EthixBytes

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EthixBytes

“I am re-assessing my views on gun control.”
Foy Valentine in response to staff member Ross Coggin’s question, “Are you O.K.?” just after the Executive Board of the S.B.C. had hotly debated the recommendation to abolish the Christian Life Commission.

“The only tired I was, was givin’ in.”
Rosa Lee Parks, responding to the charge that ‘she was tired’ when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, which sparked the modern civil rights movement.

“There is no scriptural basis for segregation.”
Billy Graham, in 1952 in Jackson, Mississippi, as he walked to the ropes that separated blacks and whites and tore them down, in response to the governor’s suggestion to conduct separate meetings for blacks.Christianity Today, August, 2005.

“It was truly a minor misunderstanding.”
Victoria Osteen, wife of millionaire megapastor Joel Osteen, when the couple was removed from a plane bound for Vail, CO, after she argued with a flight attendant over not cleaning a spill to her satisfaction, delaying the flight one hour.

“Christine DeLay, wife of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, was paid $115,000 by a lobbying firm to ‘determine the favorite charities of members of Congress.’”
Eric Gay, Associated Press.

“This was the purest case of whistle-blowing . . . these people were tormented by the fact that something was wrong in the government.”
James Risen, author of State of War who wrote the NY Times column about government spying on U.S. citizens without warrants.

“If the federal minimum wage were raised from $5.15 to $7.25 as proposed, it would be the first increase since 1997and an estimated 10 million low-income workers would get pay increases. Polls consistently show that four out of five Americans want Congress to act.”
Austin-American Statesman (December, 2005).

“I found those 2000 verses on the poor. How did I miss that? I went to Bible college, two seminaries, and I got a doctorate. How did I miss God’s compassion for the poor?”
Rick Warren, noting how his trip to Africa forced him to re-examine Scripture with “new eyes.” Christianity Today, October, 2005.

“When 1 billion people in our world are living on less than $1 a day, and child poverty rates are going up in the richest country in the world, [poverty] is the defining moral issue of our times.”
Jim Wallis in Sojourners.

“He’s President George Bush, not King George Bush. The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow.”
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), in response to the President’s contention that he had the authority to approve domestic wiretaps without judicial warrants.

“John McCain spoke passionately about the ‘obscene, despicable behavior’ in Washington, the corrupt lobby and a Congress so out of control it had more than 6000 pet projects in a single highway spending bill.”
Austin American Statesman report on John McCain’s taped speech during a book-signing visit (12/13/05).

“The United Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Authority has concluded that a half-million people could die in Kuwait and Iraq from the effects of 320 tons of depleted uranium used by the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War. DU has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years and is particularly deadly once it enters the food chain.”
America, October 17, 2005.

“By 2007, the world’s population will be divided equally between rural and urban areas and 1 in 3 urban folks will live in poverty. Today 80% of South Americans live in cities, 35.5 % of them live in slums.”
Habitat World, (September, 2005).

“War is the means by which Americans learn geography.”
Ambrose Bierce.

“In a Nov. 30, 2001 email, former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed told lobbyist Jack Abramoff that 50 pastors led by Ed Young, of Second Baptist in Houston, would meet with Texas attorney general John Cornyn to shut down an East Texas Indian tribe’s casino, for which Abramoff and Reed were reportedly paid about $80 million by the rival Coushatta tribe casinos of Louisiana.”
Associated Press columnist Suzanne Gamboa.

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.