Lowell and the GOP: Zealotry on Parade

Consider Meredith Marie Lowell/Anne Lowery, an animal rights activist from Ohio with a desire to kill for her cause:

Woman tries to hire hit man to kill fur-wearer: FBI

(Reuters) - An Ohio woman who likened freeing lab animals to liberating Holocaust survivors was being held in custody Wednesday on charges she used Facebook to try to hire a hit man to kill a person at random for wearing fur, prosecutors said.

The details of the story just sink further into the morass of "why weren't you thinking" that the first paragraph revealed. Lowell was so poor at covering her tracks, she used library computers near her house to post to Facebook. She must've had the idea that using an assumed name would be enough. She was taken in by an FBI agent who she talked to about liberating lab animals, claiming it was akin to saving Holocaust victims.

And to add insult to injury, she only wanted to pay the "hit man" $850 to pick a random fur-wearing person and kill them. Which she didn't think would be at all illegal. Did she only watch the first half of Mafia movies and assume everyone got away with it? And since when does a hit man work for that small a fee? I've never priced the market, but I daresay buying a murder must be more expensive than that. There are escorts who charge more than that for a date. Even if you're opposed to all animal testing and fur-wearing, it should be obvious that Lowell/Lowery went way too far.

She's a small example of the larger problem with zealotry that Rick Santorum has been demonstrating as of late, not to mention the GOP's concerted attempt to force women to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds before they have an abortion. Over-the-top pronouncements, a clear disconnect with how the world works, and sloppy attempts to force their will onto undeserving people they'll never meet.

Even if you don't wholly agree with the analogy, what point is there in forcing people to go through that kind of procedure or claiming that sending people to college is an attempt to turn them into atheists? And why do something to help that party stay in power? They're clearly working toward making the USA a theocracy, something our Founding Fathers would have protested had anyone proposed it over 230 years ago.

The FBI exists to stop people like Lowery. Since the Republican Party is dependent on the will of the voters, it's the people who get to decide whether they can wreak their havoc and work to stop them. That is why, now more than ever, I want Obama and the Democrats to win and win big in 2012. I'm not sure what I can do, considering my disabilities. But I can at least speak up on occasion.