According to the CDC suicide rates for American adults ages 45-54 is the highest it’ been in 25 years. It rose 20% between 1999 and 2004.

Gee, I wonder why.

Could it perhaps be that Dubya took office in 2001 and sent this country straight to hell?  It would seem that having George Bush as president is hazardous to our health.

NOTE: I wrote this last year, and while Bill and his cohorts have been silent so far—that’s not a guarantee they will stay silent. So I am surrendering ahead of time.

Since the Christmas season officially begins on Thanksgiving these days (though my local discount stores have had Christmas stuff since the day after Halloween), I fully expect Bill O’Reilly and his fellow conservatives to start cranking up the  ol’ familiar War on Christmas  any second now.
In any case, I want to put a stop to this immediately. Here is the letter I’d like to send O’Reilly—but, frankly, I don’t want the jerk knowing my email address, because he’s likely to turn me over to Homeland Security—since anyone who isn’t Christian must be a terrorist. I’ll publish it here, because we know someone in O’Reilly’s pay reads DKos, otherwise how could he find all those quotes to take out of context?

I am gonna have a headache on Christmas Day. Because of an adorable pootie. This is a rant. It’s also the latest chapter in the soap opera of Irishwitch’s adventure in Georgia.

It’s the only way I will be able to restrain myself from shaking my sister-in-law until her teeth rattle for her carelessness with animals.  She isn’t cruel a la Michael Vick, but she is the incarnation of every blonde joke ever told. She doesn’t think. She has a bad track record—accidentally ran over 2 cats, made two other male cats outside cats because she was too cheap to neuter them, and had a miniature Pomeranian killed by a car when it  escaped from the house (that last  wasn’t entirely her fault; the dog ran out every chance it got).

Just for a change, I come to praise Georgia, not to rant about it.
It’s easy to be negative when so many of your experiences have been negative. . My in-laws are more than a little batshit crazy.  I fit in about as well as  Marilyn Masons would at a Baptist picnic. I find the politics depressing and the domination of religious  fundamentalism  scary.

I owe the atheists among us an apology.  Yesterday, in my diary on The Golden Compass I made a comment about being  tired of militant atheists, just as I am of militant believers. It gave the impression that I was tarring all atheists with the same brush. That was not what I meant at all.

Most atheists aren’t militant. They don’t disturb my sleep on weekends by knocking on my door to preach at me that I should lose Jesus or the Morrigan. They don’t hand out tracts or slip them under my door. They don’t disrupt Pagan Pride Day by handing out anti-Wiccan pamphlets.  They don’t hold anti-prayer services or readings of Camus during lunchtime at work. They merely live their lives quietly and ethically, doing the right thing BECAUSE it is the right thing, not out of fear of punishment or hope of reward in some afterlife. Mostly, they just want to be left alone, without being preached at, a desire I wholeheartedly share.

You thought they went nuts over Harry Potter?  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The film version of The Golden Compass opens on December 7—and the Religious Right has been lining up for over a month to attack it.  It began with Glen Beck. Why? Because Philip Pullman is an unabashed atheist who  hates the Narnia series, and they are terrified that the story of young Lyra’s quest to save a friend, and, later, the universe will somehow lure kids into atheism.  Toss in gay angels, the death of God, and the idea that innocence, ignorance and unthinking faith are over-rated while questioning,  sexuality and adulthood are good, and you can sorta see why they’re pitching hissy fits that would do Scarlett O’Hara proud.  Mind you, the film has down-played the anti-church theme and atheists are a tad annoyed over this  watering down of the books, but they don’t allow facts to get in their way..

I  will turn 58 on Monday, Nov. 19. That means it’s TWO YEARS till I am sixty. I will no longer be middle-aged. I’ll officially be  Old. And I thought I’d share my experiences as an Older Woman with you and throw it open for discussion.  I know my experiences won’t mirror every other women’s. Everyone ages differently and has different needs, wants  and expectations.  My role models were Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon, who proved you could be older and still sexy, and that you didn’t have to turn into Red Riding Hood’s Grandma just because of chronological age.

crosssposted at Hot Flash Report.

Most of us don’t even want to think about Roe. V. Wade being overturned.  For 34 years, it has provided women with the right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy, and protected their health and, yes,  lives when a fetus too damaged to carry to term or their health is endangered. It’s been one of the rocks we built feminism on, because without control of their fertility, women are hostages to biology.

And yet, we must face the very real possibility that SCOTUS will eiyher overturn Roe completely or so hamstring it as to make it useless.  Ther are now 5 anti-choice conservative Opus Dei Catholics (who don’t reflect the opinions of most American Catholics any more than the Catholic League does) on the Supreme Court, and they are salivating to do just that. We need to be prepared for this as a real possibility, because is can happen.

Queen Jezebel’s name has become synonymous with feminine beauty and wiles, a seductress who murdered without blinking and who attempted to turn the Israelites from their true God to pagan deities. She is definitely the Bad Girl of the Bible.  Next to her, Delilah pales in comparison—she merely pried out of Samson the secret of his strength and gave him a haircut,.  Jezebel built temples to  her false gods, killed YHWH’s prophets en masse, made life hell for gloomy old Elijah, and dared to conduct business in her husband’s name.

Now an archaeological  discovery indicates she was, indeed, a powerful queen. Jezebel, a Phoenician by birth, had her own seal.

cross-posted at Hot Flash Report

There’s a curious storm brewing in Texas over sexual harassment and a U.S. District Court judge appointed by  George H.W Bush.  And it's about to go national. In other words, another Republican sex scandal. Can’t these boys keep their hands to themselves? And there’s the possibility of corruption as well, another favorite Republican pastime.

Just when you think the Religious Right can’t get any dumber, they prove you wrong. A friend sent me a link to a website where a Yahoo listowner deleted  her Harry Potter list because Dumblodore was gay, and it was so insane that  I decided to check the blogosphere for  the Christian Right’s reaction to J.K. Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore—and it was both unpleasant and, at times, hilarious. Laura Mallory has an article decrying his gayness on her [hisvoicetoday.org home page ]. And, just as predictably, the Christian Coalition couldn’t keep its mouth shut—anything to gain some free publicity as its popularity has waned.

Tonight, the lead story on the eleven o’clock news on WBS-TV was an account of vandalism at a local church in Monroe, GA.  They lingered lovingly on an upside down pentacle and repeated scrawls of "666".  The reporter made several references to "devilish and evil acts," and the  ads for the news gave every impression that out-of-control Satanists were behind it. Only halfway through the report did you learn that the church is African American and there were also scrawls of "White Power" and "KKK" –and that this has been going on for many months with no publicity, until Halloween rolls around and it’s time to play up the EEEEEE-Villlllls of the Oh-Kult. The most amazing part is that while they promoted the hell out of this, there is no story on their website to link to.

In the diary I posted last week, there were some interesting comments made stating that (1) as long as Halloween is profitable, the Christian Right will lose and (2) that calling the Religious Right’s attack on Halloween  a "war" is as phony as Fox News’ War on Christmas. On number  1—you’re likely correct. So long as it makes money, Halloween will  continue—even though it is sadly reduced by banning Halloween parties and costume parades in public schools, but that doesn’t negate the fact that there is a very real attempt by the Christian Right to destroy the holiday.And comparing this well-organized attack to the extremely faux "War on Christians" declared by O’Reilly and Gibson and the other Right-Wing Idiots is incorrect for reasons I will attempt to show below.

Halloween as always been my favorite holiday.  I love the crisp air, the smell of apples and fallen leaves, and the chance, for one day out of 365, to be someone more exotic, more glamorous, more interesting than old everyday me. When I became a Wiccan, it also became a religious holiday for me, Samhain, the Celtic New Year, when the walls between the worlds—ours and the next—are thin and we can celebrate those who have passed on.  Either way, it was always a very positive time for me.  Since we are a coven of two, we usually give out candy in the early part of the evening, then, as midnight approaches, have a small and private Wiccan ritual.  

But Halloween is under siege.

We all know about the major sacrifices military families.  The military member is gone for long periods, while the family sits home, tries to keep things normal, and worries the whole time.  Active duty people, all too often, return in coffins or with missing limbs, TBIs, or PTSD.  They return to inadequate care in overcrowded, understaffed military hospitals (understaffed because the military always has a shortage of doctors and nurses, but  worse during wartime because those medical people in Iraq and Afghanistan are pulled from military hospitals) and a broken V.A. that couldn’t even handle the veterans it was caring for before Bush’s insane war.

Americans tend to brush off the possibility of theocracy in the United States. Theocracy always happens somewhere else. In Iran, for example, where you can only run for office if the ayatollahs say you can,where  gays are executed, and where stoning for adultery is legal because all law is religious law. Or in Saudi Arabia, where women who are immodestly dressed (that  is, not completely covered by an abayeh, head veil  and face veil are beaten by the religious police, where even a princess can be stoned for fornication, and where no other religion  can exist.  Or in Afghanistan under the Taliban, where not wearing a burqa could get you killed, where rape victims are murdered for their "crimes", and all law is, again, religious law. But not in America, land of the free, where  the first amendment guarantees religious freedom for all and demands separation of church and state.

But there are mini-theocracies here, and the Warren Jeffs trial gave us an in-depth look into one of them.

To most of us, the term "Lost Boys" conjures up images of  Peter Pan’s stalwart band of young followers who fight pirates,  swim with mermaids, and hang out with Tiger Lily and her Indian tribe. Like Peter, they plan to stay boys forever, caught up in eternal childhood. But in Utah, there is no Peter Pan, and it  has a much darker meaning.  The Lost Boys of the FLDS are teenagers who have been excommunicated from their FLDS church and thrown out of Colorado City and other FLDS towns, barred from seeing their family, cast out in a world that makes no sense to them.

Elissa Wall is a hero to me.  Like Joan of Arc and Anita Hill and the women who brave the demonstrators at abortion clinics( any one of whom could be packing a gun and crazy enough to shoot) to escort patients safely into the clinic, she braved ridicule and contempt and vicious personal attacks on her character to speak truth to power.  Unlike Ms. Hill, she won, because they convicted Warren Jeffs of taking part in a conspiracy to rape a minor.

Elissa was only 14 when she was ordered to marry a cousin she heartily disliked.  Unlike many of the child brides, she protested and begged not to have to marry him.  Most girls don’t protest because they live in a world where disobedience is simply unthinkable, and the punishment for it severe for them and anyone who aids them.