Hekate
Hekate's JournalRead the answers in this thread -- the sober ones. Then read the US Constitution.
False choices, strawmen, and moronic ideas about turning my nation into a military dictatorship do not amuse me.
"How does a Jew consider himself white?" Say what?
I'll ask my hazel-eyed husband who sunburns easily. He's silver haired now, but as a child he had a mop of golden curls.
His dad looked so Polish he was able to melt into the Belgian Underground for the duration of WWII, travelling on missions with false papers.
His mom had the ethnic look, but was also hazel-eyed and fair-skinned, with dark hair. But she didn't blend in.
It depends. The Diaspora has been on for 2,000 years? Jews settled everywhere. They've been in Europe a long time, and there's bound to be some drift.
I grew up in Hawai'i, and was never allowed to forget I was a haole. The composition of my ethnic background was irrelevant: I was a haole. The few Jewish kids in my school were lumped into the same category. I didn't blend in to the local population, and neither did they. When I moved to California I was given a different label, again informing me that my actual background was irrelevant: Anglo. (I really never saw people who looked like me outside my immediate family until I visited Boston in my mid-30s. We look like our Irish ancestors who came in the middle of the 19th century, apparently a persistent ethnic stamp.)
In Europe, my husband and his family were never allowed to forget they were Jewish; when they moved to New York City, I think it was simply taken for granted among such a large population. Moving to California in 1964 was a bit of a shock: he was informed that he was an Anglo, too.
People judge others by so many things. I'm still glad I grew up where I did, where casual intermarriage was the norm. It shaped my worldview forever.
I caught that, too, and it floored me. "Rootless cosmopolite" goes back way before Stalin, iirc...
It is an anti-Semitic insult rooted in the old "blood and soil" identity that plagued Europe for untold centuries, and was a backhanded way of pointing out that Jews, who were not legally allowed to own land, congregated in cities.
When people start waxing poetic and misty-eyed about the Fatherland and the Motherland, they are talking about who "really" belongs and who, by Heaven, does not. It's only a short step from that sweet sentimentality to a vodka-fueled pogrom.
I was furious when Dubya introduced "the Homeland" into the American lexicon, because while the earliest line of my family got here about 1620, we've been well-endowed by later immigrants all along the way. This is America, land of immigrants. My family is proud of that -- I used to believe my country was too.
Who handed "Homeland" to Dubya? I really don't think he has that kind of malice in him. I don't think he knows the company it keeps. The term "Homeland Security" makes my flesh crawl.
But I know who does have that kind of knowing malice: Steve Bannon and the alt-right, and now that self-hating Jew, Stephen Miller.
You're really sure of all this? Is the 2016 Platform still in effect? Not abrogated?
It's just odd to me that the choice issue has just now arisen at DU -- just in the past few days -- in the most inflammatory terms imaginable, and that rather than considering the source of the rumors or doing due diligence in their research, people are jumping all over it like it's settled fact and threatening to leave the party that has so egregiously betrayed them.
Really?
The litmus test should not be: "Do you personally find abortion distasteful?" That's nobody's business.
The litmus test should be: "Will you defend Roe vs Wade and uphold the secular law of the land protecting the rights of women to the full range of health care, which includes both contraception and abortion?" Because, that, my friends, is everybody's business.
Two separate topics in point at DU: Kamala Harris & abortion rights. Presented as "concerns"...
Yeah, sure. Presented as concerns.
Kamala Harris is being anointed for 2020 
and the Dem Party gonna support anti-choice candidates
And they're off! My fellow DUers are drooling and barking like Pavlov's Dogs! Running in circles! Screaming at each other!
Bejayzus, people.
The fact that we are having this fight at DU just now means someone is stirring the pot...
If I understand the explorations of the Party honchos, the issue is not whether an individual candidate is willing to have an abortion themselves, but whether or not they will support the continuation of Roe vs Wade and whether or not they will protect the legality of abortion across the US.
Seriously, where was Senator Ted Kennedy on the issue of abortion? He was a practicing, if flawed, Roman Catholic. As a Senator, he upheld the laws of secular society as he had sworn to do, and worked to expand those laws in the direction of compassion for all. I never heard him say a word against Roe. He was one of our best Democrats -- and a member of a Church that is against abortion.
Should we have shunned him? Primaried him? What?
I thought this issue had been settled by my Party. Individual conscience is an important thing, yet from the beginning our country has striven to balance that with the upholding of our system of secular and not religious laws.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 90,860