Over the weekend, our friends at Jezebel ran a mature, substantive piece taking issue with North Dakota’s fetal heartbeat bill in a rational and fair-minded manner that treated pro-lifers as thoughtful, well-intentioned fellow Americans.
Nah, just kidding. Anna Breslaw’s post on the legislation’s sponsor, Rep. Bette Grande, is as lazy, angry, impatient, and borderline Christophobic as…well, pretty much everything else Jezebel publishes.
Breslaw doesn’t think being able to detect a baby’s heartbeat is a good enough reason to forbid killing him or her, nor does she like the idea of parents not being able to dispose of their unborn offspring afflicted with genetic abnormalities. That would be “Draconian,” you see. But as usual, she skips the part where she explains why human characteristics like heartbeats don’t entitle someone to protection or why defects make some people less equal than others. Either she doesn’t care about the “supporting argument” part, or she thinks her audience won’t. Neither scenario reflects well on the feminazi crowd. (I’ll say this much for team Jezebel, though: they know their audience.)
Commenting on a Grande campaign video, Breslaw writes:
Additionally, Grande is a religious Christian and “family woman,” which is more-or-less Christian code for “someone who would never put herself above a tiny, formless cluster of cells like you SELFISH HARLOTS.” Above, you can watch her talk about Jesus.
And “more-or-less” is apparently secularist code for “I just made it up.” It’s hard not to read just a hint of defensiveness in Breslaw’s contention that merely talking about the importance of one’s Christian faith and family life is now tantamount to “slut-shaming.” We’ll add these topics to the ever-expanding list of things Sexually Enlightened People TM don’t talk about (a list which, for those of you on the go, can handily be summarized as “shut up”).
Next, in response to the following passage from an Atlantic piece on Grande:
The issues hit close to her, she said, having relatives with children born with a genetic abnormality and seeing an increase in discrimination toward individuals with Down syndrome and other genetic issues.
“It takes you back to Hitler, and we know where that went,” she said. “He started going after those with abnormalities, and I think it’s an absurdity we would go back to that kind of thing.”
Breslaw says:
The underlying thing here is something huge and stupidly basic that makes it IMPOSSIBLE for me to understand Christians like Grande: Aren’t they supposed to think that Jesus was nice? Because they make Jesus seem like a real asshole.
Yes, because only a nut would see something Naziesque about exterminating the young en masse because of their genetic defects! Again, abortion is the issue against which Godwin’s Law falls apart. But that’s well-trodden ground, so let’s focus instead on the suggestion that making such comparisons is somehow un-Christian.
To the extent that modern mainstream culture likes anything about Christianity, it’s the religion’s supposed non-judgmentalism. People who couldn’t tell you anything else about the Bible are pretty sure Jesus said judging people is bad. But the context they don’t know makes a world of difference. While Jesus did indeed preach humble recognition that the self-righteous are sinners, too, the part immediately after where He tells the adulterer to “go now and leave your life of sin” is often forgotten.
Garrett Kell of the Christian Legal Society explains what Christ really meant by “judge not, lest ye be judged” in Matthew 7:
Jesus didn’t teach against judging. He taught against a specific kind of judging. The type of judging he spoke against was a blind, ignorant, hypocritical, self-righteous judging that overlooks one’s own faults, failures and sins and only sees faults, failures and sins in other people. And the picture He uses is supposed to be kind of funny. There’s two guys in a wood shop…one guy looks at the other guy and says hey you’ve got some sawdust in your eye…all the while the dude’s got a 2×4 sticking out of his eye.
The issue Jesus is going after is the pride that was in the people’s hearts which made it easy for them to see other people’s faults, but be blinded to their own. And notice what Jesus called them “you hypocrite.” Now, what’s a hypocrite? Someone who pretends to be something they aren’t. In the 1st century you usually only had one or two play actors would use different masks to play in different roles. They’d pretend to be something they weren’t. Here Jesus is going after people who wear a mask of piety over a heart that was judgmental, critical, and self-righteous toward others.
Indeed, the concept of some blanket prohibition on moral judgment is so incompatible with the very idea that there are such things as good and evil as to make it a self-evidently invalid interpretation. God wants us to be good, do good, and lead others to good, but would forbid us from distinguishing it from evil?
Further, Jesus Himself wasn’t always Mr. Nice Guy, and He even said or did a couple things His foes might have pegged Him as an “asshole” for, like driving the money-changers out of the temple at Jerusalem with a whip, calling the Pharisees a “brood of vipers,” telling His disciples to trade in their cloaks for swords, and declaring that merely looking at a woman lustfully makes someone a de facto adulterer.
Nothing about Christ is superficial, least of all His love. So of course it would be more complex and challenging than the kind of feel-good sentimentality you’d find on a Hallmark card. After all, there’s nothing loving about niceness at the expense of truth.
