Thumbsucking Mohler pleads innocence

Apparently stung by the backlash against fundamentalist yahoos following Friday’s awful events in Colorado Springs, Albert the Pious points toward something he co-signed in 1994 called The Nashville Declaration, which condemns violence against abortion providers.

Few educated adults will have the stomach to read all the way through, or through a tedious analysis of the entire thing, so I’m going to point to just a couple of its offenses against reason and ordinary decency.

2.1 Murder, the culpable killing of a human being, is an extraordinarily grave offense against civil law as well as against the moral law of God (Ex. 20:13) on which all morally legitimate civil law is ultimately based.

2.2 The Bible teaches that each human life is sacred, for every human being is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27). For this reason, each human life bears divinely granted and immeasurable value. Human beings are not free to take the lives of others, for those lives belong to God, their Creator. This is the meaning of the divine prohibition of murder in the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not kill” means that God prohibits the unjustified taking, and mandates the protection, of human life.

The first problem, right off the bat, is that Mohler grounds his argument on the Genesis creation tale, which never happened; he is reasoning from premises which have incontestably been proven false. The second problem is that, even if the fairy tale were true, Mohler would have no grounds for concluding that every life is sacred; not only does the cited passage not say that, the god of the Old Testament is a wanton and pitiless killer.

And all “morally legitimate” civil law is based on the Bible? Seriously? Only theologians can tell us what the law is, then?

3.4 We have already argued that, given the sacredness of human life, the burden of proof is on any who would morally justify its deliberate extinguishing. The terrible flaw at the heart of federal abortion law is that abortions are currently permitted while requiring a woman to meet only a minimal burden of proof which may be imposed by state laws. In terms of gestational life, the federal government has wrongfully abdicated its responsibility to protect the innocent and to establish and enforce stringent criteria for the justifiable taking of human life.

The woman who wishes to terminate a pregnancy has a burden of proof? Proof to be presented to whom? A committee of theologians? The very point of the decision is to rid a pregnant woman of the interference of busybodies like Mohler. And on what grounds is the autonomy of the affected couple not deserving of the protection of the laws? They are fully-formed adults, in the here and now.

But as we can see from Mohler’s indignant tweets about Planned Parenthood over the past few months, he has been as happy as anybody else to stoke the incoherent rage that culminated in those shootings.

Not once, so far as I can tell, did Mohler utter a single word these past few months (not even wink-wink) to the effect that he sure hopes one of his brain-damaged fans doesn’t take it in mind to go fix those evil folk. Honestly: I don’t believe the man even possesses the ordinary human capacity to feel shame.

Holy Men like Mohler are only too happy to accept money from fools who take them seriously; they should share in the moral burden of being taken seriously, too.