source: Pensito Review
Obviously, God Hates Republicans - Will They Ever Take Heed?
Last summer, as a public service to our right-wing Christian friends, particularly those who live in the South, we asked, “Why is God Smiting the Deep South?”
The article was intended as a wake-up call, because Republicans need to realize that God is punishing them for their hatefulness, warmongering, prideful ignorance and selfishness. He wants them to turn away from their hatred and fear of blacks, Latinos, gays, Arabs, Muslims and the billions of other people on the planet who are not old white Republicans. He wants them to renounce their evil ways and put their time and their tithes toward good works — like feeding the hungry, healing the sick and housing the homeless.
Last summer, the South was being punished in the form of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which primarily affected red and purple states along the Gulf Coast — a region that was still struggling to recover from the wrath of hurricanes Katrina and Ivan. We also pointed to the Exxon Valdez spill that smited red queen Sarah Palin’s Alaska in 1989.
But, as we also noted then, one of the surest signs of God’s disapproval of Southern conservatives is the scourge of kudzu, the rapacious vine introduced to the South at exactly the same time that Southern politicians abandoned Reconstruction and introduced the evil of Jim Crow segregation. Now, more than a century later, kudzu continues to consume 125,000 acres a year, almost all of which are inside the boundaries of the Old Confederate states. Worse still, a scientific study released last year underscored kudzu’s cursedness: The plant has been found to release deadly ozone gas.
In the past year or so, the South has been beset by yet more ominous signs: record heat, droughts and floods. At this moment, Hurricane Irene is barreling toward Southern shores.
Southern conservatives and Republicans everywhere have ignored all these dire manifestations, of course. In fact, earlier this month, during the debt-ceiling debacle, their representatives in the U.S. House, driven by right-wing Christians under the tea party banner, nearly destroyed the fragile recovery of the world economy as a tactic in their on-going refusal to obey Jesus’ admonition to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” in the form of taxes on their wealthy benefactors and corporate sponsors.
Then came the 5.8 earthquake, which struck into the heart of Virginia’s 7th Congressional District yesterday.
The location of the epicenter is biblically significant because the member of Congress who represents the 7th District happens to be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a tea party favorite and one of the key architects of the tea party’s efforts to kill the recovery in the debt-ceiling crisis.
How Republican is Cantor’s district? In 2008, it voted for John McCain over Pres. Obama, 53/46 percent. In 2004, it went for George Bush, 61/38, and for Bush in 2000, 61/37.
It was also telling the the quake hit Cantor’s district because, after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan earlier this year, Cantor defended right-wing efforts to defund the United States Geological Survey, the National Weather Service and NOAA. The budgets were later restored, but there is still a question about Cantor’s role in downgrading the safety of a nuclear plant in the area when he served in the Virginia Legislature.
In the past, true-believing Christians have taken heed when their religious leaders they have claimed that other disasters were punishments from God — like when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed the 9/11 attacks on lesbians and feminists or when John Hagee, John McCain’s favorite pastor, and the Rev. Billy Graham’s son Franklin blamed the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina on gays.
Apparently, these Bible-believing Christian Republicans only see the motes in the eyes of liberals but are blind to the beams lodged in their own eyes.
If this latest visitation from God won’t open their eyes, what will? If they won’t heed the 130-year curse of kudzu, the recent bouts of record heat, the droughts, floods, hurricanes, oil spills and now an earthquake, what will it take to force them to mend their wicked ways?
Cue the swarms of locusts, frogs in their beds and rivers of blood.
