I believe you are right. I am gay and I grew up most of my life in the bible belt. Unless you have lived there and see how consuming religion is, how people all confess to having a "personal relationship" with God you will never fully understand the brainwashing that goes on wtih evangelical christianity. Growing up Baptist we went to church for a totaly of 5-7 hours a week. Sunday school and church on sunday morning, traning union and sunday evening services and prayer meeting and choir on Wed. Usually once a week there was some kind of youth activity to boot. It wasn't untill I grew up and moved to California that I realized that not everyone else in the world thinks the way you do.
I also grew up and around people who believed it was really cool to say "The Bible is the only book I need to read"
I remember hearing people say that reading anything else is just a waiste of time.
When you have people growing up in a society of ignorance its no wonder they will believe what ever any authority figure tells them. They go to church and they believe whatever Pator Joe tells them because he is the authority.
The blue collar town I grew up in Oklahoma also had a very low graduation rate and I can tell you that 90% of the people I graduated with did not go to college and still live there. Most have never been out of this country to expereince another culture and some have still never been out of state. To me it is no wonder why the republican party loves to bash education. If someone can't read and form an opinion on their own they are much easier to con deceive.
Homsexuality is easy to demonize. I mean it only takes one video of a gay pride parade in San Francisco to make country folk point and scream and think armagedon is on the way. The idea of someone doing something that they want to do, freely without any concern about what others think is a foreign concept. The idea that you can spit in the eye of the norm and still live to see another day without there being some grave consequence scares the living shit out of many.
The same Bible that condemns homosexuality also condemns envy, greed, all types of lust, laziness and gluttony. But for some reason the fat ass that fill a church pew week after week tend to not be real concerned about the last two.
The republicans who have courted the religious right for so long they can't win without them......they just can't. They have worked with ministers and pastors all over this country to deceive people into voting for "men who serve God". They know that their policies are not going to help blue collar high school educated people in the midwest but as long as the people really know nothing about the economic policies of the party and they focus them on the moral issues they will win.
One would think that when its all over and said that the deaths of over 100,000 civilians (not soldiers but civilians) in Iraq would make them shed a tear but not really. Why should they care about the 100,000 faceless men, women, and children who have dies because of a horrible circumstance when there are homo's to round up!
The brilliance of the republican masterminds like Karl Rove and the like is that they knew if they got Gay marriage on the ballot in as many states as they could they would get TONS of the evangelicals to vote. And if they vote against fags they will vote for George W while there. And it worked. On MSNBC they acctually showed chartered busses of eldery coming from churches to vote at the precincts.
Yes Gay Marraige did help to defeat John Kerry. And once again gay americans were used as a whipping post to scare people and deceive them into believing it's the worst issue we face today
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