Civil Commotion

The Wartburg Watch has been discussing the just-released movie Spotlight, and today garnishes a recommendation to take abusive churches to court with this offhand observation:

1. Blogs have been instrumental in bringing the reality of sex abuse in the church to the attention of the public. As the public applies pressure, churches are forced to deal with the truth.

2. Litigation is essential in bringing to light the facts of abuse. Even pastors are concerned about lying after laying their hands on the Bible and swearing to tell the whole truth. Grant Layman’s admission of not reporting abuse to the police was instrumental in helping many folks to accept, albeit reluctantly, that SGM did not handle child sex abuse in an appropriate manner.

I love that: “even pastors are concerned about lying”. The centuries-old marketing lie that clergy have access to special cosmic knowledge denied the rest of us, that they are uncommonly virtuous, is going down — as it should. As a class, clergy are poorly educated and intellectually dishonest — and I include those who are graduates of bona fide seminaries — and reliably less ethical than the generality of the public.

The parents of a 3-year old boy have sued a Tennessee church for failing to protect their child from sexual assault by one of its staffers.

According to Barnett, the family reached out to the church to let them know what their child had told them to get to the bottom of the situation, and at first, the church denied that it happened, stating the child was making it up.

[ … ]

The family later took the teenager to court where he pled guilty for aggravated sexual battery.

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.

A Planned Parenthood employee from Kansas enumerates the offenses committed against them.

• Gasoline was poured under our back door, ignited 4 times. Twice while the clinic was occupied, causing patients to be evacuated.

• Butyric acid (used as a stink bomb) was poured under our doors, into ventilation system so many times I lost count. Clinic evacuated.

• 2 cherry bombs were left on our doorstep after hours, causing damage, clinic closure. Imagine what it’s like going to work after that.

• We received hundreds of phone calls, threatening to torch our clinic, to kill the “murdering whores” who worked there.

• 3 times someone drove by at night & shot out our windows. Picketers stood on the sidewalk, harassed employees as we swept up broken glass.

• Our clinic didn’t perform abortions. We did well woman exams, pregnancy tests, dispensed birth control, & treated STIs.

I say, tonight, we punish Planned Parenthood. I think it’s time that abortion doctors should have to run and hide and be afraid for their life.

Joshua Feuerstein

This would be a good time to reprise an old Civil Commotion maxim: Most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians; it’s the ones who don’t that you need to watch out for.