I guess it started in the 80’s when airtime on cable had to be filled and was cheap to acquire, so why not fill it with pictures of starving children you could help for 29 cents a day?

And hear we are in 2009, assaulted on all sides, hands outreached for “just a little help.” In my area, some begging is conducted as a profession, with clipboards and uniforms. There are beggars for Third World children, pregnant teens, homeless moms, Girl Scout camping trips and dying children who want a trip to Disneyland. Beggars in L.A., I learned from an LA. Times piece (back when it was a newspaper) had pimps – I mean, managers – who drove them to nice neighborhoods, handed them a sign and then collected most of their takings for the day. Gone are the days when an amusing “Will write ad copy for food” sign netted a guy some bucks. Now it’s all about turning those big brown eyes on a trapped human with discretionary income. Get ‘em where they can’t drive around you, turn the channel or change direction.

Get ‘em at the grocery store. Folks gotta eat, right? And why should they enjoy their few moments of discretionary spending, knowing that the ice cream they bought denied someone that last $4 they needed for their kidney transplant?

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RELIGIOUS LIBERTY = HOMOPHOBIA?

Led by advocates of gay marriage, the vote yesterday was 188-186 against amending the bill to insure religious liberty protections in New Hampshire.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue addressed what happened:

Leading the fight for gay marriage in New Hampshire is Rep. Steve Vaillancourt. He proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, why champions of religious liberty must resist gay marriage: he worked to kill the bill because it insulated religious institutions from its reach.

In other words, it was not good enough for Vaillancourt to secure a win on gay marriage—he had to have it all. And having it all means denying the right of religious institutions not to sanction homosexual marriage. Indeed, he said the religious liberty amendment would “enshrine homophobia into the statutes of the New Hampshire legislature.”

So this is what we’ve come to in America: religious objections to homosexuality, rooted in the Bible, natural law and the teachings of most religions, is nothing more than a pernicious phobia. Not too long ago, such objections simply constituted common sense.

One of the driving principals that the United Sates of America was founded upon was the right to Freedom of Religion. Between the years 1629 and 1640 nearly eighty thousand Puritans fled England for fear of religious persecution. Many of these Puritans were from all over England, and nearly twenty-one thousand immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Eventually, in the 1700’s, there were nearly one hundred thousand Puritan immigrants who had escaped persecution and achieved religious freedom and were living in the colonies and settlements of the New World.

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