She's just a dime-a-dozen control freak.  Unfortunately, their numbers make them dangerous.

There are lots -- too many -- of these emotionally crippled people around who, because they want to blame others for what they think is lacking in their own lives, try to use religion or patriotism or money or <name your poison here> to get others to do what they want.  Similarly to the pseudo-patriots, who rob their fellow citizens of their rights for the sake of a level of security which they forfeit by doing so, the religious fanatics violate the fundamental principles of their religions by demanding that others conform to their wishes.  Both of these groups are so deep in denial that they can't see what utter hypocrites they are.

Education is the only way out of this -- and by that I mean "liberal education", the kind that teaches you how to think.  But we've made education so expensive by not treating it as the public utility and necessity that it is that we've had to throw out much of what makes education useful in favor of teaching rote skills.  By dumbing down the schools over the past several decades, we've allowed religion to flourish, and the religious to take control of our educational system so much that many people still believe that evolution is a matter of opinion, and that the Bible might actually have something valuable to say about how the Earth was formed.

It's going to be a long time until we are finally able to throw off the insanely crippling effects of religion.  One of the first things that we're going to have to do is to quit protecting it.  We must be allowed to discriminate against people who eschew reality for religion and the rights of others for their own fears.  What these people want is to feel loved; we need to improve the mental health of our culture, but we must also protect ourselves from the insane.

by EveningStarNM on 03/14/2010 11:10:39 PM EST