Laconia

We filled in our ballots on the Saturday immediately after receipt. Although I'd done careful research, M and D only wanted the high-level summary. In most cases they just wanted to know which organizations were in favor and against. There were a few that required actual discussion because of potential loopholes or unintended consequences.

Unfortunately, I didn't save my notes, and now I can't remember exactly how we voted on everything. I know our vote split on one of the propositions. I'll have to go back to Ballotpedia and see if that reminds me. The same thing happened to me last year and we kept trying to figure out if the propositions we'd voted for were the ones that got approved. Hopefully this time I've learned my lesson!

NPR has been airing interviews with various people talking about the logic used in favor of supporting former reality TV star Donald J. Trump. One of them mentioned that Evangelical Christians tend to say that God uses flawed tools; another said that fellow Catholics told him that he couldn't be Christian and vote Democrat.

Of course as humans we're all imperfect. But I think there's a huge difference between a flawed human being and an actively evil person.

Apparently King David is a popular example of a flawed tool. Wikipedia's synopsis of the David and Bathsheba story is:

Moved by lust at the sight of her, David calls for her to be brought to him and sleeps with her, impregnating her. In an effort to hide his misdeeds, David tries to call on Uriah to return home from war, hoping that the two will have relations and that he will be able to pass the child off as belonging to Uriah. But Uriah, being a disciplined soldier, refuses to leave his post. So, David murders him by proxy, ordering all of Uriah's comrades to abandon him in the midst of battle, so that he is killed by an opposing army. Following Uriah's death, David takes Bathsheba as his eighth wife.

which really doesn't sound like exemplary behavior, y'know? Even worse, the Wikipedia article on David says, "The text in the Bible does not explicitly state whether Bathsheba consented to sex."(Notes 55 through 58 are cited.)

TBH I'm really confused about why anyone would pick David as a role model, but hey, ancient civilization, different mores, and there are bound to be a lot of things lost in translation there. And although I'm Catholic, I'm on the liberal end of the spectrum. I keep church and state separate, and so do the Jesuits that give the homily to my congregation on Sundays.

The messages that I've been getting from them over the past couple of years have been consistent: welcome the stranger. Love your neighbor as yourself. Any stranger can be your neighbor. Care for the widow and the orphan. Life is sacred, and not just at conception.

These are not the messages that I've been hearing from the Republican party for my entire life. Lately, their message has been: deport the stranger. Don't trust your neighbors. Strangers can't become neighbors. Care for the rich and powerful. Only the life of an unborn child is sacred.

How is an attitude like that at all Christian?

I find it really frustrating that the pro-life movement is so focused on unborn children. What about providing support for the children after they're born? or protecting children seeking asylum? or protecting human beings and our planet from corporate predators? (links are to political cartoons on these topics, because that's all the brain function I have left today.)

I also find it creepy that Holy Mother Church remains so focused on the virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This strikes me as prurient interest on the part of a bunch of sex-deprived old men. But that's a slightly heretical rant for another day...

Yesterday was the first day on which vote-by-mail ballots could be mailed to California voters.

We received postcards asking us to confirm our address and our intention to vote by mail in mid-September; then we received a postcard informing us of the vote-by-mail process a week later; sometime in September we received the voter information guide. I'm not sure how long it usually takes for us to receive our actual ballots. I've been a little nervous about this particular election, for reasons that I won't expand on at this juncture, so I was kind of wondering how long we'd have to wait.

I just got the usual email from USPS letting me know that I have mail and packages arriving today, and today's notice--unlike usual--doesn't include pictures of junk mail that I'd rather not receive in the first place. Instead, it has three glorious pictures of our vote-by-mail ballots.

Our mail carrier usually serves our neighborhood in late afternoon, so tonight I'll take a stroll to the mailbox and pick up our ballots. I probably won't finish all the necessary research before the end of the week, because dear lord were there a lot of propositions on the California ballot!, but hopefully we'll be able to vote this weekend and return our ballots on Monday.

I'm really impressed with USPS. Like, in general, but especially at the moment because the volume of election mail this year is going to be epic.