Pardon me: A Church’s Call for an End to Hypocrisy
August 27th, 2015
The waves that Pope Francis I has been making across the globe have made numerous headlines in recent news history. What has not gotten as much attention, but is along similar lines as much of the papal doctrines against hypocrisy, is the United Life Church’s call to President Obama. The Church is calling for the presidential pardon of thousands of marijuana users who are currently serving time in our nation’s jails and prisons. While it may seem odd for a church to take a position siding with criminals, it is important to understand the message behind the request as it gives great insight into the Church’s motivations.
Crime does not pay (for some)
The United States’ war on drugs has long been seen as something that has been enforced in a one-sided manner. Currently thousands of individual marijuana users are serving time in prison for repeatedly violating marijuana possession and/or use laws. The problem, however, is not in the laws themselves, as it is up to the people of this country to fight for a law change, but in the enforcement of these laws where our country falls into the “sin” of hypocrisy. According to recent findings reported by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a black American is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested than a white American for a marijuana offense.
What is even more appalling is the number of high profile civic leaders, politicians and business leaders who have gone on the record admitting the use of marijuana at some point in their lives. What are the “criminals” to think when they hear statements such as those made by multiple presidents of the United States about past drug use? Were they merely in the wrong place at the wrong time? If that is the case, then where is the “right place” to use an illegal drug?
It is this duplicity that the Church is railing against, and in the minds of many Americans doing so rightfully. In states across the country, citizens are lobbying their political leaders for a change in the way America’s laws deal with the possession and use of marijuana. One need only look to Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado to see that the legalization of this drug has not led down a dark winding path of immorality, as some have predicted. On the contrary, with the legalization and regulation of the drug, it may be possible for the leaders of this country to take the first step toward washing away the hypocrisy of the past. The second step is taking action to right the many wrongs done by the unequal enforcement of those laws.
United Life Church Case Law
The Universal Life Church may be ahead of its time in its request for pardons, but its future is not one that is completely hidden from today’s lawmakers; nor is the path being blazed by the Church one that promotes anything other than those principles upon which this nation was founded. The Universal Life Church and Universal Life Church Case Law will continue to monitor laws from creation to imposition, and fight against tyranny, inequality and hypocrisy wherever it is found.
It is in the nature of war that all wars are wasteful. But not all wars are senseless.
Yet to fight a war without applying the best available objective, empirical, scientific, and expert analyses, at all possible levels and opportunities— and without taking actions and crafting policies that implement the letter and spirit of the results of these findings— is to fight a war literally without intelligence… in both senses of the word.
Sun Tzu dictates that to fight a war without intelligence, is to seek a guarantee that the war will be both wasteful and senseless.
The War on Drugs is not an artful war, and it is not a war fought with intelligence— rather it is a malignant, superstitious relic from the dark ages… the World Wars, Jim Crow, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Begun three score and eighteen years ago, in the ashes of the First Prohibition on alcohol, this Second Prohibition has in fact proven with each passing year to be even more baseless and reprehensible than its predecessor. Looking clearly and dispassionately at the evidence, we can only rationally conclude that the War on Drugs has been a senseless waste of human lives and treasure.
This is America’s longest war. Make no mistake— this is a real war, a shooting war, with hundreds of thousands of real deaths and POWs. And it is at the same time a fake war, a manufactured war— launched upon lies, without a scrap of evidence, and continued flying in the face of decades of reputable scientific research and good intelligence. It is also a civil war… which our own governments are fighting against the people of the world. With our own money.
This is a war that is tearing families and friends apart, making enemies of natural allies, and pitting brother against brother.
This is a war that all of us are losing… right now, as I write this.
We the People will no longer respect the authority of governments, or their attendant laws and agents, that wage civil war on their own people.
Any governing body that upholds unscientific legislation of broadly and acutely harmful effect— in this, the 21st Century— deserves not just the scorn, but even the open rebellion of its constituents.
Total. Civil. Resistance.
In this 21st Century, we not just as Americans but as the most powerful single community in our global human civilization will face a host of cold, hard, life and death challenges, with the highest stakes imaginable— from artificial intelligence to disease control to mass extinction to genetic engineering to overpopulation to climate change, to name a few, and on to challenges we haven’t realized or even imagined yet.
These are wars that will have to be fought with intelligence, and the vision to plan 40 or 400 years ahead… not 4 years ahead. To meet them successfully, the challenges of tomorrow demand of us today the broad and successful implementation of scientific recommendations— at the personal, local, federal, and global levels.
The future is far too dangerous for us to accept anything but a humanistic government that believes in science, and proceeds in its policies from that belief. Because it is the choices we make today, on scientific issues like this one, that— taken together in the vast swirling whole of human endeavor across the globe— will decide whether the future of human civilization rests in shining cities, or in drowned worlds.
Any government in the 21st Century— particularly one as large and powerful as the United States— that does not proceed from a basis of scientific principles, is more than merely quaint or obsolete.
It is a menace to our survival. It is a menace, in fact, not only to the long term well-being and survival of its own citizens— but it is a menace to the survival of the human species as a whole.
It is a wasteful war to reform such governments. It is even more wasteful to tear them down.
But it is not a senseless war.
Sisters and brothers— citizens of the world, my fellow Americans. It is time for us to find another way.
It’s time for all of us to end this slow burning holocaust, this World Civil Class & Race War on a Selection of Drug Users. Together. It is time to speak out, to admit, to educate, to petition, to reform, and to rebel. It’s time to medicalize and to legalize. It’s time to release, rehabilitate, and reintegrate the Prisoners of War. It’s time to be humane, to be responsible, and to move on together— to the real challenges we share. Hand in hand.
Science brought us to the Moon and Franklin. Superstition brought us to Salem and McCarthy.
Help us to end this modern witch hunt. Around the world. Today.
I’ll see you in the future.
—The Reverend Casey Tay-McCarthy, Rebel Alliance, American Sector, Berlin
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Want to learn more about the world, listening while you do what you need to do?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/globalnews
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/docarchive
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/fooc
—Independent, non-commercial, ad-free news from a more global and objective perspective, including an outside, sympathetic look at the USA… without a dog in the fight. Frank, investigative, trustworthy— utterly unlike our own, mostly corrupted broadcast media in the US— the BBC asks hard questions of just about everyone but the Queen. If you’ve grown up with American broadcast media, be prepared to be shocked at how many important things are going on in the world that you’ve never been told about, and you otherwise never will be— the BBC has reporters on the ground in every region of the world, so dust off your world map. Bonus: almost zero reporting of celebrities… until they die.
http://www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight
http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/real-time-with-bill-maher-49758
thedailyshow.cc.com/
—Why, in the “Age of Information”, do few but our jesters speak the truth?
http://www.bestoftheleft.com/
—Don’t be fooled by the name. This is science-based common sense for a healthy society and a civilization with a future— with explicit and immediate activism opportunities, and excellent debate of ideas and best practices.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_(TV_series)
http://www.youtube.com/user/vicenews
—I thought Vice were fun but awful when I first ran across one of their little hipster magazines in 2005 Brooklyn. Now they’ve grown up and become the spunky and formidable Vice News, sending those former hipsters into the face of the most challenging situations our species face today— incredible struggles we almost never hear about in the disinformation media, brought to vivid life on the screen and intelligently explained and engaged, all in 15 minutes. It doesn’t get hipper than that.
Want further learning and activism opportunities?
http://www.popularresistance.org/issues/
—Common sense total civil resistance, united.
350.org/
—Help us save the Earth. So we get to have a future.
Who me? I’m an independent individual acting where I see I can best apply my limited time and abilities. I’m not profiting from any of these organizations. I simply want to know what the hell we should do to fairly and humanely save and evolve our planet and civilization, before the game is up for the most deadly and interesting species on the planet. (Look in the mirror.)
I come from time and space as a warning to the human race— you have begun your most desperate centuries. Halt greenhouse gas emissions; enact peaceful resolution and social justice as transnational absolutes; plan and behave both scientifically and humanely; eliminate nationalism, xenophobia, corruption, waste, and war; enshrine your biodiversity; reduce population; learn to love each other— or go extinct.
Your time is up, earthling savages.