament) and, let's be honest, access to any kind of birth control, has overcome any other issue or instinct for you. Why is that? Don't you think it's kind of weird? You've got a holy book chock full of instructions to heal the sick, feed the hungry, love your neighbor, and judge not, and you get yourself all worked up over other people's sex lives. The rest of us think it's really weird. And sick. And that it's allowed cynics such as Karl Rove to use you over and over and over again.

Look. The Bush junta has been in power for six years. They control the WH. They control the Congress. They control the courts. And they control, at the very, very least, Fox News. Yet they still haven't banned gay marriage nor have they criminalized abortion. Why? Because if they did those two things, it wouldn't be as easy for them to lead your around by the nose the way that they have for the past six years. No, it's in their interest to keep those two golden rings just out of your reach.

And, besides, as some of us have known all along, lots of powerful Republicans ARE gay. March Cheney? Gay. Lynn Cheney? Author of gay novel. Ken Mehlman? Almost certainly gay. Foley and now Ted Haggard are only two of the most recent examples. They take your money and your support and then they laugh about you behind your back with their gay boyfriends.

So, I'm a witch. And your holy book, at least in its current translation, does tell you not to suffer me to live. So you don't have to take advice from me. But you might, you just might, want to go off and think and pray a bit about the kind of people to whom you've so willingly given your trust and your support. And, while you're at it, ask yourself, why ARE you so obsessed with sex? Jesus sure wasn't.