A Liberal’s Letter to Sarah Palin (and Other Christian Fundamentalists)

Dear Sarah,

YOU are the apparatus of evil. Got that?

You, with your smug certainty that Jesus, a radical middle-eastern Semite who died 2000 years ago, is your personal white american savior and that your particular English version of a book originally written in a language you wouldn’t recognize the sound of, let alone be able to translate, contains the literal word of some anthropomorphic super being who created everything 6000 years ago and whose primary concern is with homosexuals getting married and with protecting the cesspool of your local parish from the evils of liberalism, art and humanist education; who almost certainly cannot follow the construction of this oratory because it contains multiple phrases, semicolons, dependent clauses, polysyllabic words and is longer than the mind numbing utterances of Rush Limbaugh; who sit in your church on Sunday listening to the sermons of often sexually deviant, witch-hunting pastors, pontificating the certainty of their particular brands of racism, prejudice, fear and loathing.
You are the tool of the evil that you believe is “out there.”

You make me sick to my very soul and here is why specifically:

You send your son off to fight against the “Satan of Islamic Fundamentalism” without the slightest awareness that what you believe is precisely what they believe, that the face of your religion is perfectly mirrored in the face of theirs.

You support a neo-conservative, republican platform on the grounds that it somehow embodies the important values of your christian faith; accepting without question that unrelenting greed, materialism, war-mongering, dishonesty, racism and fake patriotism are all minor sins compared to not electing judges who will legislate your particular brand of certainty that aborting a collection of fetal cells is a greater sin than bombing a Middle-eastern country full of living, breathing, thinking, loving children who have the same hunger for food, knowledge and respect as your own. And for believing that selling gas and oil has nothing to do with it.

You indoctrinate your own children with the belief that any form of sexual love other than that expressed between a Christian married man and woman is dirty and evil; that humanistic values and the appreciation of the finest poetry, art and literature produced by mankind is misguided and full of sinful temptations; that the honest struggle of science to comprehend the shape, size, origin and fate of the universe and our place in it is misguided nonsense compared to your local pastor’s particular interpretation of a single book composed by a handful of tribal Jews and arrogant Latin potentates in grand cathedrals who believed the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it and that God, in his heaven just above the clouds, approved of their (and your) tribal or feudalistic religious world view.

You effectively shut the door on the curiosity, open-mindedness and love of the self-discovered truth that is genuine education and willfully imprisoned your children’s intelligence in a cage of fundamentalist ignorance and certainty.

You call yourself “conservative” but snowmobile or fly around the Alaskan wilderness shooting animals for “sport.” You support businesses who misuse the workers of the poorest parts of the world and use massive quantities of fossil fuels to produce and distribute cheap goods to the USA and Europe, seemingly unaware of increasingly limited resources and the polluting effects this has on earth's magnificent self-healing nature. You deny global warming is man-made and is increasing at a rate that will lead to a devastation that matches the biblical account of the great flood and will insure the eventual death of most of the species your fairytale story had Noah save in his ark.


You deride liberals as weaklings and intellectually effete, as if they had not fought in every truly good cause this country has ever led and had not given their lives and wealth to bring about a better existence for those less fortunate; had not stood their ground against every form of fascism (right and left) and the unrelenting greed of the empire builders; had not sacrificed for equality of life, liberty and happiness for those of different color, sex and cultural origin here and around the world. (And yes, while some of them have occasionally been as dishonest, greedy and prejudiced as you are, I would suggest that history shows them to be a tad less hypocritical about it and a lot less certain of their god-given right to racial, spiritual and cultural superiority.)

You speak of America as the “shining beacon on the hill” and claim the traditions and values of the founding fathers without any awareness that Jefferson and Franklin were humanists who tried their best to write into our constitution protections against the very form of religious zealotry you practice.

Your (and John McCain’s) campaign rhetoric is a model of lies, disinformation, slander and not so subtle racial and cultural prejudice. For example, suggesting Barrack Obama is a Muslim by emphasizing his middle name and suggesting that he is aligned with terrorists.

Finally, and perhaps most to the point of this personal oratory, you have been woefully ignorant of the very real evils facing all of us. And you revel in your ignorance. You have been and continue to be the willing tool of the actual “evil forces” walking this earth: the CEOs who rape the coffers of their companies while their workers are left bereft of the compensations they rightfully earned with their life long labors; the movers and shakers of the multinational arms, drug and oil corporations who promote world-wide violence, intolerance, addiction, poverty and rampant materialism in order to add to their “bottom line” and for whom many of you work; and the fawning politicians, corrupt intelligence agencies and distracting media moguls who have pulled the extraordinary card trick of getting you to believe that unregulated capitalism, torture and the attempted abrogation of inalienable human rights is somehow equivalent to democracy, freedom and the American Dream.

Yes, you are the willing tools of the evil you profess to hate. Your hypocrisies and certainty of belief in earthly absurdities in the name of heavenly fairytales is breathtaking in its ignorance and devastating in its consequence for all of us on this paradise we call earth.

I can only pray you find the light of true humility before your darkness of certainty and arrogance destroys us all.

Ted Guhl