“Conservatives” (hardly) are relentless.

www.birddigiscoper.com: Wisconsin takes another step backwards

At 12:01am this morning the Republican controlled state Senate passed an anti-wetlands bill that ought to be ethically reprehensible to every birder and nature advocate in Wisconsin. More than window and tower collisions, feral cat predation, chemical spills, illegal hunting, poisoning, and most everything else, the primary reason for the decline of bird populations is habitat loss. For a lover of birds, this will be a tremendously damaging piece of legislation.

Sadly, this bill will dramatically weaken restrictions for developing on wetlands. So as the right-wing mantra goes, we are open for business and [BLEEP] all else. How short-sighted some of us are by failing to fully consider that our long-term survivability ultimately depends on the health of the earth, its habitat, and fragile ecosystems.

Apart from the intrinsic value our wetlands provide to birds and other wildlife, a recent study found that Wisconsin’s wetlands are worth billions in services and benefits each year. However, I’m aware of at least one right-wing nature photographer who prefers to embrace ignorance, ambiguity, and inaction rather than accept science and facts and figures, so take the report with a healthy skeptical attitude.

Most prevalent in today’s media, conservatives are quick to criticize and denounce government as the underlying problem with just about everything, but there’s a reason why Wisconsin has such wonderful natural treasures rich in biodiversity; it’s because they’ve traditionally been protected by our state government. I was painfully aware that once conservatives gained control of our political processes that they would eventually go after the environment; it’s endemic to their nature to ignore the needs of Nature.

© 2012 Mike McDowell

www.birddigiscoper.com: Wisconsin takes another step backwards

Drumming up a phony war on religion – The Washington Post

But it is Rick Santorum who wins the award for histrionics. Progressives, he said last week in Texas, are “taking faith and crushing it.” From that ridiculous proposition, he went on in truly hallucinatory fashion:

“When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Wow. …

This is a war? This is a march to the guillotine?

Romney and Gingrich know better; they’re just cynically pandering to religious conservatives. Santorum, at least, is sincere in his pre-Enlightenment beliefs. But rejection of the intellectual framework that produced not just the French Revolution but the American Revolution as well does not strike me as an appropriate philosophy for a U.S. presidential candidate to espouse, much less a winning platform to run on.

The Founders wisely decided to institutionalize separation of church and state. The references to God, the Creator and Divine Providence in the Declaration of Independence mask the fact that the Founders disagreed on the nature and existence of a Supreme Being. They understood the difference between faith and religiosity.

Within our secular governmental framework, religion has thrived.

Drumming up a phony war on religion – The Washington Post