The Annotated “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America”

On October 22, 2008, Focus On The Family laid an enormous turd of fear in time for that year’s election, and just before Halloween. Full of dire warnings about an American where it’s illegal to bear arms, be straight or believe in Jesus, the letter was a plaintive call for Christians to resist the siren’s call of Obama’s charisma and personal narrative. They called it, “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” and it had bad news. Real bad news.

I remembered this thing existed a couple weeks ago, and was curious to see if anything it predicted actually came true. No dice. We don’t have mandatory tolerance classes and Limbaugh is still on the air. (The smoke rising around his face, the belligerent grunting, it makes me think of Mephistopheles.) Tel Aviv still exists. Nobody’s bombed a shopping mall. The letter overestimated how long it would take Obama to pass a healthcare bill or prosecute Bush administration members who broke the law, which surprised me. Other than that, I won’t give anything away.

Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America

What will the United States be like if Senator Obama is elected? The most reliable way of predicting people’s future actions is by looking at their past actions. Jesus himself taught, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).

Wait! Holy shit, what are you doing? You didn’t start off with an epigraph? What’s wrong with you? What’re you thinking? Everybody knows you start off bleak as hell. The part in Ezekiel when God tells him to eat shit. You hold the infinite judgment for your third sentence? Come on. This is neither rocket surgery nor brain science.

Anyone who has hired employees knows that

Because we’re all Joe the Plumber, we have all hypothetically hired employees. Go on…

– the best predictor of a person’s future job performance is not what he tells you he can do but what he has actually done in the past.

Which was actually fantastic logic for not voting Republican last year. McCain had done more in his past than anybody else on either ticket. In fact, one worried that he had too much “past”: how much more “past” could his mortal shell possibly contain? Would he be done, uh, existing, in less than four years? That’s exactly the logic this quote brings to the McCain line on experience: he has it, and he’s also really fucking old.

So here is a picture of the changes that are likely or at least very possible

Here’s what I think of when I hear “likely or at least very possible”:

“Hey, I’m not saying your mom is a prostitute. Since I know that statement is false, you could sue me for slander and probably win. All I’m saying- suggesting, really- is that it’s likely, or at least very possible, that she sells her vagina for money. Am I such a bad guy for that?”

By the way, what’s the difference between the possible and the very possible? If something is very possible, is it associated with Barack Obama? Like, McCain’s involvement with the Keating Five was possibly corrupt. But Obama’s associations with Tony Rezco, well, that’s very possible corruption if ever I’ve seen it. See? Difference.

if Senator Obama is elected and the far-Left segments of the Democratic Party gain control of the White House, the Congress, and perhaps then the Supreme Court. The entire letter is written as a “What if?” exercise, but that does not make it empty speculation, because every future “event”

Thank you so much for putting “event” in quotes. It saved me a lot of confusion. What if I thought you were time traveling fearmongers? I would’ve been so scared- by you, by the time travel.

described here is based on established legal and political trends that can be abundantly documented

Ooh, they’re laying the jargon on thick. Established, abundantly documented legal/political trends. This sentence makes more sense if you just replace “documented” with “alleged,” or “abundantly” with “approximately,” or “described” with the German word for what I feel when delicious tears fall from Glenn Beck’s little pig eyes. Schadenfreude, I think.

and that only need a “tipping point” such as the election of Senator Obama and a Democratic House and Senate to begin to put them into place. Every past event named in this letter (everything prior to October 22, 2008) is established fact.

This letter is not “predicting” that all of the imaginative future “events” named in this letter will happen.

Of course not! We’d have to be really fucking stupid to do that. Nobody would read a letter like that, unless they wanted to make fun of it.

But it is saying that each one of these changes could happen and also that each change would be the natural outcome of (a) published legal opinions by liberal judges,

Because everybody knows how Bush loved liberal judges.

(b) trends seen in states with liberal-dominated courts such as California and Massachusetts,

Be fair, now, that’s just two states. How could a heartland state- Iowa, for example- ever give in to the Godless sodomites like California or Massachussetts?

(c) recent promises, practices and legislative initiatives of the current liberal leadership of the Democratic Party

Like regulation, and then deregulation, and then regulation.

and (d) Senator Obama’s actions, voting record and public promises to the far-Left groups that won the nomination for him.

Really, there’s no excuse for them confusing public promises with agenda. They have a PAC. They have an axe to grind, too. Who’s to say this whole letter, itself, isn’t just another form of public promise, just as impossible to realize as some of the crazy shit Obama got everybody excited about before the economy tanked?

Many of these changes, if they occur, will have significant implications for Christians. This letter is addressed particularly to their concerns so they will be aware of what is at stake before the November 4 election.

The soul of the best nation in the history of everything since Jesus? Is an enormous animatronic Satan going to burst out of the ground like in The Sixth Day?

Some will respond to this letter by saying, “Well, I hope hardship and even persecution come to the church. It will strengthen the church!”

When the lunatic fringe talks to its lunatic fringe, it’s time to leave the tea party.

But hoping for suffering is wrong. It is similar to saying, “I hope I get some serious illness because it will strengthen my faith.”

Aww, shucks, I don’t want to be Job or nothin’. Get ready for some Bible-beating. The best kind, too: taken out of the context you’d need if you wanted to apply it meaningfully to the modern world.

Jesus taught us to pray the opposite: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matt. 6:13). Paul urged us to pray not for persecution but “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). So Christians should hope and pray that such difficult times do not come.

We, however, are Focus On The Family.

But if they do come, then it will be right to trust God to bring good out of them and also bring them to an end.

It’ll be right to do so- but it wouldn’t be our place to tell y’all to do it. That kind of imposition would be as disingenuous and unbearable as an apocalyptic wet-dream.

Of course, there are many evangelical Christians supporting Senator Obama as well as many supporting Senator McCain.

A lot of people liked it when Dylan went electric. I’m just saying.

Christians on both sides should continue to respect and cherish one another’s friendship as well as the freedom people have in the United States to differ on these issues and to freely speak their opinions about them to one another.

Read that sentence out loud. Sounds shitty, doesn’t it? There’s fifteen pages of it. I know. I’m surprised they finished, too.

October 22, 2012
Dear friends,
I can hardly sing “The Star Spangled Banner” any more.

It’s that one high note near the end, right? So annoying.

When I hear the words,
O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat.

Glenn? Is that you? In the future, they trust you with pencils? Things must have really gotten bad…

Now in October of 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years, I don’t think I can still answer, “Yes,” to that question.

If you could answer “Yes” to that question on October 22, 2008, after Bush shitting on those two values- courage, freedom- endlessly, eight years straight, if you got eight hours of sleep that night and woke up on October 23 with your conscience undisturbed, you know little about freedom and less about courage.

We are not “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Many of our freedoms have been taken away by a liberal Supreme Court

A liberal Supreme Court restricting civil liberties. That’s almost like a fiscal conservative deregulating the market.

and a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate, and hardly any brave citizen dares to resist the new government policies any more.
The 2008 election was closer than anybody expected, but Barack Obama still won. Many Christians voted for Obama – younger evangelicals actually provided him with the needed margin to defeat John McCain

Who better to quote than Kafka: “Betrayed! Betrayed! It can never be good again.”

– but they didn’t think he would really follow through on the far-Left policies that had marked his career. They were wrong.

Really, you guys should’ve given “They were wrong.” its own paragraph. The John Grisham one-liner. Come on. This is Mickey Mouse stuff.

The Supreme Court

On January 20, 2009, President Obama’s inauguration went smoothly, and he spoke eloquently

That’s a backhanded compliment if ever I saw one. What are they really saying? Why should or shouldn’t he be eloquent? He’s the fucking President.

of reaching out to Republicans who would work with him. Even in the next month, when Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens announced they would step down from the Supreme Court, nobody was very surprised – Ginsburg was already 75 years-old and in ill health,1 and Stevens was 88.

Everybody knows 75 is way too old to be beholden to any Constitutional authority. That’s why McCain keeps turning seventy, year after year.

President Obama nominated two far-Left, American Civil Liberties Union-oriented judges, and the Democratic Senate confirmed them quickly. They are brilliant, articulate and in their early 40s, so they can expect to stay on the court for 30 or 40 years. But things seemed the same because the court retained its 4-4 split between liberals and conservatives, with Justice Anthony Kennedy as the swing vote.
The decisive changes on the Supreme Court started in June, when Justice Kennedy resigned – he was 72 and had grown weary of the unrelenting responsibility. His replacement – another young liberal Obama appointment

Are you fucking kidding me? First of all, swing vote? What are you smoking? A glance at his Wikipedia page will inform:

“In the 2008-2009 term, he was in the majority 92 percent of the time. In the 23 decisions in which the justices split 5-to-4, Kennedy was in the majority in all but five. Of those 23 decisions, 16 were strictly along ideological lines, and Kennedy joined the conservative wing of the court 11 times; the liberals, 5.”

And: Does anybody remember that book, “Things That Are Younger Than John McCain?” If Kennedy were born two months later, he could’ve been in that book.

– gave a 5-4 majority to justices who were eager to create laws from the bench. The four conservative justices who remained — John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — were suddenly in the minority.

Is there anything funnier than a xenophobe afraid of being isolated? That video of the monkey peeing into its own mouth shares some logical similarities.

Then in August 2009, two months after Kennedy resigned, Justice Scalia unexpectedly announced his resignation due to health reasons and by October 2009 another Obama appointment took his oath and joined the court.

For Obama to appoint three Justices in one year- that’s highly unlikely. But four? That’s mathematically impossible, unless concessions are made for the existence of ninjas.

The three remaining conservatives (known as “originalists” because they hold that the meaning of the Constitution is its “original public meaning”)

I know! Isn’t it obvious? Our understanding of what a state is and does couldn’t possibly have differed from those of the founders in the three hundred years they’ve been dead. Where else could we find a moral compass to navigate this modern hell?

kept objecting that the role of the Supreme Court should not be to create laws but only to interpret the Constitution and the laws that had been passed by Congress and the state legislatures. But the six liberal justices paid no attention.

Plaintiff’s objection of “Tough shit” sustained. Evidence of hurt feelings overruled.

They decided cases in light of their understanding of the needs of society, and they took more and more precedents not from the U. S. Constitution but from international laws.

That’s funny. Another sidelong glance at Wikipedia informs me that Kennedy- the loss of whose swing vote put us in this liberal shitstorm in the first place!- “became a leading proponent of the use of foreign and international law as an aid to interpreting the United States Constitution.” For a divisive (yet delightfully reality-free) harangue, it’s not always clear which side you’re shitting on.

Also, your childhood phobias of French people stapling berets to your scalp and shoving baguettes down your throat- the facade’s wearing a bit thin.

From the end of 2009, Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito have been constantly outvoted 6-3, and they are essentially powerless. It might be 20 or 30 years before enough new appointments could be made to change the far-Left dominance of the Supreme Court.

Huh. You know, being from Massachusetts, that doesn’t sound all that bad. But why listen to me, I’m not from real America.

Finally the far-Left had the highest prize: complete control of the Supreme Court. And they set about quickly to expedite cases by which they would enact the entire agenda of the far Left in American politics – everything they had hoped for and more took just a few key decisions.

Wow. What was that quote from the beginning? Likely or at least very possible? Four Justices retiring in one year is neither likely nor very possible nor possible at all. I don’t think that’s a tough distinction to make. I doubt, in order to make that distinction between the possible and the nearly impossible, one has to belong to one political or religious ideology. But, again, since I wasn’t blessed enough to be born into a coven of hockey moms and four-term Senators, my opinion isn’t really worth anything.

Same-sex “marriage”

Already? Wow! I was worried they’d save the buttsex for the end. Please, fantasize away!

The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from

Shrinking, debt-ridden middle class? Inescapable poverty? Unemployment? Ongoing healthcare stalemate? Sexually constipated ideologues?

the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that homosexual “marriage”

Ooh! You put it in quotes! So you’re not really saying that it’s not really marriage, but at the same time you totally are! Wow, your balls must be so massive, they bend light.

was a “constitutional”

Now why would you put that in quotes, too?

right that had to be respected by all 50 states because laws barring same-sex “marriage” violated the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Here I actually see signs of progress. They went the Equal Protection route- they hypothetically entertained recognizing gays as a minority, and not just a bizarre, unnatural abberance of God’s mysterious will. Babysteps, huh?

Suddenly, homosexual “marriage”

Really driving it home with the quotation marks! Oh, the rapier wit!

was the law of the land in all 50 states, and no state legislature, no state Supreme Court, no state Constitutional amendment, not even Congress, had any power to change it. The Supreme Court had ruled, and the discussion was over. This was a blatant example of creating law by the court, for homosexual “marriage” was mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, nor would any of the authors have imagined that same-sex “marriage” could be derived from their words.

Yeah, it would be a dubious exclusion, except it doesn’t say a thing about heterosexual marriage, either.

But it just followed the precedents that had been set by state supreme courts in Massachusetts (2003), California (2008) and Connecticut (2008).
President Obama repeated his declaration that he personally was against same-sex “marriage”, but he told the nation there was nothing he could do. The Supreme Court had ruled, and it was now the law of the land.

That phrase again, “law of the land.” My theory is that, since liberal arts colleges that teach one best how to write a fucking sentence are on the red meat conservative hate list, not many conservatives go there; ergo, they write like shit. This conforms to my expectations.

The president asked the nation to support the decision.
After that decision, many other policies changed, and several previous Supreme Court cases were reversed rather quickly — raising the question, “Is America still the land of the free?”

Was it before? Oh, shit, I’m interrupting your NAMBLA fantasia, aren’t I? Sorry. Pretend I’m not here.

(1) Boy Scouts:

Starting out with the Boy Scouts as the most horrible, most awful, most unthinkably evil ramification of allowing gays equal protection under the law- you’re not really padding your argument with reasons why I ought to give a shit.

“The land of the free”? The Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys. (This was to be expected with a change in the court, since the 2000 decision Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, which affirmed the right of the Boy Scouts as a private organization to dismiss a homosexual scoutmaster, was a 5-4 decision, with Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer dissenting even then.)

Even then! To think that it’s wrong to fire somebody for reasons other than how good he is at his job! Only a liberal!

I’m having some serious problems connecting what’s in the parenthesis with why they’d have to let the gay vampires into their sleeping bags. The closest I can come is this: “So now the Equal Protection Act meant that the Boy Scouts had to give gays a fair chance at employment. Deciding they’d had about all the tolerance they could tolerate, the Boy Scouts decided to disband.” Am I close? Let me know.

It had become increasingly difficult for the Boy Scouts to find meeting places anyway, because in 2009 Congress passed and President Obama signed an expansion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which extended federal civil rights protections to people engaging in homosexual behavior. So the Boy Scouts had already been kicked out of all public facilities.

What? How could an expansion of the Civil Rights Act restrict freedom of assembly? Maybe under Bush, but still, it’s a little more complicated than passing a Clear Skies Act that creates more pollution. Is anything possible in Obama’s America? Are there flying cars yet?

(2) Elementary schools: “The land of the free”? Elementary schools now include compulsory training in varieties of gender identity in Grade 1, including the goodness of homosexuality as one possible personal choice.

If memory serves, the sex ed Obama wanted for first graders amounted to “safe touch areas” and “how to run from child predators.”

Many parents tried to “opt out” their children from such sessions,

Because the last thing this society needs is for the next generation of Republicans to know the “safe touch areas.”

but the courts have ruled they cannot do this, noting that education experts in the government have decided that such training is essential to children’s psychological health.

Aha! The nanobots, finally!

Many Christian teachers

Like who?

objected to teaching first-graders that homosexual behavior was morally neutral and equal to heterosexuality. They said it violated their consciences to have to teach something the Bible viewed as morally wrong. But state after state ruled that their refusal to teach positively about homosexuality was the equivalent of hate speech, and they had to teach it or be fired. Tens of thousands of Christian teachers either quit or were fired, and there are hardly any evangelical teachers in public schools any more.

So, wait, you just concluded a whole section on the Supreme Court, and then you remember, oh yeah, the first ammendment has been totally fucked with by now, too. I feel conflicted. Seriously conflicted. On the one hand, this is just too much speculative bullshit to deal with in greater increments than one paragraph at a time. On the other, the logic here is so twisted to provide a “woe-is-me,” worst possible situation for hard-lining evangelical conservatives that it’s hard to not want more. I mean, what the fuck?

Non-Christians found this hard to understand. “Why not just teach what the school says even if it’s not your personal opinion? So what? We can’t have every teacher deciding what he or she wants to teach, can we?”

So, since the Boy Scouts is a private organization, it’s OK for them to fire their employees based on how they lead their lives outside the workplace. The only thing that’s different in the case of the Christians is that it’s the federal government doing it, not a private organization. It’s still the same instance of the powerful fucking the powerless. It’s still a question of civil liberties. Denying gays theirs in real life while bemoaning the hypothetical loss of yours is a hypocrisy almost beyond my comprehension.

But the Christian teachers

This might sound like playing-the-victim, but it’s totally not. It’s a little-known fact, but according to the FBI, in 2008, 66.1% of all religiously-motivated hate crimes were directed against Christian teachers. Coincidentally, of that 66.1% that were Christian teachers, 100% were really Jews.  Protestants were the victims of 3.6% of all reported religious hate crimes.

kept coming back to something Jesus said:

You’re really doing this?

“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).

You really did that.

And they quit by the thousands, no matter the personal cost, rather than commit what they believed to be a direct sin against God.
In addition, many private Christian schools decided to shut down after the Supreme Court ruled that anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation extended to private institutions such as schools, and that private schools also had to obey the law and teach that homosexuality and heterosexuality are both morally good choices.

I see a hero emerging. I wonder who the villain could be: I haven’t seen much of Obama, but I have seen a lot of gay…

(3) Adoption agencies: “The land of the free”? There are no more Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant adoption agencies in the United States. Following earlier rulings in New York and Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 ruled that these agencies had to agree to place children with homosexual couples or lose their licenses.
Just as the Catholic Charities adoption agency had closed down for this reason in Massachusetts in 2006, so all similar agencies across the United States have now closed down rather than violate their consciences about the moral wrong of homosexual behavior.

I fact-checked that Catholic Charities thing, and it really happened. I mean, what the fuck. Shutting down an orphanage. How much further from Christ-like can you get.

Christian parents seeking to adopt have tried going through secular adoption agencies, but they are increasingly excluding parents with “narrow” or dangerous views on religion or homosexuality.

So the moral wrongness of homosexual behaviour is greater than the moral wrongness of shutting down an orphanage. That’s your argument. Despicable.

(4) Businesses with government contracts: “The land of the free”? All businesses that have government contracts at the national, state or local level now have to provide documentation of equal benefits for same-sex couples. This was needed to overcome “systemic discrimination” against them and followed on a national level the pattern of policies already in place in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.

More paperwork? Gay paperwork, no less! The injustice!

(5) Public broadcasting: “The land of the free”? The Bible can no longer be freely preached over radio or television stations when the subject matter includes such “offensive” doctrines as criticizing homosexual behavior. The Supreme Court agreed that these could be kept off the air as prohibited “hate speech” that is likely to incite violence and discrimination. These policies followed broadcasting and print restrictions that were in place prior to 2008 in Canada and Sweden.

Well, to be fair, there’s plenty of stuff in the Bible I wouldn’t want to listen to on my drive to work. He makes Ezekiel eat bread baked in shit. I mean, call a spade a spade.

(6) Doctors and lawyers: “The land of the free”? Physicians who refuse to provide artificial insemination for lesbian couples now face significant fines or loss of their license to practice medicine, following the reasoning of a decision of the California Supreme Court in North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group v. Superior Court of San Diego County (Benitez), which was announced August 18, 2008. As a result, many Christian physicians have retired or left the practices of family medicine and obstetrics & gynecology. Lawyers who refuse to handle adoption cases for same-sex couples similarly now lose their licenses to practice law.

Just replace “gay” with “black” and your argument disappears. Yeah, you’re just for state’s rights.

(7) Counselors and social workers: “The land of the free”? All other professionals who are licensed by individual states are also prohibited from discriminating against homosexuals. Social workers and counselors, even counselors in church staff positions, who refuse to provide“professional, appropriately nurturing marriage counseling” for homosexual couples lose their counseling licenses. Thousands of Christians have left these professions as a result.

What self-respecting gay couple with marital issues would seek advice from a counselor who thinks they’re abominations? Of course the law has to allow for the exceptions, but Jesus, if you take either marriage or marriage counseling seriously, discretion just makes the most sense.

(8) Homosexual weddings: “The land of the free”? Church buildings are now considered a “public accommodation” by the Supreme Court, and churches have no freedom to refuse to allow their buildings to be used for wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples. If they refuse, they lose their tax-exempt status, and they are increasingly becoming subject to fines and antidiscrimination lawsuits.

Does Focus On The Family really think there’s some hoard of gay pirates anchored in the harbor, anxious to invade? Do they not realize that a boat full of gay people is usually content with itself?

(9) Homosexual church staff members:

Huh. Couldn’t you have combined this with section 8? This really is an exhaustive list.

“The land of the free”? While churches are still free to turn down homosexual applicants for the job of senior pastor,

I thought this was 1984. Come on! “After the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in favor of dissolving any religion deemed undesirable by the state, homosexual storm troopers invaded our sacred grounds, ordaining their own High Priesthood of indiscernible gender.” Why not go through and through? Fine, your daydream.

churches and parachurch organizations are no longer free to reject homosexual applicants for staff positions

Again, this might be the fake-America in me talking, but when I read that I think, “That’s just fabulous!”

such as parttime youth pastor or director of counseling. Those that have rejected homosexual applicants have had their tax-exempt status revoked, and now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has begun to impose heavy fines for each instance of such “discrimination,” which, they say, is “contrary to the U.S. Constitution as defined by the Supreme Court.”

Well, that’s, uh, cute, you just quoted a fictional commission that you say exists in the future. Is it a novel that you’re writing?

These fines follow the pattern of a precedent-setting case in February 2008, in which the Diocese of Hereford in the Church of England was fined $94,000 (47,000 UK pounds) for turning down a homosexual applicant for a youth ministry position.

Do we really need the worth in UK pounds? Like there’s anybody in Britain who can vote Obama.

(10) Homosexuals in the military: One change regarding the status of homosexuals did not wait for any Supreme Court decision. In the first week after his inauguration, President Obama invited homosexual rights leaders from around the United States to join him at the White House as he signed an executive order directing all branches of the military to abandon their “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and to start actively recruiting homosexuals. As a result, homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service (to attempt to compensate for past discrimination),

Am I sensing a little reparations envy?

and all new recruits, and all active-duty and reserve personnel, are compelled to take many hours of “sensitivity training” to ensure they demonstrate positive attitudes toward those with different sexual orientations and practices. Any one who seems hesitant or who objects is routinely passed over for promotion. In addition, any chaplain who holds to an interpretation of Scripture that homosexual conduct is morally wrong and therefore does not espouse “mainstream values,” is dismissed from the military. This is not “the land of the free” for them.

You know, I kind of admire them for suggesting that an organization as doggedly apolitical as the military could also catch the tolerance flu. It takes a special conviction. I wonder if they think as many homophobes would leave the service as homosexuals dismissed because of DADT. I know they don’t recognize that one soldier lost from either group is unnecessary.

Religious speech in the public square

(11) High schools: “The land of the free”? High schools are no longer free to allow “See You at the Pole” meetings

“See You At The Pole.” I wonder what that could be. I’m rooting for gay fireman school.

where students pray together,

Aww!

or any student Bible studies even before or after school. The Supreme Court ruled this is considered speech that is both “proselytizing” and involves “worship,” special categories of speech which, as liberal Justice John Paul Stevens argued in his dissent in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001), should not be allowed in public schools, since it is in a different category from other kinds of speech. (Justice Souter filed a similar dissent, which Justice Ginsburg joined). The new 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court followed his reasoning and outlawed any use of school property for any kind of religious meeting, even outside of normal school hours. In addition, Christian students cannot raise religious objections to curriculum material that promotes homosexual behavior.

Are these public or private high schools? Why in hell didn’t you tell us exactly what’s going on with the first ammendment when you were still on the Supreme Court? It would make a lot more sense, that’s all I’m saying.

(12) Church use of school property: “The land of the free”? Tens of thousands of young churches suddenly had no place to meet when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools in all 50 states had to stop allowing churches to rent their facilities — even on Sundays, when school was not in session.

What about Saturdays? Fridays? All this religious upheaval would seem to affect religions other than yours. You haven’t mentioned Jews once. I don’t know if I’m grateful for that or not, on second thought.

The court said this was an unconstitutional use of government property for a religious purpose. Most of these churches have been unable to find any suitable place to meet. Public libraries and public parks are similarly excluded from allowing churches to use their facilities. Once again, the reasoning of liberal Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg in 2001 in Good News Club (see above) was able to garner 6-3 support with the new court.

It’s been steadily turning out 6-3, over and over again. What about a nice 5-4 for variety’s sake? Or does your defeat have to be that final, must you squeeze every last bit of despicable pathos from this huge fucking straw man argument before you’re finished?

(13) Campus ministries: “The land of the free”? Campus organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity, Navigators, Baptist Campus Ministry, and Reformed University Fellowship have shrunk to skeleton organizations, and in many states they have ceased to exist. After the Supreme Court ruled that “proselytizing” speech and “worship” speech did not have the same First Amendment protection as other speech, and after it declared same-sex “marriage” to be the law of the United States,

Whoah, whoah, whoah. It’s now the law? So you’re saying heterosexual marriage is illegal at this point? If it were me in your head and not you- well, a lot of things would be different, but at the moment the thought crossed my mind that, one day, you’d go to jail for refusing to marry another dude, I’d want out of either my head or my home.

a subsequent Supreme Court decision predictably ruled

Five bucks they voted 6-3.

that universities had to prohibit campus organizations that promote “hate speech” and have discriminatory policies.

Prohibit them from what? Organizing? You need one more verb. Proved right again.

Therefore these Christian ministries have been prohibited from use of campus buildings, campus bulletin boards, advertising in campus newspapers, and use of dormitory rooms or common rooms for Bible studies. Their staff members are no longer allowed on university property. The only ministries allowed to function on campuses are “nondiscriminatory” ministries that agree to allow practicing homosexuals

Are you fucking joking? Practicing? What, are they just lapsed heterosexuals? The conceit is mind-boggling.

and members of other religions

Here we see “other religions” mentioned in the same hateful breath as “practicing homosexuals.” If your question was, “Is it on behalf of all religions, or the freedom of religion, that FOTF lays this enormous turd?” here’s your answer. Just Christians. Because God forbid other religions from encroaching on the sacred ground of campus ministry. Combined with the gays, that would just be too much.

on their governing boards. With the new Supreme Court appointed by President Obama, the long years of liberal opposition to these evangelical ministries finally bore fruit, and only liberal ministries are left on campuses.

I bet you had to try real, real hard not to quote Jesus, about bad trees bearing bad fruit. Good for you!

(14) Pledge of Allegiance: “The land of the free”? Public school teachers are no longer free to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States. The 9th Circuit U. S. Court of Appeals heard a new challenge to the phrase “under God” in the Pledge, and, as it had in 2002 in Newdow v. United States Congress, Elk Grove Unified School District, et al., it held the wording to be unconstitutional. Now the Supreme Court has upheld this decision.

I think the biggest problem with Item 14 is that it doesn’t make me care about Item 14. It needs more zazz.

Abortion

What, did you think they’d leave it alone? They’re Focus On The Family. This shit’s their bread and butter.

(15) Freedom of Choice Act: Congress lost no time in solidifying abortion rights under President Obama. In fact, Obama had promised, “The first thing I’ll do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” (July 17, 2007, speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund).
This federal law immediately nullified hundreds of state laws that had created even the slightest barrier to abortion.

Would it be safe to say that it… aborts them?

States can no longer require parental involvement for minors who wish to have an abortion, waiting period, informed consent rules, restrictions on tax-payer funding or restrictions on late-term abortions. The act reversed the Hyde Amendment, so the government now funds Medicaid abortions for any reason. As a result, the number of abortions has increased dramatically. The Freedom of Choice Act also reversed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, so infants can be killed outright just seconds before they would be born.

Huh. Bizarro-Obama must sure love third-trimester abortions, because they’re about as popular as a house fire. I can’t imagine him alienating himself from the 72% of Americans polled by Gallup who were opposed to making late term abortions legal. I mean, 72 is a big number. But, again, this is fake-America guy talking, what do I know about math.

States whose laws were overturned challenged the law in court but it was upheld by the Obama Supreme Court. “The land of the free”? There is no freedom for these infants who are killed by the millions.

Or for women who are victims of rape, incest, or who can’t survive pregnancy. And don’t say adoption’s an alternative, you just admitted you’d let every kid starve than give a homosexual couple the chance to adopt any.

(16) Nurses and abortions: “The land of the free”? Nurses are no longer free to refuse to participate in abortions for reasons of conscience. If they refuse to participate, they lose their jobs, for they are now failing to comply with federal law. Many Christian nurses have left the health care field rather than violate their consciences.

Okay. Bull fucking shit. You can’t be serious. You’re talking about all people morally opposed to late term abortions, and then when you get to people quitting in protest, is it the Sikhs you pick out? The Zoroastrians? No, it’s the Christians, as if yours are the only people who really give a shit about this problem. That’s about as unfair as… well, most of the other stuff you’ve said.

A number of Christian nurses challenged their loss of jobs in court, but the Supreme Court ruled that medical professionals do not have the freedom to refuse nonessential, elective care on the basis of conscience.

Read that sentence again. Think about reality. Think really, really hard. Is it likely that that would happen? Is it very possible? Your thesis might need additional work.

In its decision, the Supreme Court followed the reasoning of the California Supreme Court in the 2008 Benitez case (see section (6) above).

(17) Doctors and abortions: “The land of the free”? The same restrictions apply to doctors: Doctors who refuse to perform abortions can no longer be licensed to deliver babies at hospitals in any state. As a result, many Christian doctors have left family medicine and obstetrics, and many have retired.

Again. Do any of other faiths retire? Do any of no faith retire? Do any who disagree with abortion for reasons other than faith retire? This is fiction you’re writing, and it’s flawed, seriously flawed. You’re just giving me outraged Christians. There’s a lot of those, but there’s a lot of others, too. Irrespective of whether or not you believe God is there to be affronted by it, is there not enough about partial birth abortion that’s immediately, desperately wrong? Do you really need that abstraction? Abortion doesn’t only offend faith. Is yours so consuming that it blinds you to that?

Pornography

It never ceases to entertain, does it?

(18) Pornography: “The land of the free”? It’s almost impossible to keep children from seeing pornography.

If I’d been born ten years later…

The Supreme Court in 2011 nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene speech or visual content in radio and television broadcasts. As a result, television programs at all hours of the day contain explicit portrayals of sexual acts.

How does putting porn on TV help the state? Yeah, it would jive pretty well with the whole dogs-living-with-cats thing, but that’s not enough reason. Is thinking that somebody always must profit a quality unique to us fake Americans?

The court applied more broadly the “Miller test” from the 1973 decision in Miller v. California, by which a work could not be found obscene unless “the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.” In the 2011 decision,

Why bother with the years? It’s completely fucking arbitrary. It’s the future. You don’t know.

the court essentially found that any pornographic work had some measure of “serious artistic value,” at least according to some observers, and thus any censorship of pornographic material was an unconstitutional restriction on the First Amendment. In addition, all city and county laws restricting pornography were struck down by this decision. As a result, pornographic magazines are openly displayed in gas stations, grocery stores and on newsstands

On Main Street USA? Nawww!

(as they have been in some European countries for several years).

And a quick dose of xenophobe right at the closing bell. Great form. This is scaring me about as much as I thought it would, and in the same way. I hate to think of what you’d also be capable of doing, if you believed this ridiculous bullshit.

Gun ownership

Get yer git-r-done-er ready.

(19) Guns: “The land of the free”? It is illegal for private citizens to own guns for self-defense in eight states, and the number is growing with increasing Democratic control of state legislatures and governorships.

Most tedious LOLcat: “Im in ur state legislatures and governorships, increasing ur democratic control.”

This was the result of a 6-3 Supreme Court decision in which the court reversed its 5-4 decision that had upheld private gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). In the new decision, a response to test cases from Oregon, Massachusetts, and Vermont, the court adopted the view of the Second Amendment that had been defended in Heller by the four liberal justices, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer.

You assume that the court would be retarded enough to apply test cases from Oregon, Vermont and Massachusetts to Washington, DC. In 2007, DC had a larger number of violent crimes than the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Nebraska, either Dakotas, West Virginia, Idaho, Montana, Delaware, Wyoming, Utah, Hawaii and Alaska. That’s not per 100,000 people- that’s total violent crimes. Per capita, DC was triple the national average of violent crimes in ’07. If only they put these test cases in some sort of… what would you call it… social context?

In this new decision, the court specified that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” was limited to that purpose specified in the Second Amendment, namely, to those people who were part of a “well regulated militia” in the various states.

Isn’t the point of preserving the right to bear arms to provide those militias a means of violently overthrowing the government if it becomes corrupt? To violently overthrow this government, you’d need nuclear weapons. A couple of them. It’s not going to happen with your daddy’s twelve gauge. If you think that’s possible, well, you might be delusional enough to write this piece of meandering shit.

To those who argued that this view was not the “original intent” of the framers, they pointed to a long history of dispute over the interpretation of the expression and then said that, in any case, the Constitution was an “evolving” document that must change with the times, and so what may have been applicable in 1790 need no longer be decisive.

Or, following the same literal interpretation that made the Supreme Court of Upside-Down Land put porn on every channel, you could say that the intent of the founders, applied to the modern day, would be to give every standing militia a hydrogen bomb. Do you see how fucking absurd the porn thing is now? Good.

Therefore they allowed cities and states to limit gun ownership to active-duty military personnel and police officers. Citizens in those areas who are discovered owning guns have been subjected to heavy fines and imprisonment. Inner-city violent crime has increased dramatically.

About the “Inner-city violent crime has increased dramatically.” If what you’re implying is that more guns creates less crime, look up the guy who wrote the book on it. John Lott. He made a sock puppet to comfort himself over the bad reviews he got on Amazon. I mean, if he’s not convinced…

Education

I can call these people a lot of things, among them: thorough. Five bucks says there’s something about dinosaurs being phony. No, scratch that, I just wish there was…

(20) Home schooling: “The land of the free”? Parents’ freedom to teach their children at home has been severely restricted. The Supreme Court, to the delight of the National Education Association,

Those narcissistic maniacs! I can see them simpering now…

followed the legal reasoning of a February 28, 2008, ruling in Re: Rachel L by the 2nd District Court of Appeal in California (although that ruling was later reversed).

So they didn’t follow its reasoning? I’m confused.

In the later case, the Supreme Court declared that home schooling was a violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents (a) had an education certificate from an accredited state program.,

Okay, maybe plausible. Only in an administration that had a serious axe to grind about home schooled kids. I mean, it’s not a huge demographic, I don’t know what more regulation would affect other than just home schooled kids and their parents. But I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

(b) agreed to use state-approved textbooks in all courses,

No way. Requiring certification for the parents is far enough a departure from the norm. State-approved textbooks? Really, the first amendment thing ought to have been more clearly explained. Now I understand why they just Hitlerize Obama’s portrait. It gets really, really confusing to hold all the details of the worst case scenario in your head after a while. Serious ethical gymnastics. I couldn’t imagine doing them with the diminished capacity required to agree with most of their logic. It’s like making a house of cards, but the cards are just turds.

and (c) agreed not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong, or that Jesus is the only way to God,

I’m right all over again about the “only Christians” thing from before.

since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment and acceptance of other lifestyles and beliefs, and to run counter to the state’s interest in educating its children to be good citizens.

So there’s something wrong with acceptance of other lifestyles and beliefs? This is poorly veiled dystopian fiction with limited- severely limited- basis in fact. If its factual basis choked to death while masturbating, it would resemble this.

Parents found in violation of this ruling have been subject to prosecutions for truancy violation, resulting in heavy fines and eventual removal of their children from the home. Thousands of home schooling parents, seeing no alternative in the United States, have begun to emigrate to other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand, where home schooling is still quite prevalent.

There’s always the next frontier, right? Manifest destiny. They’ve got surfing, too!

President Obama’s response to the Supreme Court

Yeah, where’s he been in all this? Oddly silent… suspicious, even…

After many of these decisions, especially those that restricted religious speech in public places, President Obama publicly expressed strong personal disapproval of the decision and said that the Supreme Court had gone far beyond what he ever expected. But he has also stated repeatedly that he had sworn to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and, now that the Supreme Court had ruled, he had no choice but to uphold the law, for these decisions were the law of the land.

So he got a second term because everything was all hyped up? Did he call the other guy a pussy? That often works well, when you combine it with the hype.

Military policy

In his role as commander in chief, President Obama has been reluctant to send our armed forces to any new overseas commitment.

What, you want a third war? I know you’re delusional, but really, that bad?

(21) Iraq: “The home of the brave”? President Obama fulfilled his campaign promise and began regular withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, completing it in the promised 16 months, by April 2010.

Wrong war. Wrong place. Wrong time. That hasn’t changed since 2002. Unless Cheney unveils his mysterious plan for invading Iraq in the first place- if Cheney doesn’t fess up about finding the fountain of life in Tikrit or something, why shed another drop of blood in this meaningless war?

All was peaceful during those months, but then in May 2010,

What difference does it make, what month it is? In the year and month since you wrote this, has writing that it happened in May seriously affected your health or happiness?

Al-Qaida operatives from Syria and Iran poured into Iraq

Like rats into a sinking ship!

and completely overwhelmed the Iraqi security forces. A Taliban-like oppression has taken over in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of “American sympathizers” have been labeled as traitors, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The number put to death may soon reach the millions.
Al-Qaida leaders have been emboldened by what they are calling the American “defeat”

Why in the name of Jesus is that in quotes?

and their ranks are swelling in dozens of countries.

Is that one dozen or two?

Another layer of the xenophobia peeled back: Dozens of countries are waiting for Uncle Sam to make that one mistake. They may be friendly today, but all it takes is a little push for them to start brandishing scimitars and hating us for our freedom and shit like that.

(22) Terrorist attacks:

Back up.

You’re not about to suggest that Obama’s presidency will result in more terrorist attacks. Are you?

Back way the fuck up.

“The home of the brave”? President Obama directed U.S. intelligence services to cease all wiretapping of alleged terrorist phone calls unless they first obtained a warrant for each case. Terrorists captured overseas, instead of being tried in military tribunals, are given full trials in the U.S. court system,

With donuts and lawyers and medical attention and everything a prisoner could ever be guaranteed by law.

and they have to be allowed access to a number of government secrets to prepare their defense.

I’m speechless.

Since 2009, terrorist bombs have exploded in two large and two small U.S. cities, killing hundreds, and the entire country is fearful, for no place seems safe. President Obama in each case has vowed “to pursue and arrest and prosecute those responsible,” but no arrests have been made. However, he has challenged the nation to increase foreign aid to the poorer nations that were the breeding grounds for terrorism, so people could have an opportunity to escape from the cycles of poverty and violence in which generations had been trapped.

You want me to swallow a couple lines of bullshit as one, here. First of all, the wiretapping thing. I mean, please. What do you take me for? You can’t tell me why you’re tapping phones, because you’re listening for secret stuff. The secret stuff you’re listening for, if you find it, it’ll stay a secret, because if it got out, it’ll make the terrorists think, “Yeah! See? We’re getting to them, bit by bit!” These terrorists, by the way, all these secrets- every last one, whether or not you know you are involved with a terrorist or not (and the definition of terrorist is totally yours to dictate) all the shit you’re listening for in my conversations has to do, one hundred percent, with terrorists. And these terrorists want to murder as many of us as possible because why? Our freedom? Not thirty years of escalating tensions between the United States and the Middle East. They hate us for our freedom? What the fuck are you talking about?

Second, tell me the Bush years weren’t a nightmare of similar intensity. Tell me you couldn’t have written something like this, but at the end of the Clinton era, and it would’ve been one hundred percent accurate at the end of Bush’s first term. You have the conceit to try and scare people into voting away from Obama because maybe he’d let the terrorists go- when Bush had eight years to catch Bin Laden and didn’t do it? You have the sack to presume Obama’s presidency could measure up at all to the relentless mutilation of rule of law under George Bush?

Third, and this just makes me feel like getting up and taking a shower, but the thing about the foreign aid. You say it like it’s not the truth. Why did the Taliban become a political reality? Afghanistan was poor as shit, the religious fringe got control over the violence and we didn’t care enough to pump the necessary money into its infrastructure to avoid theocratic junta meltdown. It stayed poor and crazy. I mean, come on. If you’re going to try to get me scared about terrorism, I expect you to understand at least the basic fucking civics of how it starts. They’re poor. They’re disenfranchised. If they were neither poor nor disenfranchised, there would be fewer of them.

Jesus. I mean, how many Swedish terrorists have you heard of? To treat this fact as anything other than what it is- a fact- forces me to wonder if you wish that either it weren’t so, or for us to act as though it weren’t.

Last, really, you ought to know what I’m about to say. Nobody does what you’ve done and doesn’t hear “go fuck yourself” for the rest of their lives. You’ve used the spectacle of violence to frighten us into voting a certain way. You’ve done the terrorist’s work for them. It’s of great comfort to me to think that you will, for the rest of your mortal life, have to deal with people telling you to go fuck yourself. Consider yourself lucky that this is the most severe punishment you’re likely (very possibly likely) to face, and wise because you’re only theoretically a terrorist. But I’d consider myself remiss if I didn’t add my voice to what is surely a Greek chorus of people waiting for as long as you draw breath to wish upon you the most painful, humiliating cancer the human body can contain.

(23) Russia: “The home of the brave”? As Vice President Joe Biden had predicted on Oct. 20, 2008, some hostile foreign countries “tested” President Obama in his first few months in office. The first test came from Russia.

A test from Russia- this sounds so familiar. Come on, memory.

In early 2009, they followed the pattern they had begun in Georgia in 2008

That’s what it was! I was right about to say it, I swear. What I remember is we couldn’t do jack fucking squat about that problem, because the hard power Bush was so anal-retentive about had, by then, bankrupted our capacity to negotiate. Nobody wanted to talk to us, so, since it was a problem we couldn’t solve by invading, we had severely limited options and Georgia’s still pretty much a failed state. At least, that’s what I remember. Being fake-American, my word is fallible.

and sent troops to occupy and re-take several Eastern European countries, starting with the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. President Obama appealed to the United Nations (UN),

Oh, the one with the assembly that can decide things, though lacking the power to assert these decisions?

taking the same approach he had in his initial statements when Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008: “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war,” and “All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis,” But Russia sits on the Security Council, and no U.N. action has yet been taken.

Because the U.N. has no power, that’s right.

Then in the next three years, Russia occupied additional countries that had been previous Soviet satellite nations, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the U.N. NATO heads of state have severely condemned Russia’s actions each time but they could never reach consensus on military action.

There’s Putin, rearin’ his ugly head!

Liberal television commentators in both the U.S. and Europe have uniformly expressed deep regret at the loss of freedom of these countries but have also observed that “the U.S. cannot be the world’s policeman.”

Huh. Where the fuck were they seven years ago? That would’ve been a useful counterpoint in the drumbeat to Iraq. Clearly they didn’t say it enough. And if Obama and the international community are as enamored with each other as you say, I’d expect more teamwork- action- than what you describe. He isn’t the type to let his popularity go to unused. You’d think he’d, I don’t know, repair our image abroad, make nice with everybody we pissed off, get them to do what they’ve agreed has to be done. Isn’t that the pinko-fag, appeaser-mentality thing to do? Or will he be too busy taxing and spending?

President Obama’s popularity dropped somewhat after each of these crises, but media criticism was remarkably muted. And Vice President Joe Biden reminded the nation that on October 20, 2008, he had predicted that Russia might be one of “four or five scenarios” where an “international crisis” would arise. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy,” he said. And Obama will have to make “some incredibly tough decisions,” and that “it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

I can’t really fault these douchebags for quoting that Biden gaffe. The man does it to himself.

(24) Latin America: President Obama has also moved to deepen U.S. ties and U.S. trade with communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, regimes that had long enjoyed the favor of far-Left factions in the Democratic Party.

Isn’t it nice when they out-and-out confess their lingering Cold War angst?

Several other Latin American countries seem ready to succumb to insurgent communist revolutionary factions funded and armed by millions of petrodollars from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Petrodollars… and commie reach-arounds.

(25) Israel: “The home of the brave”? In mid-2010, Iran launched a nuclear bomb that exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, destroying much of that city.

First of all, the date thing again- meaningless. Second, bravo, going all out with the scare tactic. Nuclear destruction of Israel at the hands of that dirty, scheming Ahmadinejad is the only possible outcome of an Obama White House. So what if you lack the higher brain function to fully understand the consequences of a nuclear attack. For vitriol like this, you don’t need it.

They then demanded that Israel cede huge amounts of territory to the Palestinians, and after an anguished all-night Cabinet meeting, Israel’s prime minister

Whose sorcery made him immune to both radiation and enormous explosions.

agreed. Israel is reduced to a much smaller country, hardly able to defend itself, and its future remains uncertain. President Obama said he abhorred what Iran had done and he hoped the U.N. would unanimously condemn this crime against humanity.

Unbelievable. You’re saying that because the President is an ineffectual pussy with clearly no concern over getting re-elected, the United States would just let anybody nuke anybody else with complete impunity? And how, pray tell, would this happen?

He also declared that the U.S. would be part of any international peacekeeping force if authorized by the U.N., but the Muslim nations in the U.N. have so far prevented any action.

Oh! That’s right! That thing we just talked about, with the assembly and the power vacuum! We’re going to take it seriously. Rather than cross the mighty U.N., we’re going to allow Iran the capacity to create more nuclear destruction. The Muslim nations in the U.N.? Are you fucking serious? Their reaction to Darfur was a couple guys in blue helmets on a fact-finding mission. They couldn’t prevent their way out of a paper bag. They’d still have Britain to worry about, anyways.

Health care

Death panels. I’m counting on death panels. I will bet our national debt on this part mentioning death panels.

(26) Health care systems: The new Congress under President Obama passed a nationalized “single provider” health care system, in which the U.S. government is the provider of all health care in the United States, following the pattern of nationalized medicine in the United Kingdom and Canada.

I’m actually disappointed. Instead of “the United Kingdom and Canada,” I was expecting “fag-enablers like Sweden.”

The great benefit is that medical care is now free for everyone — if you can get it. Now that health care is free, it seems everybody wants more of it. The waiting list for prostate cancer surgery is 3 years. The waiting list for ovarian cancer is 2 years. Just as the Canadian experience had shown prior to 2008 with its nationalized health care, so in the U.S. only a small number of MRIs are performed — down 90% from 2008

Ninety percent is actually a conservative estimate- some practices have shown up to a million zillion percent decline in MRIs.

— because they are too expensive, and they discover more problems that need treatment, so they are almost never authorized.

(27) Limited care for older Americans: “The land of the free”? Because medical resources must be rationed carefully by the government, people older than 80 have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures. Their “duty” is increasingly thought to be to go home to die,

Death panels! I was right!

so they don’t drain scarce resources from the medical system. Euthanasia is becoming more and more common.

The beauty of these hysterics is that a shitload of people actually believe in them. Nothing in the healthcare bill constitutes as rationing. Absolutely nothing. Peculiar, though, that a conservative like Alan Greenspan would wonder if it was “worth it” to spend thirty percent of Medicare costs on the five percent of really old people who’ll just die a year later, anyways. But Alan Greenspan is about as fiscally conservative as I’m a real American, so that’s probably a bad example.

Taxes, the economy and the poor:

Many Christians who voted for Obama did so because they thought his tax policies were fairer and his “middle-class tax cuts” would bring the economy out of its 2008 crisis.

The free copy of Freedomnomics with any purchase of a Bible helps. Good thinking, Amazon.

But once he took office, he followed the consistent pattern of the Democratic Party and his own record and asked Congress for a large tax increase.

On behalf of FOTF, I’d like to ask you, dear reader, to excuse what may be construed as a cynical assessment of the relationship between Barack Obama and the nation and party which elected him their leader. Although I’m sure none of you have suffered the requisite head trauma to know no better yourselves, at least keep in mind: to some, it seems natural to assume the dog walks the human.

He explained the deficit had grown so large under President Bush, and the needs of the nation were so great, that we couldn’t afford to cut taxes.
And several of Obama’s economic policies have hurt the poor because they have decreased production and increased inflation and unemployment. Here is what happened:

(28) Taxes: Tax rates have gone up on personal income, dividends, capital gains, corporations, and inheritance transfers. The amount of income subject to Social Security tax has nearly doubled. The effect on the economy has been devastating. We have experienced a prolonged recession. Everyone has been hurt by this, but the poor have been hurt most. In dozens of cities, there are no jobs to be found.

Hey, the War On Heterosexuality ain’t cheap.

It turns out that the people President Obama called “the rich” were not all that rich.

They were just hard-workin’ moms and dads, soccer-coachin’, Reba-watchin’, brush-clearin’ hockey moms and professional snowmobilers like you and me and Tito the Builder and Elisabeth the Hasselbeck.

They were just ordinary people who worked hard, saved, and built small businesses that provided jobs and brought economic growth. They kept inventing new and better ways to produce things and bring prices down. They produced the goods and services that gave us the highest standard of living in history. They provided the competition that kept prices low. And the top 50% of earners were already paying 97% of income taxes collected by the U.S. government in 2006.

Boo fuckety hoo. The bottom forty percent of earners owns less than one percent of the wealth here. By your math, they’re still paying more, proportionately, than the rest.

President Obama increased their tax burden so much that many business owners decided they didn’t want to work any harder when the government was taking so much away. “The land of the free?” Not for the most productive workers in the American economy. Just as nearly 2 million citizens in the decade prior to 2008 had moved out of California and New York when the Democrats had control and kept raising state taxes, many of these entrepreneurs have moved their money, their factories, and often themselves, overseas.

Eight years of that decade were spent under a Republican administration. Last time I checked, the Governator was still in office in California, and still a Republican. New York had a Republican governor from ’95-’06. Find a better example of why I should believe there is any precedent for Democrats realizing this hell- not Republicans but Democrats- or just give up.

So many jobs have been lost that welfare rolls have swelled, and President Obama is calling for more taxes to meet the needs of those without work.

However, Obama’s tax bill still included “tax credits” for the lowest 40% of earners, who were said to “need the most help.” Since the bottom 40% were not paying any federal income taxes in the first place, these “tax cuts” were actually a gigantic redistribution of income, a huge welfare payment, a way to “spread the wealth around,” as Obama told “Joe the Plumber” on October 13,

As they don’t even have one percent of the wealth of this country, how exactly are the poor going to pay taxes? In hickory nuts? Is this To Kill A Mockingbird?

When critics objected that Obama’s tax policies were leading to inflation and unemployment, he responded that our goal should not be merely to increase America’s materialism and wealth and prosperity, but to obtain a more just distribution of wealth, even if it costs everybody a little to achieve that important goal.

Those savory cold war insecurities… so rewarding.

(29) Budget deficit: The federal budget deficit has increased dramatically under President Obama, in spite of higher tax rates. Increasing tax rates on “the rich”

Ooh! Those quotation marks again! Check out the nuts on this guy!

did nothing to reduce the deficit because the economy shrank so much with reduced investment that the total dollars collected in taxes actually decreased — even though most people’s tax rate is now higher. As numerous economists had predicted, higher tax rates meant that the government took in less money. When reporters asked Obama why he still favored higher taxes on the rich when it brought in no more money, he replied that it was important that the rich pay their fair share.

You’re telling me that by increasing taxes on Warren Buffet’s sixty-two billion dollars from one tenth of one percent of his net worth to five percent, our GDP will shrink fast enough to nullify the short-term gain? Whatever mind-altering hallucigen you’re on, I hope it’s not in the water. I shudder to think there’s more of you.

(30) Union organizing: “The land of the free”? In 2009, Congress passed and President Obama quickly signed a “card check” program that nullified the requirement for secret ballots when voting on whether workers wanted a union shop.

I’m regretting your exclusion of the first amendment thing more and more as the numbers pile on. I can think of three ways that’s unconstitutional right now. There are probably more ways. You know what, I’m going to put my money on there being a long, long list of constitutional amendments that would be thrown the fuck out if Count Chocula got into office. (As if they hadn’t already been ritually sacrificed…)

Now the union has to get signatures from a majority of workers in any business, and unions around the country are using strong-arm tactics to intimidate anyone who stands in their way. Several industries are completely unionized, and prices of goods produced by those industries have shot up as a result.

(31) Energy: World demand for oil continues to climb, and prices keep going up, but President Obama for four years has refused to allow additional drilling for oil in the United States or offshore. Gas costs more than $7 per gallon, and many Democrats openly applaud this, since high prices reduce oil consumption and thus reduce carbon dioxide output. But working Americans are hit hard by these costs.

Joe the plumber? Tito the builder? Wendy the waitress? Tom the realtor? Greg the teleprompter guy? John the four-term senator? Sarah the half-term governor? Mickey the mouse?

Nuclear energy

Now, you’ve got to play this right. There’s a great opportunity for some high-quality fearmongering, but you have to say “meltdown” at least sixty times in this paragraph.

would provide a substitute for oil in some cases, and could generate electricity to power electric cars, but environmentalist legal challenges have prevented the construction of nuclear plants, and the courts have been leaning so far in a pro-environmentalist direction that nobody expects the construction of nuclear plants for several decades, if ever. Obama keeps reminding people we cannot guarantee it will be safe.

And you fucked it up again. Completely. Reminding people that we can’t guarantee that nuclear energy is one hundred percent safe is exactly the mistake a politician would make if he were limited by the realm of fact and physics. If Cheney wanted nuclear power bad enough, he would’ve told us it could make stars come out of our dicks. I mean, please. When I go to a horror movie, I expect to be scared.

As for coal, President Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to implement strict new carbon emission standards that drove many coal-powered electric plants out of business. The country has less total electric power available than in 2008, and periodic blackouts to conserve energy occur on a regular schedule throughout the nation. The price of electricity has tripled in places like California, which also faces rolling blackouts during peak energy periods. The impact on our economy, and our homes, has been devastating.

Talk radio

Because who but Focus On The Family would think talk radio is as important as taxes, the economy or the poor. Enough about them- wait till you hear what he said ’bout Father Coughlin!

Through the actions of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress, Democrats were able to largely silence the largest source of conservative opposition: talk radio.

You’re really self-sabotaging, calling talk radio the largest source of conservative opposition. You call that shit-eating contest the largest source of your opposition movement? Oh, that’s right, you do.

(32) Fairness Doctrine: “The land of the free”? By the summer of 2009, the five-member FCC was controlled by Democratic appointees – including a chairman appointed by President Obama. The “Fairness Doctrine” became a topic of FCC consideration following pressure from Democratic congressional leaders who initially did not have sufficient votes to pass the measure. The FCC quickly implemented the “Fairness Doctrine,” which requires that radio stations provide “equal time” for alternative views on political or policy issues.
As a result, all radio stations have to provide equal time to contrasting views for every political or policy-related program they broadcast by talk show hosts like

Ooh, ooh! I love lists! This should be fun, right?

Rush Limbaugh,

Veterans who disagree with the Bush doctrine? Phony soldiers, definitely. Donovan McNabb? Not talented, just black. Michael J. Fox? Totally faking it.

Laura Ingraham,

Shut Up and Sing is the most inconsequential book I’ve ever hear of. It’s laughable.

Sean Hannity,

Oh the huge manattee! Sorry, that wasn’t fair, was it? If we were going to count out all the birthers, we’d have nobody left on the list. Next ideologue.

Dennis Prager,

This guy? Three minutes and thirty seconds, wait for it, it’s the new gold standard of Islamophobia. By the way, double standard: were I a terrorist, I’d be more encouraged by my enemies auto-cannibalizing their freedom of religion than their reading the same book I do. Next.

Janet Parshall,

If same sex couples adopting children sounds like “state-sanctioned child abuse” to you- or if you think Matthew Shephard was asking for it- you are either stupid enough to fail an eye exam, or Janet Parshall.

Michael Medved

Medved. Right. He wrote an essay called “Six inconvenient truths about the U.S. and slavery.” You can’t make this shit up. “Michael Medved: Slavery shmavery!”

and Hugh Hewitt,

Hewitt predicted that the USC- Ohio State game on September 25, 2008 would be the last football game America would see before being blown to shit by bloodthirsty yeti terrorists, if Obama got elected. It’s likely or very possible that this prediction would’ve been proven false by October 22 of the same year.

and broadcasters like Dr. James Dobson.

That’s the guy who made FOTF who made this unfortunate shitstain. If you’re frustrated, this video will help.

Can’t say my life is richer knowing what those people have to say. Long list, though, right? Phew. For people who think homosexuality’s an abberation, they sure suck a lot of dick.

Every conservative talk show is followed by an instant rebuttal to the program by a liberal “watchdog” group. Many listeners gave up in frustration, advertising (and donation) revenues dropped dramatically, and nearly all conservative stations have gone out of business or switched to alternative formats such as country or gospel or other music.

Again, where’s the realism? If I were an evil liberal overlord, country music would be at the top of my list of things to put in shallow graves.

Conservative talk radio, for all intents and purposes, was shut down by the end of 2010. In order to solidify the Fairness Doctrine at the FCC, Congress in 2010 passed, and President Obama signed, legislation making it permanent.
Many legal scholars

Among them, whom?

had predicted the Fairness Doctrine would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

After the outraged Christians voted a backwash of Republicans into Congress in 2010 in reaction to the liberal shitstorm, everybody thought it was inevitable that a couple Supreme Court justices would get thrown out. You know, because it’s in one of those checks and balances the novelist conveniently writes off the page. Then they’d force the President to nominate a staunch conservative to replace the corrupt liberals, returning balance to the Force at last.

But the liberal Obama court upheld it easily. Of course, this bill fit the deeper purpose of the liberal-Left wing of American politics, which trumps all other purposes, and that is getting and increasing its power so as to impose its agenda on the nation. It was not surprising the liberal Supreme Court went along.

Christian publishers

(33) Christian books: After the Supreme Court legalized same “sex marriage,” homosexual-activist groups targeted three large Christian book publishers that had publications arguing that homosexual conduct was wrong based on the teachings of the Bible. The activists staged marches and protests at Barnes & Noble stores around the country, demanding the stores remove all books published by these “hate-mongering” publishers. Barnes & Noble resisted for a time, but the protests continued, there was vandalism and secret defacing of books,

Secret defacing of books? What’s secret- what’s being changed in the book, or the act of changing it? Do Obama’s minions obviously implant secret messages, or do they secretly implant obvious messages, or do they secretly implant secret messages? Make up your fucking mind.

and eventually the cost was too great and Barnes & Noble gave in. The same thing happened at Borders and other chains. Then they staged a massive nationwide computer attack on Amazon.com, with the same demands, and the same result. As a result, those evangelical publishers could no longer distribute any of their books through any of these bookstore chains. Any Christian publisher that dares to print works critical of homosexual behavior faces the same fate. As a result, several Christian publishers have gone out of business.

So the entire publishing industry- the free press- would be turned upside down because Barnes & Noble and Amazon stopped selling Christian books critical of gays. An administration that did that wouldn’t and couldn’t survive the backlash from everybody who takes the free press as importantly as they ought to.

Another thing: I haven’t read every book on Christian inspiration, but if the point of them is to be close to Christ’s teachings, I can’t imagine many contain anti-gay rhetoric. I’d like to believe that only a small, vocal minority of Christians are rampantly homophobic enough to equate everything Christian that can be put in a book with their prejudices. But, again, as a fake American, my feelings are meaningless.

Prosecution of Bush administration officials

This was on my wish list, too. See, we’re not so different!

(34) Criminal charges against Republican officials: In his first week in office, Obama followed President Clinton’s precedent and fired all 93 U.S. attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, including the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). President Obama argued this was not a selective political action like what President Bush had done, because Obama had fired all of them, conservatives and liberals alike.

So the selective political action which led Bush to fire U.S. attorneys did not at all influence the way Bush hired U.S. attorneys. So Bizarro-Obama fired just as many conservatives as he did liberals, because ninety three is an even number.

The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges against nearly every Bush administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq war. During his campaign, Senator Obama said, “What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued.”

Yeah, because they broke the law.

In order to facilitate these proceedings, President Obama rescinded President Bush’s executive order that had prevented presidential papers from being released, and millions of pages of previously secret White House papers were posted on the Internet.

You know, the torture memos- the ones where people talked about how they were breaking the law. Hey, while we’re still talking about the DOJ, would Bizarro-Obama torture? I doubt he would.

ACLU attorneys have spent four years poring over these papers looking for possible violations of law. Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail, and most of them are also bankrupt from legal costs.

Good. They broke the fucking law.

Where is the opposition?

If all that shit happened, and the American people were stupid enough to not vote in a serious referendum on Obama in 2010, hey, they voted for him, it’s their opposition to fuck up. Like the Democrats in 2006. Actually, like the Democrats at any point in history where there have been Democrats.

Has America completely lost God’s favor and protection as a nation? If it has, is this surprising? How can God continue to bless a nation whose official policies promote blatant violation of God’s commands regarding the protection of human life, and sexual morality?

A fundamental difference between real America and fake America is the fake American’s failure to grasp how much our sexual proclivities matter to an omnipotent, omniscient God. We just don’t get why buttsex is so evil, do we.

Why should God bless any nation that elects officials who remove people’s freedom of religion and freedom of speech and freedom even to raise their own children? His Word says,
“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34).
Many brave Christian men and women

(as Christians in the United States only make up a victimized, persecuted minority)

tried to resist these laws, and some Christian legal agencies tried to defend them, but they couldn’t resist the power of a 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court.

Because in the American legal system, not a single ounce of power or authority is held by courts that don’t have “Supreme” in their name.

It seems many of the bravest ones went to jail or were driven to bankruptcy. And many of their reputations have been destroyed by a relentless press and the endless repetition of false accusations.

No, I think you proved many of those accusations in this very novel.

The same question written in “The Star Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key in 1814 rings in the air:

Or paper, as it were. Or laptop screen.

O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Now in October 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years, the answer to that question is “No.” Our freedoms have been systematically taken away. Many of “the brave” are in jail. We are no longer “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

How did this happen?

When did this all start? Christians share a lot of the blame. In 2008, many evangelicals

Which ones?

thought Senator Obama was an opportunity for a “change,” and they voted for him. They did not realize Obama’s far-Left agenda would take away many of our freedoms, perhaps permanently (it is unlikely the Supreme Court can be changed for perhaps 30 years).

No. It’s not unlikely. Congress has the power to impeach corrupt Supreme Court justices. Congress has the power to withold confirmation of Presidential appointments to the Supreme Court if the appointee is a self-alleged partisan. Like Robert Bork, remember? If you weren’t gay married to your end-times fantasy of a 6-3 liberal majority, you’d recall that part of the Constitution.

Christians did not realize that by electing Barack Obama — rated the most liberal U.S. senator in 2007 — they would allow the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression.

You can’t even call this short term memory loss, because Bush was still in office when these words were written.

Many people thought he sounded so thoughtful, so reasonable.

Just those gullible evangelicals? Because you give them so much practice making their own decisions about, uh, voting. Or were there other victims of Count Chocula’s thoughtful, reasonable overtures?

And during the campaign, after he had won the Democratic nomination, he seemed to be moving to the center in his speeches, moving away from his far-Left record. No one thought he would enact such a far-Left, extreme liberal agenda.

Here it’s fair to note that those who did expect it were, in reality, terribly disappointed.

But the record was all there for anyone to see.

Olbermann on “anyone”: “Tin foil hatters, conspiracy theorists, paranoids, racists, loons and pinheads.” How small a dot in the rear view mirror the argument from inexperience now seems. A relic of a simpler time.

The agenda of the ACLU, the agenda of liberal activist judges in their dissenting opinions, the agenda of the homosexual activists, the agenda of the environmental activists, the agenda of the National Education Association, the agenda of the global-warming activists, the agenda of the abortion-rights activists, the agenda of the gun-control activists, the agenda of the euthanasia supporters, the agenda of the one-world government pacifists, the agenda of far-Left groups in Canada and Europe – all of these agendas were there in plain sight, and all of these groups provided huge support for Senator Obama. The liberal agenda was all there. But too many people just didn’t want to see it.

Euthanasia supporters can disagree with abortion rights activists. Far-left groups in Canada, unless they support the dissolution of, uh, Canada, would probably have a bone to pick with one-world government pacifists. You said liberal activists would intimidate Barnes and Nobel and Amazon into not selling Christian books. Sueing the shit out of people like that is what the ACLU is all about. You don’t understand. A lot of people disagree with you. Your opposition is a pretty diverse group. They don’t have to agree with each other, and often don’t, but they agree that you’re a pile of shit.

Christians didn’t take time to find out who Barack Obama was when they voted for him.

Why did they risk our nation’s future on him? It was a mistake that changed the course of history.

I reiterate: If they voted stupid, they deserve what they got.

What about our faith?

Personally, I don’t know how we are going to get through tomorrow, for these are difficult times.

Well, shit. Advice for tomorrow. I can’t say I’m really prepared to give an answer, but I guess I could try. Where to begin. I don’t know, you could start by getting up. After that, there usually aren’t any life-or-death decisions to make that would, uh, immediately affect your maintenance of homeostasis. Just remember to breathe in and out, drink some water at some point in your day, and be careful not to fall down. As long as you don’t forget the part about breathing, you should be OK.

But my faith in the Lord remains strong. I still believe that “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

You’ve just told me that if I vote for Obama, I’ll get a nuked Tel Aviv, genocide in Iraq, a purge of Christian doctors and nurses, teachers, legal agencies, students, churches, adoption agencies (those that haven’t already choked on their own homophobia), books, private schools campus ministries, high school clubs, and independent publishers. He’ll fuck up healthcare, foreign relations, education, the economy, and ninety nine percent of the judicial branch. After making all those bullshit predictions, do you expect me to agree when you quote at me, that everything will work together for the good? After telling me that if I vote Obama, American citizens will die on American soil at the hands of terrorists, is that really what you expect? You ought to be too ashamed of your ignorance to offer even a whisper of it into the public discourse.

I still believe “kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations” (Psalm 22:28). I still believe our salvation comes from no earthly government for “there is salvation in no one else” than Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12). I still believe God is sovereign over all history,

So a benevolent creator is pushing us towards our inevitable extinction? You’re pro-euthanasia?

and though I don’t know why he has allowed these events, it is still his purpose that will ultimately be accomplished. He alone can say of all history, “There is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose” (Isaiah 46:9-10).

You’ve got to love the Books of the Prophets. Or the abridged version they read- just the quotable parts, none of the ultraviolence.

Sincerely,
A Christian from 2012

© 2008 Focus on the Family Action, Inc.
This letter may be reproduced without change and in its entirety for noncommercial and nonpolitical purposes without prior permission from Focus on the Family Action.

Alright. Let’s finish by first establishing a couple inarguable truths:

1. Focus On The Family wrote this to keep people from voting for Obama.
2. To keep people from voting Obama, FOTF warned that scary things would happen.
3. So FOTF’s hypothesis was: to keep scary things from happening, people must first become adequatly afraid.
3. Therefore, FOTF’s first intention was to scare people.

And, no, that doesn’t make them terrorists, any more than writing scary books made H. L. Mencken a terrorist. I meant H. P. Lovecraft, what am I saying.

What a cop-out. They didn’t sign a name to it. I mean, really. Give your protagonist a name, at least. Let the reader know it’s a real person, with real concerns, real things threatening his continued existence. Have enough respect for your audience to not waste their time. “A Christian from 2012.” As if Obama’s policies will be so radical that by 2012, any Christian still alive will be able to write this in earnest.

About the Bizarro-Obama: This didn’t adequately describe him, so I’m really filling in gaps in its portrayal myself. I don’t think he tortured. I know he didn’t wiretap. I know he didn’t invade another country without cause or legislative approval. He probably had the courage to put Cheney and his lying ilk in prison. I bet he even passed a healthcare bill before the Congress went to summer recess.

So what if he tries to appoint a couple Justices as blatantly partisan as somebody as, hmm, Harriet Miers? They wouldn’t get confirmed in a million years. She didn’t even make it that far. And would he spend a third of his four years in office on vacation? You bet he wouldn’t.

Frankly, he doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe a little ineffectual, but so is the real life version, and we’re still here, aren’t we?

Reading the whole letter as closely as I have has brought me an unwelcomed acquaintance with how it feels to operate under the thumb of this massive delusion. It’s survival-oriented. No compromise is suggested, because the idea isn’t to get along with other people. The delusion convinces you that, at best, you’ll only get by, and on your own. In order for this hysteria to catch on, organizations like Focus On The Family have to convince people, one by one, that they really are all alone. It would be counter-productive to say, “Boy, what a shame about the MRI shortage. If only there were an abundance of federal stimulus money. That way, we could buy more machines machines and educate more MRI technicians. I bet we could even prevent some of those extremely expensive diseases that contribute to the 15% of our national debt owed to healthcare costs.” It takes a feat of intellectual cowardice to believe we’ll ever be too far gone for our one greatest strength- our power to compromise- to rescue us.

The first time I encountered this letter, more than a year ago, I wondered, “What kind of moron would think all this shit is ‘likely or at least very possible?’” At last, I know. You wouldn’t have to be a moron at all. Mostly, you’d just have to be scared. You’d have to think that everybody outside America hates Americans- or at least could potentially be recruited by Al Qaeda. You’d have to think that other Americans want to take away your gun, your freedom to worship, your choice of where to send your children, what books you read, TV you watch and radio you listen to. You’d have to believe that being afraid of terrorists is an appropriate response to the existential threat they pose to our nation.

There’s a grain of truth in all of those things. Yes, a year ago, since our leaders were ignorant bullies, we were treated like ignorant bullies by the ignorant bullies abroad. Yes, some Americans want to make fully-automatic weapons, homophobia, institutions that promote hate crimes and bullshitting machines disguised as pillars of journalistic excellence relics of a shameful past. Some aren’t willing to negotiate about these things, but, in the name of progress, most are.