7 Deeds to the Left

Those that know me well know I am patient to a fault, always deferent to others, regardless of my own personal beliefs. It takes something especially abrasive to push me to the point of irritation. Right, dear?

In all seriousness, I deemed I had become slower to vexation since I became a father. I mean, when your son, despite your repeated efforts to show him the way, does the same disobedient things over and over again, surely your patience has grown if you still count him among the living? So, I felt pretty good about my 2008 version of a kinder and gentler me, right up until the time I came across this headline: “Vatican Adds Seven New Deadly Sins Including Damaging the Environment”. Kind and gentle no longer! On so many levels, coming up with new deadly sins is wrong, the least of which is a church declaring what is and is not sinful. However, despite the inescapable and irreconcilable theological differences I have with the Catholic Church, I have long thought them to be somewhat conservative in their overall political tendencies. Alas, as with nearly everything else in our society, they obviously have become engulfed in the liberal makeover that is transforming this generation. Tolerant crackbrains have come to roost on the hallowed ground of church, so much so that now it is a “deadly sin” to pollute the environment and to be “obscenely rich” (one of the other new seven deadly sins). If I didn’t know better by watching nightly election coverage, I’d think Hillary had ensconced herself in the Vatican (which is the logical next step if we are liberalizing religion)!

All this to say, if those are the best additions they could come up with for adding to the seven deadly sins, they should have talked to me first (you knew I’d have an opinion). Here are my own seven additions, ranked in order of least to most egregious:

1. Watching reality television. As if the inundation of Survivor (the show where no one has to actually survive), The Bachelor, and Dancing With the Stars wasn’t enough, now comes “Farmer Wants a Wife”. It’s a show about a farmer (who is so rural that he looks like he came out of a Calvin Klein underwear ad) who brings 10 women (all of whom look like the closest they’ve been to roughing it in their lives was when they had to wait on the valet at Neiman Marcus) out to live on his farm in the hopes that one of them will become his wife. Wow…I don’t know where to start so I’ll stop there.
2. Believing that global warming is an actual occurrence. A hundred years from now, when we have a hundred years of temperature readings and climate reviews, then let’s talk. Until then, pass me the keys to my SUV.
3. Undergoing surgical enhancements. Except in certain and rare instances, no matter how bad you think you look, I promise you look worse at some point after having plastic surgery. The craze of nips, tucks, Botox and calf implants is more than I can bear.
4. Participating in media coverage of Hollywood celebrities, their out of wedlock babies, their international adoption for personal recognition, their outlandish and downright evil religious beliefs, their left wing political statements, need I go on. Unless they just pledged their inheritance to Focus on the Family for the purpose of supporting the traditional, Biblical family model, I don’t want to hear about them and I shouldn’t have to be inundated with their exploits.
5. Brittany Spears. Please, just go away. And for media that ignores my number 4 sin and continues plastering her life all over my weekly publications, the sin just got deadlier for you.
6. FaceBook, MySpace, and so called social networking sites in general. Why did our forefathers do just fine keeping up with their friends and family without anything better than Pony Express but I have to sort through my daily email, weeding out messages from people asking me to see their MySpace or FaceBook page? Write me a letter, if you still remember how!
7. And finally, the deadliest of all…anything Oprah. I don’t care how “charitable” her “Big Give” seems (consider that she gets all that merchandise donated from sponsors and the fact that it’s “her favorite things” just highlights her materialism) everything she stands for is pure evil. Need some examples? Check out this article http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,351545,00.html or this one http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/03/05/the_secret . Nothing else needs to be said.

I could go on and on but my friend Burro Joe has probably already stopped reading because it’s too long so I’ll just sign off and say, until next time, I hope you avoid the pitfalls of the growing list of deadly sins...or the pitfalls of the growing population of liberals.