d_r
d_r's JournalThe thing I'm worried about
This tea party group "true the vote." They are going through voter rolls and trying to find anyone with a mis-spelled name or mismatched address. They have targeted students and poor and minorities. There are stories in the press about people being declared "dead" or challenged because their address is "commercial." Basically, they are going through databases and trying to find anything.
Now go forward to election day and this is what I'm worried about. They are looking for "volunteers" to go to mostly poor, mostly minority, mostly democratic districts to challenge voters. So the people who volunteer for that are going to be the nuttiest of the nutty. Now think about how desperate and crazy the far righters are getting. Think about how afraid they are of black people in the first place. Now think about the experiences that African-American people have had with voter suppression. Put those two together on election day. The whole purpose of these right wingers is to make the lines slow and make people give up. But I'm afraid it could get really, really ugly.
religion and tax exemptoins
The other day a "pastor" who is a facebook friend of someone I know posted "I can't believe that the DNC is quoting scriptures!"
It bothered me when my friend told me, because the implication was that the bible wasn't for democrats, that this preacher was saying that Democrats couldn't be Christians. It is an implied political message - if you are a Christian, you can't vote for Democrats. I wondered how that fit with church's and tax exemption- can a preacher post political messages on their facebook? I mean, isn't that a way of communicating with parishners? And where is the line with a political comment? A lot of the churches here are covered with political signs during election season, and I wonder if that is permissible?
Then today I saw this article that I thought was interesting - it is an attempt to estimate the amount that churches are subsidized through tax breaks. I think some of he assumptions were off base (for example, because the amount that church's hold in trusts isn't reported, it was estimated by taking the amount the Presbyterian church holds, but I doubt that the little church's are comparable). Anyway, I wanted to share it here because I thought it was interesting:
"Research Report: How Secular Humanists (and Everyone Else) Subsidize Religion in the United States"
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=cragun_32_4
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Member since: Thu Oct 28, 2004, 11:27 AMNumber of posts: 6,907
