Robert Knight is kind of a journeyman utility infielder of the religious right. I forget which team he’s with these days — might be the Family Research Council, might be Concerned Women of America or one of the others. It’s one of those groups that insists that good Christians must have no fellowship with unrighteousness and no communion with darkness.
Except for the Unification Church, because the Moonies’ newspaper is a reliable source of right-wing partisan hackery and that’s what’s most important, after all. And so Robert Knight regularly writes for The Washington Times.
Knight’s latest column seems like it should’ve been easy. It’s a standard babykillerbabykillerbabykiller attack directed at Hillary Clinton. Knight has been writing variations of this same attack since the early 1990s, so you’d think he’d have it down by now. Alas, though, Knight gets his Canaanite religions confused and manages somehow to get all of his biblical allusions backwards.
The former secretary of state, Knight writes, has “the religious sensibilities of the priests of Baal or the rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Baal? When you’re trying to paint your political opponents as evil baby-killers, it doesn’t work to accuse them of secretly believing in fertility gods. Molech is the Canaanite god you need to invoke here. When you’re accusing the baby-killers of killing babies to honor their false god of baby-killing, you should always use Molech. A veteran player like Knight really should know that by now.
But the bigger problem with Knight’s column is that his two biblical allusions there both work against what he’s trying to argue. Hillary Clinton, he’s asserting, is a murderous proponent of mass-death. Like every opponent of those who are “pro-life,” she must therefore be pro-death.
To reinforce this accusation, Knight references two stories from the Bible: the story of the priests of Baal, and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both of those stories contain the element Knight wants to introduce here: mass slaughter and a feast for proud death.
But, oddly, the people Knight tries to associate with Clinton are the victims of that mass-slaughter.
Here’s how that story of Sodom and Gomorrah ends:
Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.
And here’s what happened to those priests of Baal — 450 of them, according to 1 Kings 18:
Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of them escape.” Then they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the Wadi Kishon, and killed them there.
These are two stories it’s probably best to avoid if you’re trying to argue that being “pro-life” is the paramount ethical principle.
More to the point, if you’re trying to present yourself as a champion of “religious liberty,” then comparing yourself to Elijah at the Wadi Kishon doesn’t really strengthen your case.
That suggests that your idea of “religious liberty” only applies to whatever sect you think of as the true religion. The followers of false gods, you’re saying, don’t deserve this freedom. They don’t have the same rights as the followers of the One True Religion. The only rights they have are the rights to be rounded up, dragged to the river, and killed.
That’s hard to reconcile with the slogan of “religious liberty.” It’s not easy to square with the slogan of “pro-life” either.
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