A COMPELLING NEED TO CONTINUE

Several months ago, the Bleacherman decided that there really was no need to continue to offer his unique and centrist-driven wit and wisdom to the few readers who actually took the time to read the CenterFieldBleachers’ Blog.

In the end, it was not the lack of readership that pushed me to stop writing. I’m used to being ignored.  I’m used to having my opinions and perspectives being trivialized.  I am used to being non-existent.

In the end, it was frustration that pushed me into total oblivion.  The world around me was going mad and there was nothing I or millions of rational people like me could do to derail the train wreck that our country was hurling towards at warp speed.  Destruction was becoming inevitable.

So the Bleacherman waved the white flag, sat down in his favorite arm chair, television channel changer in hand and watched the approaching Armageddon.  I listened as the likes of Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow and Megan Kelly narrated the ebbs and flows of the coming cataclysm.

But in the end, I realized that I  could not sit quietly and watched the night of nights come and consume  the light of life.  I could not remain silent, I could not sit in my chair and stay a spectator.  I have to speak out.  I have to yell.  I have to scream.

So here I am.  Regardless of how many people read this blog…here I am…I am speaking out.  I am yelling.  I am screaming.

 

 

AN ERRANT AIR STRIKE IS NOW A WAR CRIME?

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The United Nations, the world leader in hypocrisy, inaction and bullshit, has suggested that a recent air strike in Afghanistan was not only a deadly tragedy but may have been a war crime. 

A war crime; are you kidding me?   

What we know is this: an American airship, engaged in military action with what it deemed were enemy combatants, accidentally fired on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the Kunduz region of Afghanistan. Scores of medical staff and civilians were either killed or injured in the attack. 

At the center of the issue is a claim by the aid group that runs the hospital that the American military continued the bombing of the hospital and surrounding region for thirty minutes after receiving phone calls telling operational command that a hospital was being bombed. The aid group also claims that the GPS coordinates of the hospital were made available prior to the attack. 

The Americans claim that there were in the process of engaging a group of insurgents who were directly firing upon U.S. personnel. 

(It should be noted that over the course of the ensuing week following the attack, , the military’s story – their explanation – their offered mea culpa and plea for exoneration or justification was changed a few times.) 

But what happened was not intentional and regardless of what the UN says or some international law asserts, the attack did not reflect a war crime. 

Combat in the middle of a war zone in not something carried out with surgical precision. It is impossible to declare a small piece of land in the middle of hell as off-limits to the chaos that surrounds so called safe zones. Send GPS coordinates, call military commanders, hell…put up large signs all day long; in the end, war is an evil that knows no boundaries nor can it read maps or take phone calls. It goes where it wants to go.   

One enters a war zone at one’s own risk.   

The UN loves to investigate war crimes. Just ask Israel. 

But when will the UN investigate itself for its acts of omission in Rwanda. How many hundreds of thousands died because the UN is a worthless and impotent illusion of a noble idea that can’t possibly translate to anything real and useful. 

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TO TED CRUZ THE CONCEPT OF SMALLER GOVERNMENT MEANS MORE GOVERNMENT INTRUSION.

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Ted Cruz, reflecting an adolescent, school boy maturity, thinks that the threat of shutting down the Federal government is a good negotiating tactic. He acts more like a youngster on a playground who continues to threaten to take his baseball – the only baseball – home with him if he doesn’t get his way.   

Ted Cruz is nothing more than a village thug. He is a mean, angry, vindictive, arrogant man who cares little about the people he hurts as he carries his crusade to force his view of God upon the American constituency. 

He declares his opposition to abortion and one way to advance his ideology is by promoting a zealous if not a fanatical to defund Planned Parenthood even though not one single tax payer dollar goes to pay for any abortions.  

But why should Ted Cruz care about either specifics, facts or people. He is all about self promotion. 
Ted Cruz does not care that his course of action will leave millions of poor woman without healthcare, without prenatal care and without medical counseling just so he can wave the Christian Cross and claim his victory.   

So tell me, is this really how the Christian God works? Damn those with no money. Damn those with no access to healthcare. Damn everyone who Ted Cruz doesn’t like. 

Tell me, is this Christian God a supporter of pedophilia by its Priests? Does Ted Cruz support pedophilia? He must; after all, I don’t see him rushing to take tax exemptions away from the Catholic Church because of the obscene conduct of some of its Priests. 

Tell me, if Ted Cruz is successful in shutting down the government, is he still going to get a paycheck? Yes, of course he is because for some obscene logic his job is considered vital and important and all that other governmental horseshit that makes functional government a wishful prayer. 
Shutting down the government just does not makes sense; not fiscally, not politically and especially not over an issue such as the funding of Planned Parenthood.  

We need to stand up to political grandstanding. We need to yell out, “HELLL NO, STOP THE NONSENSE!” 

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QUICK MEMOS TO BERNIE SANDERS, DONALD TRUMP AND JEB BUSH

Hey Bernie, Bernie Sanders! Yes you, the guy who is running for his party’s nomination for President. Yes you, the guy with the Robin Hood complex.

I consider myself an Independent. I have voted now in 12 Presidential elections and in 7 of them I have voted Democratic (Humphrey, Carter, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama x2). I have voted Republican 5 times (Nixon, Reagan x2 and George Herbert Bush x2). I like to think of myself as driven by issues and policy rather than political party.

Now with confession over, I feel as if I am compelled to offer my concerns over some of the policies you seem to be advocating.

You commit to immediately moving to substantially raise taxes on millionaires, large corporations and wealthy investors. You claim that by doing so you will have the resources necessary to create middle class jobs, make public colleges tuition-free and rebuild America’s infrastructure.

Sounds good; at least in theory. The reality is that it is all populist bullshit. It is an idea for a Disneyland Fantasy ride and not much more. The numbers don’t compute. One does not equal two no matter how much you wish it to be true.

The quest for income equality cannot be accomplished simply by taxing down the net worth of individuals and corporations. Punishing success is simply a stupid thing to do; regardless of the nobility of the desire to bring the American dream to more of this nation’s population.

While this blogger admits that the tax code greatly benefits the wealthy and corporate America, the answer is not a systemic tax increase but a complete rewrite of the tax code that spreads the cost of paying for government more equally across the economic landscape. Tax loopholes need to be closed and corporations like Apple can’t simply walk away from tax liability by claiming to domicile their headquarters in a country with a more favorable tax rate.

Tax increases have to be matched by more productivity and less dependence on government welfare programs for individuals and corporations alike. Government cannot solve all of this country’s social disparities and dysfunctions. Emphasis on individual responsibility must be included in the discourse. Government cannot be an end to all means.

Your message should be one that calls for a fair tax code and an emphasis on individual, community and corporate responsibility and an equal participation in returning America to a country of reason and purpose.

And now, some thoughts for you, Mr. I am really, really rich, Donald Trump. First, I applaud you for your many business successes. Second, I must scold you for thinking all of America’s problems can be negotiated away by a skilled “card player” playing some type of geopolitical poker.

Running a country, one that is founded on the concept of rule of law, is much different than running a large corporate empire. In the Boardroom, you may be Lord and Master of the microcosm that you rule and your wish becomes everyone’s command. In a democracy, your wish is nothing more than a bunch of words strung together forming some semblence of coherent thought.

You just can’t snap your fingers and demand an end to the birthright provision of the US Constitution. Nor can you start bullying Mexico to pay for your manifestation of the Berlin Wall. There are things like treaties and tariff laws that have to be followed.

And then there is that thing called the Congress of the United States that is currently long on accusatory and damning rhetoric and short on governing. As you have now witnessed first hand, there are many divisions of political thought permeating around you. Finding consensus may be beyond even your considerable negotiating skills.

Although you have made immigration one of your main issues, you cannot and must not ignore the promise you made to be the greatest job creating President etc etc etc. So tell us how? How can you bring jobs back to America? By sending Carl Icahn to China and Japan to negotiate a better deal? Come on, Donald, be real. The issue is much more complex than something fixed by a conversation over a good cigar and a glass of cognac.

And just one more thing: I need to know whether or not you support the dissolution of the Export-Import Bank? We all know that Ted Cruz is an idiot but now we are going to add “job destroyer” to his resume. What do you think?

Last but not at all least, I need to send out a short, short memo to Jeb Bush. Stop trying to put the blame for our failure in Iraq on Obama or anyone else. The faulty intelligence that you keep vomiting up in defense of GW was contrived by Cheney and the late Bob Novak. The whole war, from beginning to its never ending nightmare, was and still is a con job. Accept the fact that your brother screwed up and go on with articulating your own foreign policy. The Iraq War will always be a stain on our national psyche and what we must do is stop defending that which cannot be defended. Show some real leadership and acknowledge the truth and help us learn from our mistakes.

Memos are now at an end! For the moment….

THE FORGOTTEN POLITICAL QUESTION: WHAT’S IN THE BEEF?

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Well, it’s election season again (or is that still) and the usual cabal of candidates and news reporters have begun their nomadic journey crossing the American landscape in search of money, votes, stories, innuendos and tabloid-worthy smut.

Tis the season when politicians never answer the questions asked of them, political pundits and spin doctors try to convince us that north is south and east is west.  Obfuscation becomes the science of using a lot of words to say nothing.  And with Donald Trump running for office, the phrase “I Love Me and Me Loves Trump” will replace “In God We Trust” on or currency.

Trump now is THE man, numero uno, king of the hill and all  the other accolades that he loves to bestow upon himself.  He rests on top of the latest GOP national poll conducted by CNN.

Tis the season that the GOP voter, known for waving the American flag, believing that war solves everything, eating apple pie and loving mom and a Christian God , demonstrates an incredible wealth of stupidity when the cheer a draft-dodging coward after he publically calls an American soldier a coward for allowing himself to be captured after his plane is shot down in enemy territory.

Hate is a powerful motivator because human nature is more inclined to hate than to love. Trump’s entire candidacy is fueled by anger and hostility.  Substance and policy are a lost art form.  Even truth becomes an after thought; it is like the car accessory that you think you want but know you can’t afford it so you let it fall to the bottom of your wish list.  After all, a politician telling the truth is such an oddity that I believe that we as a constituency can’t handle a good dose of truth-telling.

Everyone claims that Trump is just a transitory flash in the dark; like Palin, Gingrich and Herman Cain.  The experts say that his star will fade.

I doubt it.  I think his strength will only grow as more and more people, searching for a bandwagon to jump on, will see the Trump circus as something they can grab a hold of even though Trump stands for nothing of substance.  The Donald is anti-Washington and that is all that the conservative base of the Republican party want to hear.  Trump followers don’t care what is in the sausage or what type of beef is in their desired six patty super burger.  It is all about taste.

For the most part, the American voting constituency is a superficial, topical sentence, substance and truth avoiding society and Donald Trump’s campaign personifies this intellectual disenfranchisement.  No one cares about what is in the weeds.

In the end, we get what we vote for and when the moment of truth comes knocking on our door, when Sarah Palin is the administration’s top intellect,  when Trump’s hand is on the nuclear trigger and he is mad and has been offended and when his insecurity needs to strike back….god help us.

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THE NULLIFICATION OF THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

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When the US Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of the Affordable Care Act and affirmed the right for same sex couples to marry; the religious right wing of the Republican Party jumped off the rails of reason and all hell has broken out. Denunciations of the Court have now reached a crescendo of name calling and many of the more ignorant type are even urging an end to the court’s existence or demanding a drastic and draconian change to its overall composition and structure. The nut jobs have gone so far as to demand that Supreme Court justices stand for re-election every eight years.

The term “judicial activism” again fills the airwaves and dominates political discourse. But just what is ‘judicial activism?’ According to Wikipedia, judicial activism is when judicial rulings take on a personal or political nature rather than reflect strict interpretation of the constitution. So making corporations people is spelled out in the Constitution and individual freedoms such as the right to marry is not. Hmm, I’m confused.

Led by the likes of Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and a cabal of GOP Presidential candidates, the destruction of America and the mechanics of an awesomely crafted democracy that enabled the country to thrive for two hundred and forty years has begun.

While no form of government is perfect and without faults, American democracy has depended upon the separation of powers, at least in theory, to keep in check the reach of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

Of course, theory is great in the sterile environment of a classroom discussion; but has restricted value in the world where the influences of reality dominate its practical application. Past Presidents and Legislatures have found innovative and cunning ways to circumvent intervention by another branch of government. But in the end, government works. Every four years a President stands for election or re-election. Congress is voted into office every two years for House members, every six years for Senators. And the Supreme Court justices are nominated by the President; subject to confirmation by the Senate. Once confirmed they sit on the bench for life; never having to compromise their integrity by standing for a popular election nor a legislative re-confirmation.

But all in all the system works because in the end, the rule of law prevails. We might not like a law but we respect the process enough to obey it. That is until now when Christian zealots are attempting to hijack our democracy in order to force their religious beliefs on others. From birth rights to marriage rights, from birth control to an individual’s right to die with dignity, the right wing wants to manipulate religious freedom to reflect their right to define morality as they believe it to be. The word God has invaded the realm of political dialogue and policy creation.

Strict constitutionalists have taken residence in the 1st Amendment and have used its power to establish a base constituency that seeks to minimize and marginalize all religions except evangelical Christianity.

When a Presidential candidate proclaims that he or she will obey the laws of God before they obey the laws of the constitution, I wonder how can they swear on a Bible that they would preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. How does one do that by establishing God as a higher power than the Constitution?

Good night and good bye America; it was great while it lasted..The beginning of the end is upon us.

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WHY CAN’T WE ADMIT THAT RACISM, IN ALL FORMS, SHAPES AND COLOR, EXISTS IN AMERICA?

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It doesn’t really matter what you call it, label it or in a scientific report classify it as; racism is pure and simple, raw evil. It is a senseless and purposeless emotion, born from pure ignorance, that more often then not manifests itself into wasteful acts of violence on innocent people.

Last week, a disturbed and troubled young man, seduced by the lure of white supremacists and their doctrine of hatred, walked into a church and not long afterword, opened fire with a semi-automatic hand gun that he received as a birthday gift from his father. Nine black parishioners were murdered in cold blood. Racial insults were screamed at one of the survivors by the shooter.

In spite of the obvious, ignoring the facts, oblivious to the realities of what had happened, Fox News referred to the killing as an attack on (the Christian) faith. Their demented logic was based on the out of context fact that the shooting occurred in a church; therefore, it had to be related to a newly proclaimed war on the Christian faith.

Except for Ben Carson and Rick Santorum, all of the other GOP presidential candidates have danced around the issue; none of them showing the courage to acknowledge the obvious and stand up and challenge their party’s core demographic of race haters.

Republican candidates must get their head out of the Fox News Sandbox. The world is changing.

It is time for the men and women who want to lead this country to show courage and conviction and stand up for what is right and stop crawling in the gutter to please just a few who refuse to let go of the past.

Courage. It is fast becoming a lost but much needed commodity in today’s political environment.

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IT IS NOT A GRAND OLD FLAG AFTER ALL

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Did you know that June 14th was Flag Day? You didn’t? Well don’t feel so bad. You were not alone in your historical ignorance. 

I would assume that 99% of Americans did not know of this celebratory designation and an even larger number did not care as well. Flag Day is one of those small print footnotes in history that fall in the who-gives-a-shit category.

To enlighten you all (thanks to Wikipedia): On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the flag, similar in structure and color as the one we worship toda, as the official flag of the United States. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson, with nothing else better to do on that day, issued a proclamation officially establishing June 14th as Flag Day. Thirty-three years later, Congress affirmed the designation.

Even back then, Congress was regulation happy. They created a whole section of Federal law devoted to flag etiquette. It even has a name: the Flag Code.

I, as a product of the sixties anti-establishment, anti-war culture, attended many protests and demonstrations where an American flag was burned and desecrated. Short-hair, white-shirted, tie wearing, bible toting Americans hated such acts of defiance and to this day, the burning of our flag or any other act desecrating its noble ideas is a hot button item for these half-assed patriots. . If you want to see a conservative’s blood boil or hear an angry, vulgar diatribe of patriotic bravado, just burn a flag in front of them.

So I compelled to ask this question. Where are these defenders of the flag? Today, in Charleston, South Carolina, the American flag and even the official State flag were flown at half mast in honor of the nine Americans murdered by a mad-man in a local church. However, near-by, a Confederate battle flag waved proudly at full mast.

One of the protocols mandated by the Flag Code is that the American flag cannot be flown lower than any other flag. So if the American flag is being flown at half mast and the Confederate battle flag is not; is this not a disrespectful display of our national flag? Is this not the same as burning the flag?

After all, disrespect is disrespect.

So where is the outrage? Where are the patriotic pillars of our society who should call out the State of South Carolina for its disrespect and desecration of the American flag? Where in the fuck are these defenders of symbolism who think the responsibilities of patriotism is served by simply wearing a flag-shaped lapel pin?

I guess the flag is not that grand after all. It is just a weave of cloth barfed out of some machine in China. It is, after all, a hollow symbol of a set of values long ago abandoned and forgotten. It is, after all, a relic long ago desecrated by the burying of the principle that all men are created equal.

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HOW DISGUSTING WE AS A NATION HAVE BECOME.

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Over and over again, I keep hearing the pundits, politicians and preachers declare that America is ( or at least should be) a Christian nation. Over and over again, I listen in amusement as this cabal of self-defining righteousness takes to the airways demanding that this country follow their God’s path to salvation.   

Today I realized that this path of theirs, this march towards their version of a Christian nation, is a march towards the degradation of a society that has survived and thrived for generations because of its religious plurality and social diversity.   

This congregation of zealots, this Christian version of ISIS, complains that their religious freedoms are being taken away from them by an ever expending secular population which seems intent on breaking free from the oppressive inhibitions and prohibitions that the religious right has used for centuries to control and restrict individual growth and thought.   

Today, the religious zealots warn that they are first bound by the laws of their god or gods and then and only then are they obligated to follow the doctrines of constitutional law. They make no effort to hide their belief that when the laws of their god conflict with the laws of the state; gods law must prevail.   

(But when their right to own guns are threatened, these extremists are the first to hide behind the Second Amendment of the Constitution.) 

I, for a long time, took this push towards Christianizing America with a grain of salt and a suppressed chuckle in my throat. After all, I reasoned, this is the good old U.S. of A. and its 1st Amendment rights. I believed that the whole move towards a Christian theocracy was more of novelty than a reality and would soon lose much of its power and influence as time passed. 

Then, several weeks ago, I woke up and realized how stupid I had been. I am sure that in the early 1930’s, German Jews had the same reaction to Hitler and his brand of anti-semitism. This Christian crusade is nothing to dismiss with a wave of the hand. It is for real and it threatens the very fabric of our pluralistic society. We are slowly, in the name of some god or gods, becoming a very evil, hateful and spiteful society.

Case in point: I heard on the news several weeks ago that four people on the east coast had been arrested for assaulting a fourteen year old girl. The assault, police investigators later learned, was intended to trigger a miscarriage of a fetus being carried by that teenage girl.

It seems that this young lady – actually, she is still a child – was attacked, raped and impregnated by a family member. With no realistic option available to her because her freedom to choose the course of her own life had been subjugated by the Christian religious right, her family chose an alternate option; an option that was draconian, devastating and to most, distasteful and appalling.

But what option was available to this young victim? Society had taken from this young girl, this child, the option of abortion. She had no other choice and fced going through the pain and a host of financial, mental and social consequences that I am sure she was ill-equipped to handle.

The young girl was being forced to become an ‘unwed mother’ by a society that seeks to condemn and ostracize women who bear children out of wedlock. Jeb Bush recently said that unwed mothers should be subjected to public shaming. For what?

So I must ask: In the context of today’s religious movement that seeks to condemn and penalize women who seek abortion; , what did this young girl do to warrant being ostracized from society? She was a victim. She did not seek out nor initiate sexual contact. She was RAPED! This ‘mess’ was physically and violently forced upon her. Why did the moralists demand that the future of this fourteen year old girl be compromised? Is this really the intent of this thing they call god?

The young girl was impregnated at no fault of her own. She was raped by a family member. The people who use this fairytale called god as their guiding light defend themselves by stating that the innocence and purity of an unborn child is precious and needs to be protected. Okay, what about the innocence and purity of this fourteen year old girl? Does she not deserve equal protection?

In a quest to demand that this country become a nation of Christian purity, the very ideals that compelled 102 pilgrims to board the Mayflower have been trampled over by the zeal for a resurrection of a specific doctrine of religious piety and observation. Hatred and discrimination is being protected by the veil of the constitutional right of religious freedom.

And we have no where to go for relief, change or mitigation.. Our politicians have been bought and are now controlled by the super rich and large corporations. The Supreme Court has abandoned the concept of equal justice for all and have sold its soul to the the influences of party politics. Education is considered a luxury and available only to the wealthy. Healthcare is viewed as an anathema. Feeding the hungry is seen with disdain and contempt by those that go to Church on Sundays to sing songs of brotherhood and charity.

What has this country become? I don’t think even this fantasy called god knows anymore.

Oh wait….there is hope….Donald Trump is running for President. You know the guy. The man who can stand up and defend the sanctity of marriage despite having been divorced three times. And people buy into this shit. What have we become

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RUBIO’S BIG FEAR…LIBERALS TURNING CHRISTIANITY INTO HATE SPEECH

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Marco Rubio, sniffing the gutters searching for votes, raised his head and offered another round of attention-grabbing not-so-wise wisdom. He believes that liberals are turning Christianity into a dogma of hate speech.

I can only laugh at the absurdity of his observation. Liberals have nothing to do with this labeling. Christian extremists are doing this to themselves. They need no one’s help in turning a doctrine of love and brotherhood into a cult of hate-driven lunacy.

Rubio also believes that gay marriage is a clear and present danger to Christianity. Again, the absurdity generated laugh starts again. Statistically, the number of same sex relationships in the US is numbered to be around 750,000 or maybe 1,500,000 people. The number of people claiming to be of the Christian faith in the US numbers around 216,000,000. So it is hard for me to see how the behaviors of a little more than one half of one percent of a demographic grouping can constitute a clear and present danger to anything.

If there really is a threat to Christianity then the source of that threat comes from within. Young people are walking away from religion because the belief in a God has become so filled with hypocrisy, so polarizing, so politicalized and so commercialized that it no longer resonates in a world faced with the consequences of realities that the Church chooses to ignore and downplay.

Too many so-called people of God are now seen as both hateful and sinful. Priests abuse children and the Church does nothing about it until it is forced to do so by a tsunami of adverse public opinion. Ministers and preachers stand at the pulpit and call for the death of gays. Religious leaders condemn gay marriage because it, in their view, threatens the institution of marriage yet these same leaders hide in some back room when the issues of divorce, adultery or spousal abuse are being discussed.

Yes, Mr. Rubio, Christianity is under attack but not by non-believers, gays or even aliens from Mars; its most lethal enemy is itself and its most extreme believers. These men and women of god with their deep seeded beliefs reek of their own hypocrisy as they cherry-pick their way through through the bible to support their racial and social hatreds.

You claim the ground of being anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion but you also claim the ground of condoning adultery, child abuse, degradation of women and divorce-gone wild. You march with guns drawn and defame the religious teachings of others with profanity and blasphemy. You quote Leviticus 20:13 to support your opposition to homosexuality but ignore Leviticus 20:10 which provides similar punishment to those who commit adultery. Hell, you elect adulterers to the US Senate and vote for them for President.

You, Mr. Rubio, you and your hypocrisy is the real threat to your religion. One day you will look in the mirror and in a freak moment of truth you, too, will agree.

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