You Say "Witch" Like It's A Bad Thing?

Stephen King tried to warn us....

I find it ironic that many folks on both sides of the aisle now think that Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell is crazy because "she's a witch". I think O'Donnell is foolish for many reasons including the fact that she doesn't know what a witch really is, let alone what one is for. (1)

From what I've seen of her, she does not have enough intelligence, courage, compassion, honesty, learning, critical thinking skills or personal wisdom to be one.

Sia

Further Reading:

How It's Done by Hecate

(I agree with H. The young woman was lying)

Training as a Green Witch

The Christians and the Pagans

Endnotes:

(1) Pratchett and the Pagans

"Certainly witchcraft for Tiffany has very little to do with magic as people generally understand it. It has an awful lot to do with taking responsibility for yourself and taking responsibility also for the less able people and, up to a certain point, guarding your society. This is based on how witchcraft really was, I suspect. The witch was the village herbalist, the midwife, the person who knew things. She would sit up with the dying, lay out the corpses, deliver the newborn. Witches tended to be needed when human beings were meeting the dangerous edges of their lives, the places where there is no map. They don't mess around with tinkly spells; they get their hands dirty."

Terry Pratchett's next book, I Shall Wear Midnight, features his young witch-in-training, Tiffany Aching, and hits US bookstores on Sept. 28th.

Hat Tip: To the reason.com blog for the poster art. Their notes on Ms. O'Donnell are worth reading.

Update 9/22

Starhawk has responded in the Washington Post and she speaks not just for Wiccans but for many Pagans when she says this:

...had O'Donnell really 'dabbled' in Witchcraft, she might have learned that ....Witches do not worship Satan--we consider the Devil to be a purely Christian construct. We see nature as sacred, and human beings as part of nature. Our spirituality does not require belief in things we can't see--but rather an attitude of respect, awe and wonder at the everyday miracles we can see, the great and common mysteries of birth, growth, death and regeneration in the fall of a leaf or the phases of the moon, in the cycles of our lives and the turning of the seasons.

O'Donnell might have learned that Witches see all of life as interconnected, that we are taught to respect other people, to treat one another with compassion, generosity and honor, to protect the earth and to live in balance with nature. We can only imagine how her life, her crusades and her politics might have been shaped by an early encounter with the Goddess, for whom the body is a temple, sexuality is a path of deep and sacred communion...