No Floor Yet
AJ Robinson

When I worked for Disney, I had a little comedy routine I used to do for my fellow cast members. That’s what the company calls its employees, cast members. They always loved hearing it. Here’s how it went,

“So, I walked into the HR Department and the guy asked me for my employment history. I told him that after I got expelled from high school for selling exam papers I became a crack dealer until I learned how to set up my own meth lab, but when it blew up I got busted and ended up doing a hard five years in the state pen, during which I got hooked on heroin. After I made parole, I got clean and went to work for Disney for five years. Now, I’m looking to relocate to this area because I got married to the one girlfriend I’m sure that her five kids are mine. The HR Director took one look at me, leaned across the table and said, ‘You used to work for Disney!’ With that, I got the job.”

They’d all laugh, as it was incredibly farfetched, but it did serve to make a point. Working for Disney earned you major bragging rights that, for lack of a better term, allow me to gloss over certain other deficiencies on my resume. Granted, my funny story took that ability to an absurd extreme, but, hey, that’s what made it funny, a bead of truth.

Today, I see such circumstances go, literally, to reductio ad absurdum. Typically, this is when a person takes a statement to an impractical conclusion in an effort to negate it. For example, as Roy Moore said, after losing a Senatorial seat to Democrat Doug Jones, ‘God will set this right.’

Well, now we’ve reached that level in our politics. We elected a president that admitted to sexually assaulting women. People thought we could go no further, that we’d reached the “floor,” when it came to lowering our standards for elected office.

We hadn’t.

We now have a man running for office that has women accusing him of essentially child molestation. Technically, the accusation is of hebephilia, a sexual interest in pubescent or early adolescent children. That, in and of itself, is not the new “floor.”

No, the floor, for now, is there are people saying they will vote for the man despite believing the women. Think about that statement for a moment and ponder its meaning. Voters are saying they would sooner see a hebephile in the United States Senate than they would a Democrat. As if that isn’t bad enough, many of these people claim to be Christians.

Somehow, I think Jesus would disagree. When, in Matthew 19:14 he says “Let the little children come to Me and so not hinder them! For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

The next line is “And after He had placed His hands on them, He went on from there …” I somehow do not think he was suggesting we should lay hands on children in an inappropriate manner! Yet, these so-called Christians are literally saying such a man is preferable to someone who doesn’t have an “R” after their name on the ballot.

I am incapable of wrapping my head around that. I used to think it was “Nation before party.” Then the GOP, the Republicans, went to “Party before nation” in an effort to block Obama from doing anything, even things they agreed with.

Now the GOP has lowered itself to one simple idea. “Power before all else, even our faith.” That is fascism, putting the acquisition and holding of power ahead of all else.

Has America truly dropped so low? I hope not, as that’s an America where I don’t want to live.

The 12 December 2017 special Senatorial election in Alabama is over. Decency won, although its opponent, decadence, refused to concede, saying god would surely turn the results around. We shall see.