Politics, Religion, and Knitting

Originally published  Tuesday, July 29, 2008

I belong to several knitting mail lists. One thing they all have in common is that politics and religion are verboten. Knitting is fraught with its own highly flammable topics without adding the über combustibility of politics and religion.

Every once in a while, though, some knitting list member loses all sense of judgment and posts something of a highly political or religious nature which causes a big kerfuffle on the list. Such an incident happened just today on the EZasPi list. Thank goodness we have a highly-involved and firm list mom, Diana, who put a stop to the fire before it became a conflagration.

Here’s what happened. An e-mail message extremely critical of presidential candidate Barack Obama, that was written by an army captain serving in Afghanistan, was forwarded to the list by a woman who claimed she was friends with the captain and his wife. The substance of the message, which pertains to Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East, is factually flat-out wrong and quite malicious. It has been “debunked” on the Snopes web site:  http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/afghanistan.asp

I don’t know what could have possessed this woman to send a message of this nature to our knitting list. Crap like that doesn’t belong anywhere. Shameful, really.☹

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