Cherry-picking morality

If you can’t out-Christian a crazy Fundamentalist, use their tactics and watch them fold like napkins: and Obama did just that.

(ack, try to parse that sentence. sad face.)

Anyway, this little story  pits Barack Obama against crazy fundie James Dobson. I apologize if the link is broken within a few days, because Yahoo hardly ever fixes such things.

Obama gives examples of things in the Old Testament that don’t translate into the modern day, particularly items in Leviticus dealing with how slavery is good and eating lobster is bad. Durr, right? Enter Dobson.

Dobson and [Tom] Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament.

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

“… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

H.L. Mencken Week

All quotes are gleaned from the collection The Gist of Mencken: Quotations from America’s Critic, edited by Mayo Dubasky.
Why are the Fundamentalists so hot against the hypothesis of organic evolution? Is it because the thing is in contempt of Holy Writ? Then why are they not equally hot against the doctrine that the earth is a sphere and circles round the sun? Isn’t that in contempt of Holy Writ also? I can discern no difference between hypothesis and doctrine save that the former is less positive and uncompromising and hence less heretical than the latter. (Jan. 3, 1926)

Religion, though it is seldom discussed honestly, is a very important matter in the United States. Most of the crazy laws that now afflict us originated in the theological hallucinations of this or that preposterous sect. (Feb. 1922)

When a fat woman shows me her legs, I am not filled with the designs for stealing her from her husband; I am filled with thanks to God that she has a husband, and that he is watchful. (Feb. 1921)

A year or two ago I displaced Trotsky, for a brief space, as the chief bugaboo of the literate minority of the populace. (Nov. 1922)

The American people have got so used to quacks in high office that they have come to feel uneasy in the presence of honest men. (April 1929)