FOX News host Jeanine Pirro is at the center of an ongoing controversy concerning a remark she made last week about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The relevant clip is below.
Pirro was suspended for two weeks, and you-know-who had a regular hissy-fit.
Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro. The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against @FoxNews hosts who are doing too well. Fox …..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
….must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country. The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them. Be strong & prosper, be weak & die! Stay true….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
….to the people that got you there. Keep fighting for Tucker, and fight hard for @JudgeJeanine. Your competitors are jealous – they all want what you’ve got – NUMBER ONE. Don’t hand it to them on a silver platter. They can’t beat you, you can only beat yourselves!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
Certainly, Pirro was wrong to identify the hijab with Sharia exclusively; many Muslim women, probably a majority, wear the hijab and want nothing to do with Sharia law. She was not wrong, however, to raise the larger question of religion and loyalty. Is there any religion on earth (besides Buddhism) that doesn’t insist that its prophet must have priority over corporeal authority?
Let’s be clear about this, too: Christianity makes the identical demand.
In 2 Corinthians 6:14, the Apostle Paul commands that Christians must “not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” This command reaches far beyond marriage, but it certainly includes the covenant of marriage within its span. Paul’s principle is clear: The Christian’s commitment to Christ is determinative of his or her other commitments. A believer must not marry an unbeliever, for this violates the very logic of the Gospel and the believer’s union with Christ.
The believer in Christ acknowledges him as Savior and Lord, with an allegiance that exceeds any earthly commitment. When two believers are married, they share this mutual commitment and are commonly dedicated to the Lordship of Christ.
Mohler is the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest seminaries in the United States — and this is what he teaches. SBTS graduates, in turn, howl and bellow that teaching from pulpits all across the country, and all around the world. Southern Baptists are very definite: Jesus first, and everybody else — your family and your country included — can have the leftovers.
Southern Baptists take this stuff seriously, too. During the 2016 annual meeting a motion was debated to condemn display of the Confederate flag. That debate quickly digressed into a discussion of loyalties in general, and the following quotes are a very small sample of the prevailing sentiment in that convention.
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“I am a Christian first and an American second.”
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“Following Christ will always trump being an American.”
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“If I ever have to choose between the cross and the American flag, I will choose the cross every time.”
If you can stomach it, listen to a half-dozen or so Southern Baptist sermons posted online next Monday, especially those delivered in rural southern churches; you’ll hear a lot of near- and actual-sedition.
Remember the Terri Schiavo case, that unfortunate Florida woman who was kept alive in a vegetative state for approximately 15-years? The state judge who oversaw that case was thrown out of the Southern Baptist church he attended, for the specific reason that he put the law before his pastor’s interpretation of what Jesus would want.
And there is a long roll of Catholic politicians who have been denied Communion because they didn’t vote as the bishop wished on this bill or that.
Pirro probably assumes that all Muslims are just as crazy as the pious freaks who surround her at FOX.
Again, Pirro was half-right: Islam, like every other religion that has ever soiled the earth, does demand undivided loyalty.
“The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day’s time they will have turned it into a Hell.”
Jeremy Bentham
The saving, humdrum truth is this: Most people — Count your blessings! — have too much sense and decency to be good Christians, just as most people have too much sense and decency to be good Muslims; if it were otherwise, the earth would be uninhabitable.
But Christianity and Islam so vociferously condemn the “other,” the skeptic, as wicked, that most people lack the courage to say frankly that their storylines are crazy and their ethics cultish nonsense. It’s easier to be a hypocrite, occasionally attend services, and avoid surveillance.
That strategy for maintaining peace isn’t going to work for much longer, though, because much of the political turmoil in the world has its origins in the decline of the Abrahamic faiths. They are dying, and so the old, discredited faiths are retreating to their cultish origins — and demanding that everybody choose sides.