Desperate Liberals Who Use the Bible to Grow the State and End Up Hurting the Poor
I love liberals. They’re so consistently inconsistent. Any appeal to the Bible about creation, abortion, or homosexuality, and a liberal will cut you off at the knees. But if they can find a single verse, even a word, that supports one of their Statist programs, they will get all spiritual on you.
The latest comes from MSNBC’s Martin Bashir. Bashir has been on the wrong side of religion for a long time. Some Republicans are trying to get the budget in order. This means cutting bloated and unconstitutional programs. When a conservative politician talks about cuts, liberal religionists go into action. All of a sudden the Bible becomes important. In his interview with Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), Bashir uses the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Bible to attack Rep. Barton. Liberals must really be desperate when you hear them referencing Catholic Bishops in a positive way, you know, the same Catholic bishops that oppose the ordination of women, abortion, homosexuality, and homosexual marriage and have a pedophile problem?
Bashir moves from the Catholic Bishops to the Bible to support his claim that government programs are good for the poor. He sees a government directive in Psalm 146:
“How do you square your approach to the words of Psalm 146, where the Psalmist writes this: ‘He gives food to the hungry, the Lord protects the foreigners, He defends orphans and widows.’ this the exact opposite of the cuts that are being proposed by Republicans in Congress?”
Note that the Psalm says that it’s God who gives food to the hungry, not the State. Bashir would probably come back and argue that government is God’s agent to give food to the hungry. But there is no directive in Scripture to use the power of the State to accomplish the goal.
In the same Psalm there is a warning:
Do not trust in princes,
In mortal man, in whom there is no salvation.
His spirit departs, he returns to the earth;
In that very day his thoughts perish. (Psalm 146:3–4)
The hungry have been trusting in princes for decades, and what has it gotten them? Many of them are warehoused in housing projects where there are high rates of violence, drug addiction, and illegitimacy. In an attempt to free them from hunger, the State has made them slaves who are only good for the next election.
America’s problem is not hunger; it’s fat. The ribs of poor children are not showing; their bellies are. There’s an obesity epidemic in America, even among the poor. What do the experts recommend to fix “the nation’s ‘obesogenic,’ or fat-promoting, culture”? More government! More trust in princes.