From the article by Glenn Greenwald:
“This kind of love, between two men or two women, has existed for thousands of years, long before the kind of ignorant bigotry that we now hear on a regular basis, provoked by a simple picture of love.”
— Pedro Lotti, crusader for equal rights and basic human decency
“Won’t someone, please, think of the children!”
— Helen Lovejoy, narrow-minded gossip and literal cartoon character
Yet Mrs. Lovejoy’s catchphrase is one that extreme conservatives, in North and South America alike, have taken up as their battle cry — oh so hypocritically — in recent years: “Won’t someone, please, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!”
…would these be the same children that conservatives have generally worked to impoverish, strip of food/medical benefits, and send to prison/war?
…the same children conservatives have insisted be deported back to their war-torn countries, nations ravaged for decades by Washington’s support for puppet dictators and genocidal terrorists?
…the same children that conservatives (like Duncan, De Vos, Emmanuel, Trump, Obama, Clinton…) have thrown to inferior, discriminatory private/charter schools while taking a hatchet to the nation’s public education system?
(Because… you know, “Socialism in any form is, um… the anti-Christ?”)
Or are these those other children, the ones we drop bombs on and/or starve with sanctions, deny potable water to, and generally KILL BY THE MILLIONS, year in, year out, under Democrats and Republicans alike?
(Am I not correct? Isn’t the number of children who die needlessly every year, as a result of the gangster-capitalist economic system Washington has forced on the world, somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000,000 children per year — mostly for want of mosquito netting, clean water, and resources that could be provided for a tiny fraction of what America spends on war?)
AMERICA KILLS CHILDREN BY THE MILLIONS. YEAR IN, YEAR OUT.
BOTH WITH OUR POLICIES AND OUR MISSILES.
THERE IS NO MORE ELOQUENT EXPRESSION OF AMERICAN VALUES IN THE WORLD THAN THESE NINE MILLION SMALL CORPSES PER YEAR, ALL UNDER THE AGE OF 5.
(Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright probably thinks their sacrifice is “worth it.”)
WHO COULD POSSIBLY TAKE SERIOUSLY THESE PRETENSIONS OF CONCERN FOR “THE CHILDREN” COMING FROM AMERICANS OF ANY STRIPE?
LEAST OF ALL coming from far-right conservatives, who have led the way to fascism, at home and abroad (even as post-JFK Democrats have done virtually all of the heavy lifting, policywise, to get us to this dark place, covering up right-wingers’ crimes, retroactively legalizing them, normalizing GITMO, torture, assassination, and worse)…
But boy are these right-wingers obsessed with pedophilia conspiracies!!! They just can’t get enough pedophilia stories — Mmm MMMM! (And don’t forget to mention the Clintons… and Huma Abedin, who has a funny name and a cheating, sexting ex- named “Weiner” and who looks foreign, anyway… hurray for prurient, bigoted partisanship!)
These same folks also obsess a great deal about the “72 MUSLIM VIRGINS” in the GWOT era — religious bigotry the Western media enjoys disseminating, no matter how few people their stereotypes represent.
Basically, I’m saying these sex-obsessed right-wingers are projecting their own pathology… the pervs.
AND IN CASE ANYONE MISSED IT, I’m also saying that someone should actually start thinking of the children. In a way that amounts to a hill of beans.
Because literal millions are desperate for our empire to stop poisoning and murdering them, enslaving them, starving them, stealing their water/resources, denying them medicine, destroying democratic institutions wherever we go…
WHY CAN’T WE MAKE IT STOP?!!
Because if it doesn’t help achieve the ends of our corporatist/Christian Dominionist/white-supremacist/militarist global empire, it isn’t worth doing???
Because adopting even vaguely socialist, humanitarian policies would be somehow worse than perpetuating the omnicidal catastrophe that Fascism 2.0 has wrought???
Because if we don’t vote for fascists every 2-4 years we’re letting down “our side” of the duopoly???
What I’m saying is that it’s WAY past time Americans started caring about something other than material goods and hating each other — while the planet burns thanks to fires WE started.