Forty-five years ago on a trip into the North Borneo rain forest in the Malaysian State of Sabah, I bought a couple of totems, baskets and a machete from Kadasun Dusuns whom I had hired to guide me and a few other people to the top of Mount Kinabalu. What a trip!  The two small hand-carved totems fit my writing today.  Although they still displayed old skull trophies in their longhouses when I met them, Dusuns were no longer the feared head hunters of Borneo. 

O.K., O.K., so the senator from Texas has sashayed into the bull pen ahead of all the other “sort of” and “maybe” aspirants to the highest office in the land.  Ted Cruz who has declared his intention to be president has promised to lead a triumphal march from fundamentalist Christian Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. He declares his ultimate triumph will be eradication of “every word of Obamacare.”  He also promises that in what he hopes will be a Cruz through his first four years in the White House, he will eliminate abortion, gay marriage, the IRS, and all gun control. He promises to deregulate all energy production, to break the government down to something Tea Party leaders can manage, and to kill whatever it is overseas that needs killing to protect the American Constitution. In his latest pronouncement on gun control he promises a time when, “y’all define gun control like we do in Texas: Gun control is when you hit at what you aim at.”  

The man is no dummy.  He graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. He knows exactly what he is doing, and whether he believes what he says he believes or not, he is cock-sure that what he is doing is the right thing to do to get him picked by the Republican Party to be its candidate and to get him elected to the highest office in America.  Only a relatively short time ago after he won the runoff in Texas that put him in the Senate, his victory speech in essence declared himself to be the American dream and that the dream comes from God.  In his speech he thanked everybody from Ron Paul to his young daughters and Sarah Palin and, of course, his mother, his father, and the Holy Ghost. In a recent speech to to the Homeschool Iowa conference he told the audience, “We love our children and we take seriously the biblical admonition to raise them up to walk in the godly manner.”  

…And now to another proposal slithering out of the far right of American politics:  Today’s L.A. Times reports on the the efforts of Huntington Beach lawyer Matt McLaughlin who wants to get enough signatures to put his god-inspired initiative on the November 2016 ballot in California.  He calls it the “Sodomite Suppression Act,” which would criminalize sodomy and put to death those convicted of it.  No kidding.  There really is a lawyer in Huntington Beach by the name of Matt McLaughlin, and that lawyer, also not kidding, is serious about strengthening legally the resolve of religious organizations to continue to marginalize LGBT citizens of the United States of America.  Of course, McLaughlin's grossly offensive, inhumane solution for what he sees as the problem of ungodly sexual orientation is not likely to make it onto the ballot; but the holocaust he proposes should at least get him barred from legal practice.