Michele Bachmann was on “Understanding the Times with Janet Markell” this weekend and back up to her old tricks, saying very bad things about “Barack Obama’s dangerous policies.” You know, like saving America after the GOP ran it into the ground in 2008. Oh wait, no, she was upset about gay people:
The world is literally burning around us, but rather than deal with real problems, Republicans can’t let go of their hatred for gay people. And so, pulling out an old Republican trope, and keeping with an underlying theme of the so-called Values Voter Summit, Bachmann misrepresented the case of Biblical Sodom, which Religious Right types like to present as a case of God punishing gay people:
When we raise our fist to a holy God and say that we are going to redefine marriage, we are going to be okay with paying a Planned Parenthood to cut up innocent baby parts and sell them for research, that clearly is a problem and as we have seen God render judgment in the days of Noah, in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah and so forth throughout history, what the prophets have told every generation is that there is a just God and the people must repent and turn to him. So too in this day of wickedness in our own culture, we need to do the same. We need to repent and we need to confess because a holy Savior is coming to save us and redeem us from this sin-sick world.
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My God! (no pun intended) Bachmann’s God spread more unborn baby parts all over the place than any other being in history. The Bible is full of God-ordered multiple abortions, as I have pointed out here before. I will recap a few favorites for you:
2 Kings 15:16: “He [Menahem, king of Israel] sacked Tiphsah and ripped open all the pregnant women.”
Genesis 38:24: Tamar is pregnant. This is found out only 3 months later, proof she had been bumping uglies with somebody. She is a widow. So since she is pregnant, she must be a prostitute, right? We know how this works out in right-wing morality. Her father-in-law orders her to be burned alive, which of course includes burning the fetus alive. Twin fetuses, in fact. No problems there. Toast the little suckers! Then this dirty old man finds out he is in fact the father and changes his mind about crisping them. There is no indication that the fetuses are people or that there is anything wrong morally with murdering them in the womb. Fundamentalists make a big deal about killing “innocent unborn babies” but the fetuses here as elsewhere obviously carry no guilt but are killed or sentenced to die anyway.
Numbers 5:12-31: It is perfectly permissible to put a curse on a woman – if the husband believes she has been adulterous – that will result in miscarriage in the event of her guilt.
Numbers 31:17-18: “Now, kill all the boys. And kill every women who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
And God’s most blatant anti-woman attack:
Hosea 13:15-16: “I will have no compassion…the people of Samaria…will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashes to the ground; their pregnant women ripped open.”
I wrote here last year at this time, in response to Jessa Duggar,
[F]rom the perspective of Jewish Law, the Law of Moses – those laws that God himself wrote – we are not murdering infants. The ancient Jews did not count infants as people, let alone fetuses: Leviticus 27:6 puts a monetary value on children, but only when they reach one month of age, and in Numbers 3:15 a census counts only those one month old and above. In the Old Testament, fetuses and children under a month old are not people.
In the Mishnah a fetus becomes a person only when “the greater part of the head” has emerged from the womb and it clearly states that the life of the mother has priority over the life of the fetus.
Furthermore, in Exodus 21:22-25 we are told that if a man accidentally kills a pregnant woman, he is guilty of murder. Tellingly, if only the fetus dies (miscarriage) he is not guilty of murder. The fetus is not a human being in Jewish Law. God (who is said to be the author of this law) nowhere condemns or bans the killing of fetuses.
No doctored Planned Parenthood video, or even Carly Fironia’s fantasies, could match these images.
And Sodom! Egads.
The only problem here for Bachmann is that God didn’t nail Sodom for “homosexuality” but because the folks in Sodom were acting like Republicans.
This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her sisters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but they did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me. (Ezekiel 16:49-50).
So assuming there is a God, and if he acts like YHWH in the Old Testament, he could well nail America, but not for the reasons Bachmann has stated. Far more likely is man nailing his own planet. Republicans have a solid start on it, and they’d rather condemn gays than admit to global warming.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
