No Soup For You!!

Morality. The Guitarman likes to think he has decent morals. On occasion. When the mood strikes him. But my morals are different from yours. And different from the guy sitting next to you on the train. Or the guy ringing the bell for the Salvation Army at the Jewel. Also different from from Bishop Thomas John Paproki, head of the Springfield Archdiocese, as well as Peter Bensinger, former DEA administrator. Both of them also hold the dubious title of fearmongerer.

The Catholic church, as everyone with a brain stem knows, is big on morality. As well they should be, you know. Church. God. The bible. That sort of stuff. Telling it's flock the proper ways to run their lives. And others. Thou shalt not sin, yada, yada, yada. Heard it all before. But reading the paper today, the line, "we are all equal in God's eyes" comes to mind. But apparently, we are not. Not if your significant other happens to be the same sex as you. That's when God, according to the Catholics, draws a line in the sand. "No soup for you!" Soup, in this case, being eternal salvation. The skinny? Illinois has finally come around and is about to give legal recognition and rights to those whose morality differs from those consider themselves the mouthpiece of The Almighty. And how do they do it? With fear. We are all going to hell in a hand-basket if we stray from the white line they painted under our feet. Telling the masses, and in particular Gov. Quinn, that their law is the real law, not some stack of papers that makes up the constitution. That if he wishes to, "speak as a Catholic, then he is accountable to the Catholic authority..." News flash there Bishop: he is accountable to the people of Illinois and their rights. And the people want to live their lives on their own terms.

But flipping the page, who the heck is Peter Bensinger, and why does The Guitarman lump him into the category of fearmongering morality police? I am sure he believes in his morals. But like any person in a position of power, he feels the need to tell the rest of us how to run our lives. How our morals are not up to par with his. How any person suffering from one of the over 140 (GOOD GOD THAT MANY?) approved conditions for medical marijuana must put aside common sense and their own judgement for his and his ilk. And he does it with fear. His letter in the Sun Times warns us that if Illinois were to approve medical marijuana, we would all die from cancer and become drug dealers, coffee breaks in the workplace would be replaced with pot breaks, our highways would "become deathtraps", schools would close because all the kids would drop out, the sky would fall, and a cloud of locusts would engulf the world blotting out the sun for a thousand years. In that order. I love one of the statistic he cites: 33% of positive drug test results from fatalities on the roads in 2009 were for drugs other than alcohol. That means 67% were for alcohol. Maybe, dude, your focus should be on drunks, not pot-heads. And that 33%? What little sliver is marijuana? And what sliver of a sliver is from people seeking real relief from their maladies with a joint?

It all boils down to one thing. People in power have let it go to their heads. And their morality drives them to tell the world how it should be run. When they do it with fear, when they try to scare the rest of us straight, they are letting their own true fears be shown. The fear that the rest of us will one day rise up from the ashes of our own destruction and take over the world. That actually sounds like a good idea to me. But hey, who the heck am I? I'm just some dude who likes to play guitar. Now back to those 140 approved maladies. I just know I've got to have one of them.