If You're Going to Practice Magic

learn to do it right.

When I read this story, my jaw dropped:



CALLER: Yeah doctor. Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night.

How hard did you pray because I see one of our members was missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? One of our members died? How hard did you pray senator? Did you pray hard enough

HOST: Senator Barasso, he was referring to Senator Inhofe, who was not part of the round of voting this morning.

BARASSO: The votes today, they needed 60 votes in favor of the bill. Senator Inhofe is opposed to the bill, and whether he was there or not didn’t make any difference. There was no way that Jim Inhofe was going to vote for the bill, the senator from Oklahoma. So that’s why he wasn’t there this morning.

HOST: Do you know where he was, senator, why he wasn’t able to make the vote this morning?

This was after Sen. Tom Coburn (R-The Scary Place) called upon Christians to pray that a senator would miss the vote on health-care reform.

Speaking against the health care bill on the Senate floor just moments ago, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) expressed his hope that a Senator of the majority caucus would not be able to make the vote:

What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray.

OK -- how sick is that? First, it's pretty sick to pray that some senator is going to miss a vote, by whatever means, but then to pray that somebody dies? And then get all weepy because you think you missed your target and one of your guys bought it?

I had a huge argument with my sister once about prayer versus spellwork -- she's a fairly fervent Christian, or was at the time, but not a whackjob like the person in that story. At any rate, she insisted that prayer and spellwork were in no way the same thing or even similar. I don't see all that much difference -- you're using words to focus energy in an attempt to influence events. Seems pretty straightforward to me. (And if you've got a whole group praying together for the same thing, how is that different than a coven doing a working?)

Full disclosure: I don't do a whole lot of magic. That's not the point of being a Witch, as far as I'm concerned. I have, however, done enough spellwork to know that it just doesn't work that way. And Witches at least know enough to know that whatever you send comes back at you, whether you believe in the Three-Fold Rule or not: even coming back at the same strength is bad enough, so don't go sending out bad shit, much less death wishes.

(Sidebar: Interestingly enough, it's exactly that sort of thing that leads to the first crisis in the first volume of Ze -- one of Konoe's spells comes back at him and tears his arm off. Seems the Japanese have the same understanding of magic workings that Western Witches do.)

And the moral of this story is, once again, the Christianist right has no morals. As if we had any doubt. And apparently, some of them are pretty stupid.

Update: From TPM, some concern that the phone call may have been a hoax.