Sam Harris

A man named Jim Adkisson was pissed off because he couldn’t find a job. He blamed in on liberals and gays for taking all the jobs.  Ironically, he was also pissed that his food stamps were being cut. Food stamps. A product of liberal governmment…

So he goes into a Unitarian Universalist church in red state Tennessee and loads up his guns and shoots anyone he can.

They will probably charge him with a hate crime.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=5463260&page=1

Shooting up churches has sort of become the 21st Century equivalent of “going postal.” It’s the insanity du jour.

The really interesting thing about the media coverage of this tragic event was while it took place in a “church”, I never heard God or Jesus mentioned once. I only heard one commentator even say that his prayers would be with them. I wonder how many people, especially in the Boble Belt actually know what the UUC is.

I attended a UU Church for two years. Not once was the name Jesus invoked during a prayer. And prayers are actually silent meditations that often ended with “blessed be.” There were classes for helping the terminally ill, donations and services dedicated for support of abuse shelters, sermons on gay and lesbian rights, and ending war.

Look what they found in Adkisson’s home:

Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.

The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.

right wing talk books found in home

One just has to wonder how many other people are influenced by the rantings against liberals made by asshats like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage to the point of killing the members of a church that was very involved in helping women, minorities, the needy and gays. I see that Adkisson was unemployed,  a former member of the 101st Airborne, and had a couple of DUIs, so I wonder if he is an alcoholic and/or suffers from a stress disorder. He also seems to have been particularly obsessed with the fact that gays are in a large part responsible for the problems our country has. The more I see, read and hear about how gays are somehow responsible for the sad state of our country, I have to wonder just how many people are infected with the kind of rampant irrational stupidity enough to believe what the liberal bashers and fundamentalist Christian demagogues are saying. Sadly, it all smacks of the same tactics and rhetoric of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews and it scares the shit out of me, and I’m not even gay.

Sadly, the very people he killed would probably have been willing to help him in whatever way they could have if he would have simply asked them.

dlsmith - 29 July 2008 04:04 PM

Sadly, the very people he killed would probably have been willing to help him in whatever way they could have if he would have simply asked them.

Contrast that to a recent sermon John Hagee gave in which he said it was a sin to help a man who wouldn’t work. He, of course, was referring to the “socialists” in government. That sermon was on You Tube before lawyers working for Hagee took it down, with all the other kooky things Hagee has said in the past—-right before his Christians United or Israel convention.