Obama, his queer supporters and Lady Gaga...Huh?

[Unvarnished]

I like your signature, Deadspace.

Reason defined: realistic; of sound mind
Antonyms: illogical, irrational, ridiculous, unrealistic, unreasonable, unsound

A religion that declares war on REASON.........?!!! Will not stand out against it for a long period....!!!!!! [Quote] Kant, the Kant dictionary.

Another memorable quote:

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave. -William Drummond (1585-1649)

[LaydeeLiberty]

Obama Lifts a Ban on Entry Into U.S. by H.I.V.-Positive People - NYTimes.com

[Unvarnished]

Originally Posted by LaydeeLiberty

Obama Lifts a Ban on Entry Into U.S. by H.I.V.-Positive People - NYTimes.com

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled, wretched refuse upon our shores, -dunce- yearning to take what he can get away with.

http://www.boloji.com/literature/00104.htm
Emma Lazarus

...Only when she threw herself wholeheartedly into her Jewish subject matter did those veils and screens begin to come down. Lazarus tackled the issue of anti-Semitism head on. Her poems and essays in The Century and other publications appealed to the non-Jewish public to recognize the part Christian prejudice and persecutions had played in creating a "Jewish Problem," where the Christians viewed the Jews as aliens who refused to relinquish either their religious beliefs or their group cliques. For Jews, the "problem" was the fact that others defined them as a problem (Encarta, "Jews"). Her writings in the Jewish magazines appealed to her own people to reform and renew themselves. With determination, she called on Jews to establish a national homeland in Palestine as a haven from anti-Semitism, and to that end she organized the Society for the improvement of East European Jews to help resettle victims of Russian oppression in Palestine (Jacob, 133).

...Lazarus is seen as a person writing from the outside, a person set apart from the people she sought to guide and aide, a defender of the Jews who is hardly one of them. Absorbed, with no religious affiliations of her own, she had little appreciation for the traditions and rituals that governed Jewish life in Eastern Europe for centuries. She viewed the immigrants as backward, their religion as "superstition." Her image of Jewish renewal was of a return to an idealized past, to that heroic biblical age that Christians so accepted. "The Banner of the Jew," a poem part of Lazarus's Songs of a Semite, portrays her feelings about the whole matter.

...Wealthy and well bred, she had little understanding of the skills and culture the new arrivals brought with them. Concerned lest American Jews be seen as disloyal, she envisaged a Jewish homeland in Palestine only as a haven for the oppressed of other nations and not as a national center for all Jews. In making that distinction she also recognized that sending the improvished immigrants off to Palestine would ease the insecurity their presence caused American Jews (Young, 60). As sympathetic as she was to their plight, she needed to maintain the separateness of Jews like herself from them.

Lazarus's greatest accomplishment for the Jewish cause was her poem entitled "The New Colossus." It is an Italian sonnet written by Lazarus to express her belief in the United States as the haven or home of Europe's "poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe" the fresh air of democracy. The sonnet was written for a fundraiser for the building of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, a gift to the United States from France. The essence of the verse, however, seems to be an analysis of the Statue and the spirit of the gift.

"The New Colossus"

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

As the poem is formulated like the Italian sonnet, the first eight lines present an awe-embracing Statue, "A mighty woman with a torch." These eight lines symbolize the essence of the Statue itself while the concluding six lines present a turnabout, which elaborates on what the Stature stands for, what the State would say if it could talk. Lazarus choice of the title is an allusion to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a giant bronze statue of the Sun God Helios that had overlooked the Greek City's harbor. However, the Statue is "not like the brazen giant with conquering limbs astride from land to land," rather she is a mighty woman who welcomes the world, a mother of exiles. Furthermore, Lazarus personifies the Statue to state and popularize America's mission as a refuge for immigrants, one of America's great national policies.

In her own time, many saw her as a beacon of light, much like the Statue of Liberty itself, reaching out to downtrodden immigrants, the "wretched refuse" of other lands, in the words of her famous poem. Yet her work has not held up well over time. Except for her sonnet, it is mostly unknown and unread. It has not held up in part because her talent was not a major one (many of her poems are insubstantial; her essays too antagonistic). Essentially, however, it has not held up because much of it no longer rings true. Like her letters, her poems reflect the discomfort of a woman who was not totally at home in the Christian world she inhabited but had not quite found her footing in the Jewish one either. It has the feel of outsideness, of a writer who held herself too much apart, too much above the people she sought to defend and counsel. The outsideness has stood in the way of its survival...