Robin Meyers speech

Please, please read this and think about it before voting on November 7th:


This is a speech from Robin Meyers:

As some of you know, I am minister at Mayflower Congregation UCC Church in Oklahoma City, an open and affirming, peace and justice church in northwest Oklahoma City, and professor of rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. But you would most likely have encountered me on the pages of the Oklahoma Gazette, where I have been a columnist for six years and hold the record for most number of angry letters to the editor.

Tonight I join the ranks of those who are angry, because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus but whose actions are anything but Christian. We've heard a lot lately about so-called moral values as having swung the election to President Bush. Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral value - I mean, what are we alking about? Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does. Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim that moral values are on their side.

When you start a was on false pretenses and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God's will and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only not moral but immoral.

When you live in a country that has established rules for waging a just war, built the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral.

When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching or turn them on their head (you know, Sermon on the Mount stuff like never returning violence for violence and those who live by the sword will die by the sword), you are doing something immoral.

When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American coldiers and refuse to even count tham, you are doing something immoral.

When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam and then question the patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight and came home a hero, you are doing something immoral.

When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the Gospels, which say that the way the strong teat the weak is the ultimate ethical test, by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so that the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something immoral.

When you wink at the torture of prisoners and deprive so-called enemy combatants of the rules of the Geneva Convention, which your own country helped establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.

When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys and the "evildoers," slice up your own nation into those that are withyou of with the terrorists - and then launch a war that enriches your own friends and seizes control of the oil to which we are addicted instead of helping us kick the habit, you are doing something immoral.

When you fail to veto a single spending bill but ask us to pay for a war with no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous deficit that hangs like a great millstone around the necks of our children, you are doing something immoral.

When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that was once the most loved country in the world and act as if it doesn't matter what others think of us, only what God thinks of you, you have sone something immoral.

When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters and seek to use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.

When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect the earth, which is God's gift to us all, so that the corporations that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something immoral. The earth belongs to the Lord, no Halliburton.

When you talk about Jesus, who was a healer of the sick, but do nothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a doctor, even if she doesn't have a penny in her pocket, you are doing something immoral.


I can't finish, I am getting to pissed off. But please vote Tuesday. This pathetic President is in need of checks and balances. As it is right now, the Constitution is not working like it should.

Just a few more things to think about between now and Tuesday...stem cells, Katrina, Rumsfield, Bush's smirk, minimum wage, as many US soldiers are now dead in Iraq as Americans were killed on 9/11,Intelligent Design, Founding Fathers, the National debt that has gone from a plentiful surplus to a incredibly large debt, the list goes on & on...

Jackie Wellman
www.jackiewellman.com