I've just posted a rather passionate message at the network54 forum as a response to a message in which it was sayd that Bush is a good president and that the writer has Bush in office rather than Kerry, because the later supports (tolerates would be a more fitting term for all I know of Kerry) gay marriage. I'm posting this message here too, as I think it may trigger an interesting discussion in which some may be of a different oppinion than I am. Note that the message was written in a somewhat aggressive temper:
You say Iraq was freed.
No question at all Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator! A horrible dictator as I might point out who rose to power with great support from America and other western countries.
But let's be honest how many horrible dictators are still out there, still backed by our governments as they provide us with cheap rescources?
And how liberated is Iraq anyway with daily terror from both sides?
But liberating Iraqi people was not the "reason" for the war anyway. It was the weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be an outright lie! Not a fib like politicians everywhere tell every day, but a lie that costed more than 1000 US soldiers and many more thousand Iraqis their lifes!
Then lets move on to some other things about G. W. Bushs politics. Does it sound alright for a democratic government to imprison people for an indeterminate time? Without charges? Without a lawyer? And does it sound alright that people are being tortured? Why do you think is it that the so called "enemy combatants" are mainly imprisoned in countries such as Cuba and Jordan where they won't catch that much public interest and where it is more difficult for reporters to report about treatment of prisoners that is not in accordance with the Geneva accords or the declaration of human rights?
Now there is one thing I want to make sure you understand. I am not especially symphatetic about terrorists, but how many of these people locked up without charge are terrorists? Quite a few of them were not even captured by US troops but (in case of Afghanistan) by militias who got bounties for captured "terrorists". So why shouldn't they just declare the closest available taxi driver to be a terrorist and hand him over?
But we don't even need to look only at the war on terrorism in order to see the questionable actions of Bush's policy. What about the record budged deficit Bush brought in after Clinton had actually managed to get into the black numbers? Are you defining Clinton over his sex scandal?
Why is it that about 200 FBI agents were busy to investigate about president Clinton's sexual life while they ought to have been answering calls from Texan flight trainers who were worried about some strange guys who wanted to learn how to fly a plane, but not about how to take off or land? Did Clinton's sex affair (inappropriate and ruthless as it definitely was) or the lies he spread about it kill anybody? No!
Did Bush's lies kill anybody? You bet they did!
But back to other policies of Bush. We have the revoking of the Kyoto Protocol Clinton had signed. Doing a little favor to the CEOs who sponsored his election campaign, I suppose, but hey who cares? I don't suppose any of them will live to see the worst effects of global warming, while we may!
Another thing, you asked whether I believe that my countrie is going to be bombed? Well, not really. But when Bush made sure that American soldiers could not be tried in front of the international court in the Haag (Netherlands) for crimes of war, there was also a legislature passed allowing the use of "military force" if still it was attempted to try Americans before that international court. Why on earth does Bush want this kind of fool's license for US soldiers? Perhaps a look at Abu Ghraib may tell us why.
All this combined I think is quite something that might work as a counter argument against the "horrors" of giving gay and lesbian people equal rights to "straight" people.
I for my part do not think that in a modern, enlighted society the government has any right to interfere into what grownup people do in their bedrooms, so long it happens consently! Unlike the stuff I listed above it does not kill anyone if two people of the same gender love each other!