"THE SHOCK DOCTRINE"

This brief video on "The Shock Doctrine," was just sent to me by a friend of mine and, although it is not explicitly related to the plight of LGBT people, it has many and significant implications for their civil rights as well as for the future of this Democratic Republic.

There are people in power in a variety of institutions, not the least of which are the religious and political institutions, who have a vested interest in stimulating the "fight or flight response" that is part of the Reptilian Brain, so that certain types of people will become submissive to their dictates and hegemony of those institutions. For example, by portraying Christianity as being "under siege" by "radical homosexuals," a great deal of money and power accrues to those clergy and evangelists who seek to foist their prejudices on to others, all the while claiming the mantle of righteousness, morality, and decency, in the name of the Bible, and in the name of God, to gain and solidify their positions of power.

Many politicians also use "the shock doctrine" to stimulate the fight or flight response in the electorate, as was seen in the varying colors depicted, ostensibly showing the level of threats of terrorism, prior to the last Presidential election. Once the election was completed, I no longer saw those colors being displayed in the media, and I doubt you did either. The manipulation of those colors was, in my opinion, used to capitalize on the threat posed by the 9/11 attacks, so as to justify the existing policies of the Administration, and to, therefore, win the election by the votes of many who constantly had their Reptilian Brains bombarded with perceived threats from "the enemy," that only the existing Administration and its policies could be adjudged to successfully confront.

As I've so often written, the fight for full and equal civil and sacramental rights for LGBT people is inextricably related to the fight for the future of our Democratic Republic, and for the reclaiming of the Gospel of grace and love from those who have perverted it, and imposed it, for their own naked self-interests. To merely see "Gay liberation" as being an end in and of itself is to be as short-sighted as those who are beneficiaries of the Civil Rights movement for Afro-Americans being unwilling and/or unable to see the connection between their own ancestors' struggles with grinding oppression with the grinding oppression historically and currently visited upon God's LGBT children.

This type of perversion of the Gospel message has become so acute, that there are clergy and professing Christians in the Episcopal Church, for example, who would rather align themselves with the rabidly homophobic clergy in Uganda and Nigeria, than even consider that God loves ALL of His children, and that our God who specializes in diversity commands us to love everybody and to seek to help remove yokes of bondage from others.

They, and those like them, have missed the message of grace which is the fundamental nugget, the very core, of the Gospel and, by so doing, they have tragically portrayed Christianity as a warped characature of their own legalistic and/or perverted psyches that are diametrically opposed to Godliness!

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