Re: OT: demise of COBOL WAS: Infinite Loops and Explicit Exits

From: Chuck Stevens (charles.stevens_at_unisys.com)
Date: 12/01/04 

Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 16:42:37 -0800

"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@enternet.co.nz> wrote in message
news:314fu2F3472ddU1@individual.net...

> Don't you think this thread is getting, like, surreal...?

Perhaps; I can see how you would think so. But some parts of the US are
*extremely* conservative, and Orange County, California is one of them.
Maybe you don't run into folks like this:

I've personally run across the folks from Westboro Baptist Church and their
ilk, I've seen what they trumpet as Christianity firsthand.

One gay couple I knew shared a life together for something approaching
thirty years. They owned a home together, with the appropriate paperwork.
One of them died, and his parents came in, stripped the house of all of its
contents, threw the surviver out onto the street, and convinced the probate
judge to declare the will invalid on the grounds that the survivor was a
gold-digger who had corrupted their son.

I knew another gay man who was told to his face by a co-worker that it was
not only his God-given right but his God-given duty to stone him to death in
front of the company offices for his sins, and that he personally resented
the fact that neither the company nor the government would allow him to
exercize freely the tenets of his religion.

I know another gay man who was literally beaten to the ground by a group of
self-proclaimed Christians wielding Bibles as weapons for the crime of
trying to walk away from their proclamations as to what an abomination
before God he was.

I've encountered people who feel that the men who killed Matthew Shepard
made an oopsie for which they're obviously forgiven because they're
obviously Christian, while Matthew Shepard clearly deserved to be murdered
and to burn in hell forever because he was gay.

Would that these events were surreal. Unfortunately, they aren't.

    -Chuck Stevens

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