How Sweet It Is to Be Mocked by You

Pat Robertson is right.

My fingers still hurt from typing that, but it's true.  At least in this very specific instance.

Last weekend, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch where Jesus comes to visit Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos, the highlights of which were Jesus asking the Broncos QB to tone down his public displays of faith a notch and telling the rest of the Broncos that, if he's going to keep helping them win, they need to stop playing terrible football for the first three quarters of the game. 

So the sketch was pretty sacrilegious concerning Christ and pretty rough on His sheep Tim Tebow.  And that made televangelist (and cuckoo-bananas false prophet)  Pat Robertson mad.  While discussing this sketch on whatever "Christian" channel he's on, Robertson had this to say:

If this had been a Muslim country and they had done that, and had Muhammad doing that stuff, you would have found bombs being thrown off!

Now, aside from "bombs being thrown off" not making any prepositional sense, Pat Robertson is right.  Islam does not take kindly to mockery, especially concerning its chief prophet Mohammed.  And had SNL done a skit mocking the Koran, the prophet and/or Muslims the way they mocked Christianity, I'm sure that somewhere in the world, you would have found some bombs being thrown off in some form or another.  So it's not as though SNL's lack of Islam-mocking sketches is born from a genuine appreciation of the religion.  I sincerely doubt that the head writers at 30 Rock haven't asked Jason Sudeikis to dress up as Allah's prophet because they genuinely respect the beliefs of 1.6 billion Muslims throughout the world.  Rather, any respect they give to Islam is born out of fear of violent retaliation, the same fear that caused Comedy Central to wimp out of showing a depiction of Mohammed in a South Park episode a number of years ago.

And while respect born from fear may be an acceptable thing if you're Tiberius Caesar, it's not worth squat if you're a pope or a prophet or a Presbyterian.  So, as Christians, the fact that we're not given the same respect as Muslims shouldn't make us angry.  Instead, that should make us happy, very happy.  Because that means that people view the Church precisely the way Christ said they'd view her-as something lowly and meek, something that can be mocked with impunity. It means that people expect us to do exactly what Jesus told us to do when they strike us-to turn the other cheek.  

And as someone who very frequently fails to act in a Christ-like manner, it's pretty comforting to see that, somehow, the world still expects me to be exactly who Christ says I am.   It's a great reminder that neither my sins nor SNL sketches can stop Jesus from being Lord of His Church.

Zach Wahls is messed up. Here's how.

I've seen this video floating around facebook quite a bit the past day or so.  If you haven't seen the video, watch it.  If you already have, just to refresh your memory, the YouTube video summary says exactly this: Zach Wahls, a 19-year-old University of Iowa student spoke about the strength of his family during a public forum on House Joint Resolution 6 in the Iowa House of Representatives. Wahls has two mothers, and came to oppose House Joint Resolution 6 which would end civil unions in Iowa.

In many of the facebook threads I've seen linking this video, those sympathetic to his cause have asked the same question. How can you possibly disagree with him?  People want to know.  After watching this, how can you possibly believe that being raised by a gay couple is harmful to children?

Easy.  By hearing what Mr. Wahls says.  By merely listening to the words that come out of his lips.  Because when I do that, it's quite clear that being raised by two women has, for lack of a better phrase, really messed him up.  Here's how:

30 seconds into his speech, Mr. Wahls informs us that he and his younger sister are full blooded siblings because his biological mother was artificially inseminated twice with sperm from the same anonymous donor.  And how does he feel about that?  That's something which is really cool for me, he states.

So, to dial things back a bit, Mr. Wahls' biological mother wanted to be fruitful and multiply and raise her children with another woman.  This, however, was problematic for her because, per the natural laws of the God who made the heavens and the earth, it takes man parts and lady parts in order to make a baby, and neither she nor her lesbian partner had such man parts.

So to remedy that problem, what did Mr. Wahls' biological mother do?  She went to a sperm bank.  And by doing so, however indirectly it may have been, she encouraged a man to take the precious gift of life that God put into his loins and spill it into a cup.  She took the gift of fatherhood, the sacred title that our Father in Heaven blesses men to share with Him, and she mocked it.  She looked at the titles husband and father, and said,  I don't want your love.  I don't want your sacrifice.  I don't want your guidance or your courage or your care or your forgiveness, and I don't want to cherish you as one flesh with me.  All I want is something very specific from your sexual organs.  And I'll give you money for it, if you'll agree to just go away once we're done.

That's what Mr. Wahls' biological mother did.  She paid money to sexually humiliate another human being.  She paid a man made in God's image to give her what God Himself had told her she could not have as long as she lived contrary to His law.  Though she never saw this man's face, and though he may have left his "donation" willingly, she treated the father of her children like a prostitute.  

And what does her son, Zach Wahls, think about all that?

That's something which is really cool for me.

The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character, Mr. Wahls says later in his speech.  And I have no doubt that he wants that to be true.  But it's not true.  Because, in service of their sexual orientation, the two women who raised Mr. Wahls told him that men are entirely disposable once they've been harvested of their seed.  They spent 19 years proclaiming to their son that a man's faithfulness to his offspring can be purchased for nothing more than fifty bucks and a pornographic magazine.  In every day of his life, Mr. Wahls two "mommies" taught him that women have every right to humiliate men, to pimp them out, to demean and shame them if it suits their purposes.

And in the end, he believed them.

So, while Mr. Wahls may be very polite and articulate, while he may be intelligent and dignified and a million other things that nobody has ever said that children of gay couples can't be, he doesn't respect men.  He doesn't value fatherhood.  And he doesn't understand the horrors of glorifying yourself by shaming your neighbor.  And he doesn't do those things precisely because he was raised by two women.