I love this excerpt from Granny D Haddock’s speech at Orchard House in Massachusetts…

I think every man and woman of us wants to be a patriot to this great nation. How sad to miss your cue when the alarm bell rings for us! How horrible to be enslaved to the wrong way of thinking at such a time of national crisis! We owe it to our friends and neighbors to free them if we can, so they might stand with us.

I will propose a mental experiment to see if we can find a string or two that can help us lead our friends out of this dangerous maze.

Imagine that your friend is very much pro-life and pro-war and doesn’t see the illness of her mental conflict.

I think you might notice that this friend of yours lives a slipcover-protected life and has not even allowed herself the freedoms of a good fantasy life. Let’s repair that.

Let me suggest that we take her to a good arts district, rent her a studio apartment full of art supplies above a good sidewalk café, find her a lover and come back in ninety days to see if her politics have changed. As she lives a real life, as she explores her own potential, she will learn to let others live and enjoy their lives, too. She will want to help the young woman artist next door who gets herself into trouble. She will even begin to be amused and impressed instead of angered and depressed by the Clintons and other lively, joyful, free-living people of this beautiful earth.

When people begin to really live their lives, the black and white certainties do not turn to shades of gray, but to the million-jeweled hews of a morning’s dew. That sparkle is the reality of life revealed. Life is about living, and about helping other real people get through this world with a minimum of pain and a maximum of human dignity. We simply can’t do that with authoritarian politics and its deadly abstractions. We can only do that with our love and our freedom to think for ourselves and act individually and as a community.

And that was the example of Jesus, wasn’t it? Did he not challenge the organized church of his day, challenge its authority, and overturn its rules that had hardened into cruelties and corruptions? Did he not show us how we might act instead from the love and charity of our own hearts, and, in this rebellion, did he not say, follow Me? Are we not to think for ourselves? Was so grand a thing as the human mind meant to be wasted?

Our founders were deeply spiritual and also deeply secular–a well-balanced condition of the mature mind that eludes today’s political fundamentalists. Our founders respected human freedom and the urge toward greater equality. Over the centuries, we have tried to make this nation a better expression of their intent, so that there would be no second-class citizens, no arbitrary authority that limited our life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. And the better angels of that Revolution stand yet upon our shoulders as we oppose the clan of authority, that cult of death, whose cloak of human oppression has cast its shadow over our children’s future.

What must we do? We must bring the light of consciousness to people who are enslaved by the darkness. We must show them–make them see–the clear links between the Taliban and the American fundamentalists. It is about power, male power, and subservience. Why can’t a young girl in trouble get an abortion in the preferred world of the fundamentalists? It isn’t because of the sanctity of life, or the fundamentalists would be acting to preserve life by getting medicine to Africa instead of impeding it. They would be halting executions and building up our institutions of peace.

The desperate attitude of the far right toward not only the unborn baby but even brain-dead people on life support reveals something about their true religion: they have little. There is nothing in their actions that reveals a belief that life is eternal, that there is no death except as a doorway to something better. Their brand of Christianity simply does not relate to the teachings of Christ. The worst of the hate-mongers who misuse the Bible to make million-dollar church incomes and push a political agenda of male domination and hate are easy to spot, for they cherry-pick Bible passages to suit their purposes. They disregard any turning of cheeks, they disregard the fact that Jesus never mentioned the homosexuality that they so fear. They seem not to fear that, as very rich men, they themselves might have a hard time driving their Hummers through the eye of the needle into heaven. They claim that every word of the Bible must be followed, but if they really believed that they would have stoned themselves to death years ago, as they are as sexually frisky and full of covetous looks as anybody else. They forgive themselves freely, of course, even when they promote the murder of foreign leaders.

They refuse a young girl an abortion for the same reason they would refuse her birth control: because in either case she would be exercising power and control over her own future–and such power and control is reserved for the authorities–male authorities–below whom she is to cower and serve and reproduce. It is all about that, and we have to start saying so, so that the far right will no longer have the women marching in its toxic ranks–at least the smarter women.

If I ran the Democratic Party, I would lay it all out in expensive advertising campaigns. I would have the sociologists and the psychologists talking about the tricks of mental slavery that are being used to trick decent Christians and other people into following un-Christian leaders and policies. As with any kind of mental counseling, progress depends on the spread of consciousness–of self-awareness. I would let more and more people, especially the women, come to understand the nature of the lies that surround them and defraud them. I believe they really are for life and for liberty, but they must be given better information, better moral and emotional support.

The whole speech is a great read, actually; but I especially loved the above excerpt.