Rep. Bob Morris is a glutton for punishment it appears. Not being content to simply not vote for an innocuous resolution congratulating the Girl Scouts on its centennial, Morris wrote a letter to his colleagues to inform them about his “web-based research.” He took a public beating.
Well, apparently Rep. Morris isn’t here for the hunting. He has written a column for the Washington Times entitled Shut up and sign. If your culture war makes you the enemy of the Girl Scouts, perhaps you should re-think your strategy and take a moment to figure out what the hell you’re so mad about. Quoth the Morris:
Nothing short of the destruction of our faith and values would satisfy progressives. We have been left with no choice but to refuse to cede even one more inch of ground in this bloody culture war. The time for resolve is now.
Paranoid much?
Things change and the past was never as good as you remember it. But, no matter how tingly it makes you, that doesn’t mean you’re a brave warrior in some kind of existential struggle. You’re a small cog in a vast, ever-changing universe. Hubris, arrogance, and wishing it were otherwise doesn’t change that. Show some adaptability and some humility and realize you have fellow travelers with concerns and lives every bit as valid as your own. And for goodness sake, quit picking on the Girl Scouts.
AMEN!
Between this and SB1, Girl Scouts selling cookies would be advised not to ring Rep. Sling Blade’s doorbell.
In any event, I believe he prefers french-fried potaters.
This gentlemen is my state representative. I contacted the Allen County Democratic Party to offer my support and money to his challenger. I have not heard back from them. The Allen County Democratic party is in disarray, I am told and it is my fear that the organization cannot launch a good challenge to this paranoid extremist. I do not want to destroy his faith and values. I just want him to understand that Indiana is not yet a Catholic theocracy. And I wish to flush his ilk from the political areana so he can come back and sell his snake oil that masquerades as health supplements.
If installing far-right theocrats in office is god’s way of being good to Indiana, sign me up as a heretic and an apostate. And call me the Happy Blasphemer.
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
~Barry Goldwater
Reminds me of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which frequently comes to mind for me when the mixture of government and religion comes up. In this case, Children of Dune:
(Emphasis added).
Boy, did Goldwater nail it.
This is the Republican party of 2012. No one is safe from attack. Atheists, women, Hispanics, gays, and now even little Girl Scouts. What a wonderful party to belong to. I hope they’re proud.
I would donate money to his challenger, but I’m pretty sure Morris is doing a good job of ruining his career himself.
Amy, I sure hope Morris is ruining his career. But absent a strong Democrat to challenge him, only the Allen County can switch him out.
Just for fun, I looked through the American Heritage Girls catalog to see what they’re selling. First off — not dictionaries.
Second, what caught my eye was a book “Six Ways to Keep the ‘Little’ in Your Girl,” by Dannah Gresh. I looked on her site, and she promotes purity and modesty for girls. OK, while I don’t want my daughters tramping around, I also wonder what psychosis Gresh is working out when she writes stuff like this:
http://purefreedom.org/dannah.htm
“My heart’s desire was, is and always will be to live a lifestyle of purity, but in high school I detoured from that pursuit long enough to get tangled up by lust. Like no other sin, moments of unbridled passion had intertwined my life painfully into another’s.
“The evening that I heard Dr. Dobson’s program, it took me three hours to tell my husband in the darkness of my bedroom.”
Three hours! Were Vietnamese spin-fuck chairs involved? If I were husband, I might have stopped her after five minutes and said, “I think I get the point,” or maybe I would have asked politely if she could demonstrate that sin on me, you know, her current husband.
I tend to wonder if there is a “don’t think about pink elephants” dynamic at work. By spending a lot of time forbidding sexual impurity, you get your followers thinking about sexual impurity a lot more than someone without moral guidance. It creates a problem that the Church can solve for you.
Like any good marketing pitch, I guess, it tells you about a problem you didn’t know you had and fixes it for you.
Doug,
I will call your pink elephants and raise you one baby zebra.
If I had to listen to Dobson’s program, it might take me 3 hours to get over it too. I’m pretty sure large doses of tequila would help though.
I also contacted the Democrat candidate and have not heard back from him.I would think that Dan Parker would step up to the plate on this one and help out. This is more of a state issue than an Allen county issue anyway.
Morris is just one more cancer with in the Republican Party.Right Wing Christians like Hinkle hiring teenage male hookers, Plowman taking bribes..it goes on. The point is that the Republican party is a mess in Indiana. The right wing nut cases have taken over the party and its not a good thing.The whack job tea party seems to be running the GOP now.
What ever happened to centrist logical thinking? Everyone is so full of hate. Morris is not only an embarrassment to the Party but to all Hoosiers.
He is an embarassment to all of Indiana. I hear people that pull a straight Republican ticket ripping him.
If Rep. Morris were British, his comment “We have been left with no choice but to refuse to cede even one more inch of ground in this bloody culture war” would make more sense. I’m talking about the word “bloody”. As British slang I probably wouldn’t object. But since I don’t think that’s how he meant it, I would advise Rep. Morris to calm down.
Since he belongs to the party that is freaking out over vaginas, gays, and specialty license plates, I shouldn’t be surprised at his hysterical claims about the Girl Scouts and his arrogant claim of martyrdom. While his persecution complex might sound good to his choir, it’s nauseating to this person’s ears. When a state representative can turn an innocuous resolution into some sort of crusade when there are real dangers plaguing the state, I wonder how anyone can vote for him.
Morris should calm down and have a cookie. Just not Girl Scouts cookies, I guess.
“Bloody” culture wars. Huh. I didn’t know the Romans had started throwing Christians to the lions again. What channel is this show on?
It’s really pretty amazing, how articulate Mr. Morris was. Some people might even think someone else wrote his article for him, especially considering how he first responded to the ridicule by saying only (paraphrasing), “It’s all true! Look it up!”
Your “don’t think about pink elephants” comment reminds me of pre-Vatican II days (which themselves now seem to have passed) when Catholic grade schoolers were taught that although in general, there were both venial (having angry thoughts about my neighbor) and mortal (shooting him point blank with malace both before and afterthought), when it came to sexual sin, committing just a venial one was rarer than a Nancy Pelosi bumper sticker in rural Louisiana. If it was sexual and you gave it more than a microsecond’s worth of thought, you would go to hell for all eternity. You even had to be careful about learning what was a sexual thought, because in thinking about one, or even thinking about thinking about one, you ran the risk of eternal dammnation. You were a goner if you took any kind of pleasure, even mental pleasure, out of it. So the average Catholic boy was probably committing a mortal sin every thirty seconds. You can imagine how awful a sin having erotic thoughts about pink elephants would have been.
Morris has yard signs all over his district in northeast Fort Wayne. They are green and white, ironically in girl scout colors. But this is yellow dog Republican country.
My stepdaughter goes to school with Morris’ daughter. She has met him. She said he is nice but weird. She also said that his daughters wanted to stay in Girl Scouts and were upset about having been jerked out.
What do the yard signs say?
Just “Bob Morris.”