Once again here I am

Once again here I am April 28, 2015

• Television preacher and failed presidential candidate Pat Robertson is sometimes helpful for developing my vocabulary and my self-understanding. Thanks to Uncle Pat, for example, I now realize that I am a “habitual heterosexual.”

• A Mississippi judge offers an essay-writing option for teenagers caught drinking alcohol. Rather than losing their license for 90 days, Harrison County Justice Court Judge Albert Fountain gives them the option of writing a 1,000-word essay on the book of Revelation.

ACHBCover21Fountain insists that this topic is just a suggestion and not the required topic, but he thinks the book of Revelation is a good subject for underage drinkers because “I think what’s wrong with the country today is that we’ve taken Christ and God out of everything.” That’s a Narrative of Decline two-fer right there — fatalistic premillennial dispensationalism combined with a stale rant about “what’s wrong with this country today.”

Underage drinkers from Harrison County are hereby invited to copy and paste anything I’ve written here about the book of Revelation and to submit it for any essays they may be invited to write in Fountain’s court.

But please don’t take that to mean that I’m soft on underage drinking. Far from it. I think underage drinkers should be tried as adults.

Laura Turner takes a closer look at “Collide” — that so-called “Tinder for Christians” app. The clues she lists — that led to her confirming — that this isn’t a product of the evangelical subculture are spot on. Turner didn’t fulfill my request by signing up with Ruth 3:4 as her favorite verse, but her pick — Ecclesiastes 1:2 — was still artfully done.

One quibble, though: Turner is right that evangelicals don’t usually introduce themselves by identifying their favorite Bible verse. But the app also resembles a swipe-able high school yearbook and, well, take a look at the senior quotes in the yearbooks from any evangelical school and you’ll see a lot of “life verses.”

• “We do not know what happened to Gov. LePage as a child, that made him so vindictive against people who have less than he does …” That’s from Evan Hurst at Wonkette on the Maine Republican’s efforts to prevent poor people from using assistance (“food stamps”) to purchase sliced bologna from the supermarket deli. All of what Hurst calls “Prohibited Poor People Food Theater” is clueless and obnoxious, but the GOP’s latest poor-stomping move in Maine is particularly absurd. They’re claiming that people eating sliced bologna are living high on the hog — but that’s not the part of the hog they use to make bologna.

In any case, Hurst is right about the motivation behind such efforts. It’s not virtuous or emotionally healthy to seethe with resentment toward those who have more than you do, but it’s not irrational. But it is irrational to seethe with resentment toward those who have less than you do. And it’s even more vicious and emotionally destructive.

• Fr. Jonathan Morris, R-Fox News, says that an atheist president would be untrustworthy because such a person would not believe in “eternal consequences.”  Without the threat of eternal damnation in Hell, the argument goes, an atheist president might just think that anything goes and he might run around sexually abusing children or covering up for those who do. And that sort of thing wouldn’t only make that one individual president untrustworthy, it would make the entire institution suspect until it demonstrated radical, meaningful repentance and reform.

• On Thursday, April 23, The Liar Tony Perkins appeared on a right-wing Iowa radio show to discuss the impeachment of Supreme Court justices who might decide in favor of marriage equality for same-sex couples. “We will impeach your sorry keisters,” host Jan Mickelson said of any justices who might vote to overturn state bans of same-sex marriage.

“I don’t disagree with you,” TLTP said. “I think you are absolutely right.”

Three days later, on Sunday, April 26, The Liar Tony Perkins appeared on CBS news’ Face the Nation and was asked about that conversation. And there, on national television, The Liar Tony Perkins denied that he had ever called for impeachment.

• Since I am nothing if not fashionable, here’s John Oliver’s look at cheap clothing on Last Week Tonight.

 


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