I'm guessing Jesus would agree

With Natasha Chart, not the people she's criticizing, i.e. the Christian Right, in Because It's Easy To Sell Out Women Open Left 09/30/09:

Public Christians in US politics can easily prove their piety to peers by punitively, and only, making life harder for women. They are not asked to prove moral fitness by driving out moneychangers, helping the poor, showing mercy, clothing the naked, exemplifying forgiveness, showing hospitality to strangers, being humble, keeping prayer private, sheltering the homeless, ministering to prisoners or feeding the hungry. Indeed, if indifferent cruelty is a spiritual virtue, then majorities in Congress are surely bound for heaven. Such as it would be. Whatever faith that is, it isn't in the Bible, a book I've had to read through cover-to-cover at least twice.

Which also therefore qualifies me to inform you that 'the b*tches got it coming' is neither in the Gospel, which isn't the law, nor the Constitution, which is. Read up.

But lets be fair to the Christianists. They provide homes to care for unwed mothers, don't they?


I'm not suggesting that everything that appears in the Christian Bible about women is benign on the face of it. But Christianity is a living religion, not just an artifact from eons past. And there's no reason to assume that the brand of Christianity practiced by the Jim DeMints and Michele Bachmanns of the world is the most genuine variety. And one would think that it should count for something with Christians having some integrity in their faith that Jesus' attitude toward women stood out as strikingly more egalitarian than the norm for his immediate culture.

Then again, it also should mean something to them that the Gospels don't record Jesus singling out homosexuality or abortion as sins, even though both were well-known and practiced in the Roman Empire of his day. (It was a primitive form of abortion, but it was there.) That fact doesn't seem to carry much weight with the Christian Right, though. Or any weight at all, actually.

Tags: christian right

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