• Yil-Jan Lin on how “Americans use the Book of Revelation to talk about immigration – and always have.”
Pastor Robert Jeffress, who preached at Trump’s 2017 inauguration church service, told viewers on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” “God is not against walls, walls are not ‘un-Christian,’ the Bible says even heaven is going to have a wall around it.” The Conservative Political Action Conference held a panel in 2017 titled “If Heaven Has a Gate, A Wall, and Extreme Vetting, Why Can’t America?” There are even bumper stickers that say, “Heaven Has A Wall and Strict Immigration Policy / Hell Has Open Borders.”
This stuff is, frankly, dumb. Nearly illiterate.
“Hell Has Open Borders”? The extrabiblical construct of “Hell” these folks believe in is blasphemous folklore, but by their own lights, “Hell” isn’t considered a place anyone is free to leave at any time. This is the one thing they claim not to believe about “Hell” — that it has been “harrowed,” it’s walls and gates destroyed,
And as for “Heaven Has a Gate [and] a Wall,” well, yes, the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation does include a wall and a gate — twelve gates, actually. And here is what it says about that:
On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.
Revelation is also a book that offers visions of Heaven that includes: “A great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” If that’s the book you’re turning to for “biblical” support for your violation of the biblical commandment to welcome and embrace the foreigner, stranger, alien, and immigrant, then either you haven’t actually read the book or you cannot actually read.
Also: you’re just being a jerk. Because you cannot be anti-immigrant or anti-foreigner without being a jerk. Don’t be a jerk. (This is also an oft-repeated divine commandment.)
See earlier: “The Pearly Gates Are Never, Ever Closed.” That ends with this:
Revelation 21 tells us that the Pearly Gates are never closed and we stubbornly insist on imagining that they are never open. That doesn’t tell us any more about what it is that John was trying to say, but it tells us a lot about what it is we wanted to hear.
• This is a darkly hilarious story from MAGA-world: “GOP Harasses Nuns In Hunt For THE FRAUDS.”
Trump is probably going to lose Pennsylvania. This is probably because he’s not really even trying to win Pennsylvania. His strategy here is just to spew enough nonsense that the result can be “disputed” enough to let Scott Perry and Doug Mastriano find a way to get John Roberts to just award the commonwealth’s electoral votes to their preferred candidate.
In service of that, they’ve got people like Cliff Maloney investigating alleged voting fraud by pointing out that a single building in Erie, Pa., is listed as the address for 53 women voters. That seemed suspicious to Cliff. Women, after all, cannot be trusted to vote in the way that Cliff thinks they should.
Turns out the address is home to the Benedictine Sisters of Erie:
When it was pointed out to him that convents tend to have multiple individuals residing at the same address, he insisted that no, it was the children who are confused.
“Now the commies are coming in claiming that ‘nuns live there’ or ‘you idiot just google it’ WRONG,” he huffed. “Our team leader spoke to the one person there and they claimed ‘NO ONE LIVES HERE.’”
The Benedictine Sisters of Erie, who do indeed have a robust online presence, responded that they “take no issue with knocking on doors to increase citizen participation in elections” but, they do object to “claiming false information as true in an effort to discredit differing views or affiliations.”
“We want to call Cliff Maloney to account for his blatantly false post that accuses our sisters of fraud. We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie,” Sister Stephanie Schmidt, prioress, said in a statement published online.
Seems conclusive, but Maloney isn’t giving up. “we’ve got our team continuing to analyze the situation,” he says. They’re women after all. They’re obviously up to something.
• In other news from here in the Keystone State: “Appalachia’s Ugliest Cryptid Drowns In Its Own Tears.” I’d never heard of a “squonk” before. Guess it’s a western Pennsylvania thing.
• The title for this post comes from Regina Spektor’s “On the Radio,” which I’ve had in my head ever since Trump’s weird Pennsylvania “Town Hall,” where instead of answering questions he just stood and waved his hands while playing “Ave Maria” and all nine minutes of “November Rain,” the ultimate radio-DJ-has-to-pee song.
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