I Swear This Isn't A Political Post...if you don't read between the lines...

Grandmaother just told me about this story that was in her local paper. That woman deserves some sort of award. Some sort of BIG award. Some sort of AWESOME award.

It drives me nuts that we live in a society that prides itself on our "FREEDOMS" but punishes people who are not of the "norm." Punished because they practice a religion that doesn't focus on "our" God. Punished because they have the AUDACITY to love someone of the same sex. Punished because they make a difficult decision to end a pregnancy.

The beauty of America is that we can be who we want to be. America was founded by people who were escaping religious persecution. Leaving behind a country, an entire continent, because they weren't completely free to live life as they wanted.

This is from the Library of Congress:

Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe.

I get that they came here to escape what they were being forced to believe in. To forge a new society where they were free to worship, and live, as they wished. It seems to me, though, that in the past 225 or so years, that vision has gotten completely, pardon the language, fucked up. We've ended up with a society where you're celebrated if you fit in with the majority of people's beliefs, but you're persecuted (there's that word again) if you don't live your life by their standards. How does THAT work with what our country was founded on? Seems pretty damn hypocritical to me. And that's not what I want my country to be about.

This is from, I hope I don't have to tell you, the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Created Equal. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Shouldn't we, as Americans and human beings, "refuse to compromise passionately...held convictions" and live our lives to follow the first few sentences of the Declaration of Independence? I'm sorry, but the YA-hoo's from the article above are much more dangerous to the belief's America was built on than two men who want to have sex with each other. But maybe that's just me.