- The Left is suddenly aghast at heterodoxy.
- BHO’s lawless prosecution of dubious war.
- Carpet-bombing platitudes.
- Didja hear the one about the gay legal alien lawncare worker?
- Stories versus real life.
- Fire from heaven.
The thought didn’t originate with me, more’s the pity, because it was prescient: as Mitt Romney emerges as the GOP front runner, the Democrat Left will develop a keen appreciation for Christian orthodoxy, the better to divide or demoralize GOP voters.
Wednesday’s Maureen Dowd column is the first instance I’ve noted:
At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.
Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.
“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”
…
Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”
Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”
The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.
Memo to Dowd: I cannot imagine staying home, let alone voting to re-elect President Obama (whose record on religious liberty is becoming execrable), because of Mitt’s Mormonism.
Given equally competent and ideologically compatible candidates, I’d surely give a slight edge to a more orthodox Christian over a less orthodox Christian or a non-Christian (in which category I must include Mormonism).
But the world has never set me up with a nice, neat decision like that. Too often, it has given me on one side a completely preditable right-wing hawk sectarian, who thinks he’s entitled to the vote of every Real Christian®, on the other an intriguing candidate of dubious orthodoxy or who declines to talk about his faith.
The only reasons to continue discussing Romney’s Mormonism, it seems to me, are illegitimate in the context of Presidential politics.
I gave him one, but only one, freebie drone assassination of a U.S. Citizen. Add “murderous and lawless” to “execrable on religious freedom” as adjectives for the current POTUS.
Meanwhile, back on the homefront, the devil is still in the details, but elective politics these days is all about carpet-bombing platitudes from 40,000 feet rather than targeting a problem carefully.
Did you hear the one about the totally hypocritical Presidential candidate who hired a lawn service that hired a guy who had an illegal alien boyfriend who once went hunting at a place in Texas that had an offensive name on a rock and he didn’t even paint over that name for a long time?
Whence “Silly Season.”
“Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.” So we tell sensible stories about life instead of telling the truth.
The appointed Gospel reading for the day (Orthodox, new calendar):
Now it came to pass, when the time had come for Him to be received up, that He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before His face. And as they went, they entered a village of the Samaritans, to prepare for Him. But they did not receive Him, because His face was set for the journey to Jerusalem. And when His disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did?”
But He turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.” And they went to another village.
Luke 9:51-56. I read it, thinking how others were ready to call down fire. Then I read a devotional and wondered what manner of spirit I am of. Then I surfed the web and realized that I’m just fine and it’s everybody else who’s calling down fire from heaven.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.
* * * * *
Bon appetit!
To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett (weird name) to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 