All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[Ohnooze]

I'll rephrase the question: What breakdown of Genuine Needy Folk to Cheaters do you think it is? 60-40, 80-20, 40-60?

I also don't think you've known many people in the system, or maybe just not the ones I've known. It's humiliating for many, in this country that prides itself on self-support. No matter how much work you put in or effort you make to change your situation there are some who will vilify you for not wanting to work for what you've got, and then the hypocrites in office putting up a never ending series of hoops you're forced to jump through.



Jesus wouldn't let someone die of starvation or exposure because they were gay, a sex-worker, or the wrong brand of non-christian. They have the right to choose who they give to, but no right to be free of criticism for who they choose not to help.

Man I don’t know…if I had to guess the percentage of people who work the system vs the ones who genially need help? Maybe 30-70….I think that the needy outnumber the ones who take advantage by a good bit. I think it’s just that people latch on to the things they see that they don’t like.

No Jesus would not have let someone starve for those reasons but I have never known a church to say “don’t feed the gay people”. In our church we gave to organizations in most cases so how it’s distributed is generally out of our hands.

[aja_christopher]

You need to stop reading that stuff....it's jacking with your head.

Guy, don't try to get personal here -- I've refrained from saying anything to you directly so far because I know it would be practically useless.

As someone who has been surrounded by hypocritical Christians almost all of my life, I don't need to "read" these kinds of things to know that they are true.

[aja_christopher]

Many of these same Christian Republicans calling for no abortion rights and a "wall" would let baby Jesus die in an internment camp with no regrets.

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"13,000 migrant children in detention: America's horrifying reality"

You have fled unimaginable violence, have crossed entire countries alone, only to find that your right to request asylum requires that you first survive a camp that more closely mirrors a place for interned prisoners than for children.

According to The New York Times, this is the reality for some 13,000 migrant children being held in detention centers across the country. The aggressiveness of the Trump administration's policies toward migrant children has created a new term -- "tender age shelters" -- language which ironically obfuscates the truth about the billion-dollar business of holding children in shelters run by some of the same private companies that operate prisons.

As the Trump administration ramps up the construction of tent camps, what remains clear is that the big business of detention centers for migrant children will only continue to grow, and that few safeguards are in place to ensure the health and well-being of those children.

What makes this particularly pernicious is that the children at the center of this story are fleeing the gravest situations imaginable. "I dressed as a man," Milexi, 16, told me. She fled Honduras, traveling alone through Guatemala and Mexico and train-hopping her way to the US-Mexico border. Milexi made the difficult decision to flee a situation in which she had been raped since age 7 and had been threatened by numerous gangs..."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/opini...ver/index.html

[Ohnooze]

Guy, don't try to get personal here -- I've refrained from saying anything to you directly so far because I know it would be practically useless.

As someone who has been surrounded by hypocritical Christians almost all of my life, I don't need to "read" these kinds of things to know that they are true.



Many of these same Christian Republicans calling for a "wall" would let baby Jesus die in an internment camp with no regrets.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/opini...ver/index.html

Fair enough but we are not going to agree. I do think it's easy to get wrapped up in stuff which is what I was meaning by that. Samantha Bee? lol...no thanks. She's way too trashy for me to listen to. I prefer to keep my lunch down

Let me ask you something, do you always live up to your own standards? Do you make mistakes? Have any regrets in life? The fact is that every single person on the planet who believes in some kind of moral standard is a hypocrite. Being hypocritical is far from being a Christian problem. We are absolutely hypocrites…good news though we have room for more so you’re welcome to come along.

[aja_christopher]

Do you make mistakes?

If you don't have time to address the legitimate issues raised in Samantha Bee's commentary then I likewise see no point in assuming that it matters to you what others think if you disagree with them, so there's no point in going any further with this conversation.

[Ohnooze]

If you don't have time to address the legitimate issues raised in Samantha Bee's commentary then I likewise see no point in assuming that it matters to you what others think if you disagree with them, so there's no point in going any further with this conversation.

Tell you what I'll listen to this video.

[aja_christopher]

Tell you what I'll listen to this video.

Fair enough as well.

And I'll let you know from the jump I was raised Christian with ministers in my immediate family -- even baptized twice as when I was younger.

I was never a "man whore" because I knew the emptiness of such pursuits, but I had plenty of "Christian" friends who spent entire weekends drinking and chasing women and trying to tempt me to do the same. Now I see "Christians" on TV saluting, supporting, and voting for a "president" who cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star and who supports torturing and killing entire families just because they might be related to "terrorists".

That said, I'm glad you found peace in your religion -- or spirituality -- but some of us never lost it to begin with.

[Ohnooze]

Fair enough as well.

And I'll let you know from the jump I was raised Christian with ministers in my immediate family -- even baptized twice as when I was younger.

I was never a "man whore" because I knew the emptiness of such pursuits, but I had plenty of "Christian" friends who spent entire weekends drinking and chasing women and trying to tempt me to do the same. Now I see "Christians" on TV saluting, supporting, and voting for a "president" who cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star and who supports torturing and killing entire families just because they might be related to "terrorists".

That said, I'm glad you found peace in your religion -- or spirituality -- but some of us never lost it to begin with.

So I watched both videos. Was there a question for me in all of that? The video was about the adoption of the Christian faith into the Republican party....in a most trashy way.

[aja_christopher]

"Trump Administration to LGBT Couples: Your ‘Out of Wedlock’ Kids Aren’t Citizens"

"No parent can ever be fully prepared for the arrival of a new baby. But when Roee and Adiel Kiviti brought home their newborn daughter Kessem two months ago, they figured that they were as ready as they could be. After all, they’d gone through the same process two years earlier with their son Lev, who, like Kessem, was born with the help of an egg donor and a gestational surrogate in Canada.

“It was as straightforward as one can imagine,” Roee told The Daily Beast, recalling the ease of bringing Lev home in late 2016, the infant’s newly printed Canadian passport in hand, soon to be supplanted by an American one. But this February, when Kessem’s fathers contacted the U.S. consulate in Calgary to obtain a Consular Report of Birth Abroad for their daughter—the legal equivalent of a birth certificate for Americans born outside of the United States—something was different this time.

“They first indicated that they needed proof of our marriage, which I found quite odd,” Roee said. “They needed the original marriage certificate, which we didn’t have with us, but I didn’t actually think anything more about it. I thought, ‘We don’t have time for this, we’ll just deal with it in the U.S.’”

Roee and Adiel obtained Kessem’s Canadian passport—a stopgap, they figured, until they could get her U.S. passport back home—and traveled back to their home in the United States. But Kessem was about to become the latest victim of a government policy that effectively de-recognizes her parents’ marriage, granting her no automatic rights to American birthright citizenship despite the fact that both her fathers are U.S. citizens. That policy, Kessem’s fathers told The Daily Beast, poses a unique threat to LGBT families, and could change the decades-old legal understanding of what the word “family” even means.

“This is a very clear attack on families, on American families,” Roee, who married Adiel in California in 2013, told The Daily Beast. “Denying American married couples their rights to pass their citizenship, that is flat-out discrimination, and everyone should be concerned about this.

“We are now in a very, very strange scenario,” Adiel said. “We are both American citizens; we live in the U.S.; I have a business here, Roee has his job here; we file our taxes as a married couple here... and the State Department is saying that our daughter isn’t entitled to U.S. citizenship because she was born ‘out of wedlock.’”

For parents of non-traditional families, the policy change has been a disaster, leaving them to navigate the labyrinthine immigration legal system with little guidance from the State Department and, at the moment, little recourse for appeal. Children of U.S. citizens are put at risk of deportation or even statelessness—despite no textual legal basis for the policy. The INA, signed into law when gestational surrogacy was science fiction and same-sex marriage was a fantasy, makes no reference to biological relationships in determining the citizenship of the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad to married U.S. citizens.

When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, lifting a ban on federal recognition of same-sex marriages, the Department of Homeland Security issued a guidance declaring that “just as [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] applies all relevant laws to determine the validity of an opposite-sex marriage, we will apply all relevant laws to determine the validity of a same-sex marriage.” On its face, immigration attorneys told The Daily Beast, that would include the INA.

That “assumption of parentage,” as the State Department calls it, now seems to LGBT parents to be reserved solely for heterosexual married couples. Only same-sex couples, whose non-traditional family structure sticks out like a sore thumb, end up facing scrutiny over how their children came into the world, parents told The Daily Beast—and as a result, whether they are eligible for birthright citizenship."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/state-...arent-citizens

[aja_christopher]

So I watched both videos. Was there a question for me in all of that? The video was about the adoption of the Christian faith into the Republican party....in a most trashy way.

Nope: if you are comfortable with the behavior of many "Christian" Republicans -- both then and at this point in history -- then I doubt anything said here will sway your opinion from said dogma.



As for your question -- yes, I make mistakes, but I don't try to tell women they can't have abortions, much less seek to make it criminal to do so.

[shooshoomanjoe]

I have never ever heard of republican wanting to kill all minorities in jail. That's just some made up left wing bs right there. Concerned about not enough white babies? Are you serious? You need to be on meds if you believe that trash. That is some serious far left crazy talk. Damn I thought the right wingers were bad about believing stupid conspiracies but wow that one is really rich!

As we saw with Katrina in New Orleans and Maria in Puerto Rico, the GOP don't care when minorities die.

[aja_christopher]

"Trump once said women should be punished for abortion. Now, he's making it happen"

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...for-abortion-t

----
"Republicans taking Trump's advice to punish women for abortion"

Republicans in Georgia just enacted legislation that would do exactly as Trump suggested on the campaign trail in 2016 - punish women for having an abortion.

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/r...on-59344965791

[Ohnooze]

Nope: if you are comfortable with the behavior of many "Christian" Republicans -- both then and at this point in history -- then I doubt anything said here will sway your opinion from said dogma.


As for your question -- yes, I make mistakes, but I don't try to tell women they can't have abortions, much less seek to make it criminal to do so.

So I’m assuming you walked completely away from your faith?

I never said I was ok with anything…past or present. I don’t support everything the republican party does and I did not vote for Trump…I’m not even a republican. I have never liked Trump to be honest. I don’t completely understand what you’re trying to point out to me.

People are people….100% damaged and imperfect. Christians have always been imperfect just like everyone else. Christians have done both terrible and good throughout history. That is humanity and that’s the whole point of the Christian faith. I’m not blind to the bad things that have happened but I’m not going to walk away from what I believe to be true because people have done bad things.

You know the Christians that I talk to generally don’t like Trump but they don’t like the direction of the democrat party either. But they see someone who will push back and that’s what’s feeding Trumps popularity. Trump supporters generally are not a bunch of racist skin heads, they are people who want to push back against the left that has taken over the decorate party. You can believe that or not but I talk to these people all the time.

[Ohnooze]

As we saw with Katrina in New Orleans and Maria in Puerto Rico, the GOP don't care when minorities die.

Really? People died in those areas so it has to be because of race?

[Ohnooze]

Nope: if you are comfortable with the behavior of many "Christian" Republicans -- both then and at this point in history -- then I doubt anything said here will sway your opinion from said dogma.

As for your question -- yes, I make mistakes, but I don't try to tell women they can't have abortions, much less seek to make it criminal to do so.

If you saw an unborn child as a human being then abortion would be murder. In such a case you would stop someone from having one and you would be more open to legal punishment because again it would be murder. This is how a lot of us see it. It’s not about power over or punishing females but about not destroying life that we consider to be a human being.

Two totally different world views but ultimately you see murder as wrong (I’m assuming) and so do we.