EthixBytes
A Collection of Quotes, Comments, Statistics, and News Items

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”         
Maya Angelou

“One would have thought after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that the need for credible news and opinion, reliable and verifiable, would have found an answer from those who could supply it, . . . You [the public] keep reminding me that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy go hand in hand.”           
Bill Moyers during his sign-off from public television December 17, 2004.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”           
H. L. Mencken.

“There is no crisis in Social Security—payments are funded through 2042, after which 80% funding will be available. The real crisis today is with the 45 million children who do not have health care.”           
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass), on Meet the Press, 1/30/05.

“The federal government this fiscal year will spend about $368 billion more than it took in, $20 billion more than it projected last September. But additional war spending this year will push that spending to a record $427 billion for fiscal 2005, making it harder for President Bush to fulfill his pledge to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009.”       
Congressional Budget Office Report, 1/25/05.

“The rise of political Christianity—a coalition of white born-again Christians, conservative Catholics, conservative African Americans and conservative Hispanics—is concerned with more than gay marriages and abortion rights. Political Christianity seeks to breach the wall of separation between the church and state and wishes to make this country a Christian nation.”           
M A. Muqtedar Khan, in the National Catholic Reporter about the ultimate design of the Religious Right in the U.S.

“To think that way demeans the Christian movement. We are not anybody’s special interest group.”          
Charles W. Colson, born-again former aide to President Nixon warning evangelical conservatives not to list demands to the President or to other elected officials.

“In this plentiful land there are 36 million who are poor, 45 million who are without health insurance and 25.5 million who are hungry. ‘Read the book,’ urged [Jim] Wallis, One out of 16 verses of scripture is about poverty—one out of nine in the synoptic Gospels.’ [James] Forbes added, ‘nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.’”       
John M. Buchanan in The Christian Century.

“The current system is rigged to benefit the interest of those in office—not of those who put them there.”           
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his State of the State speech calling for an independent panel of retired judges (not the State legislature) to apportion congressional seats, of which none of California’s 53 seats changed parties. Nationally only 13 of the 435 congressional districts saw a political flip, 4 of those from the gerrymandered Texas map.

“It is still possible that most Iraqis will come out of the war better off than they were before. . . . The question is whether the U.S. will be a better place after years of fearmongering, military abuse, erosion of civil liberties, and a constant stream of political propaganda that distorts America’s proudest legacies.”           
Ian Buruma, author of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies.

“All institutions, every last single one of them, are evil; self-serving, self-preserving, self-loving; and very early in the life of any institution it will exist for its own self. . . . never trust them. Never bow the knee to them. They are all after your soul. Your ultimate, absolute, uncompromising allegiance. Your soul. ALL of them.”      
Novelist Will Campbell in an interview for Baptists Today.

“The only way lawyers can make a case for keeping ‘under God’ in the pledge is by emptying the phrase of theological meaning.”      
Rodney Clapp in The Christian Century.

“The constitutional amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.”           
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), on the proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage, which he and six Republicans helped block.

“From affirmations of the ‘conservative resurgence,’ to demands for loyalty to the SBC’s creed, to professor-presidents, to rebukes of whatever the SBC condemns, the noose of conformity is tightening. The 2004 [state] meetings illustrate an important truth: SBC fundamentalists won’t rest until they control a convention in every state.”        
Marv Knox, Editor Baptist Standard.

“If the husband does not want his wife to work outside the home, she should not work outside the home.”       
Richard Land, SBC Ethics Commission, on Meet the Press.

“Iraq provides terrorists with a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills, . .”   
David Low, National Intelligence Officer for Transitional Threats noting Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for future terrorists.

“According to the National Priorities Project, the Iraq war so far has cost over $145 billion. At that rate, Martin E. Marty calculates that the war has cost his own small town (Riverside, ILL, population 8895) over $6 million [and] ‘for the cost of the war so far, we could have insured 86,047,783 children nationwide for a year. That would translate to 3225 tots in Riverside (if we had that many children here)’.”   
Christian Century, 11/30/04.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”        
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Updated Friday, March 25, 2005