Columbia Christians for Life, our favorite source for ultra-right-wing conspiracy theories in the Palmetto State, is taking a break from its war on public libraries who show Harry Potter films to observe the 11th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Of course, that means going full-on Westboro Baptist Church and claiming that 9/11 was God’s punishment for legalized abortion.
Yes… According to the South Carolina anti-abortion group, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil was not actually an attempt by an radical Islamic terrorist network to provoke a long and expensive war in the Middle East, or a smokescreen by a WMD-armed Saddam Hussein, or even the work of some angry Afghans who hated American freedoms. Columbia Christians for Life is saying God did 9/11, which honestly sounds a lot worse than even the truthers saying Bush did 9/11.
(original emphasis included) “More and greater divine judgment is coming upon America, unless we repent of the national sin of “abortion,” the group said in a statement Monday evening. “If we will not repent of the national sin of “abortion”, then the America of today will be destroyed, just as God destroyed the kingdom of Judah, with successive waves of foreign invasion in 605 BC, 597 BC, and 586 BC.”
The group’s statement gives Nostradamus-like significance to the words of founding father George Mason, who allegedly said in 1787 that “providence punishes national sins by national calamities.” Neither Mason’s 230-year-old warning about slavery nor Columbia Christians for Life’s email explains why God would choose a group of Islamic terrorists to do His work, but I suppose that’s just one of the mysterious ways in which He does things.
Of course, this isn’t the first time a radical political group has claimed that a national tragedy was a political message from God. Conveniently enough, those messages always seem to support the same causes those groups are advocating.
Last year, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann claimed God sent a hurricane and an earthquake to warn Congress to “rein in spending.” In 2005, Christian Coalition leaders Pat Robertson and John Hagee couldn’t decide whether Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for homosexuality or abortion… Perhaps He was sending mixed messages?
That confusion didn’t stop people from claiming that last month’s hurricane during the Republicans National Convention in Tampa, or its after effects during the Democratic convention in Charlotte, were similar political messages from God. If anything, we’re pretty sure that message we should all take from the last few weeks of political conventions is “Don’t hold your convention in the South during hurricane season!”
Being of simple mind, I suppose I need someone else to explain to me how it is that anti-abortion (I refuse to cede the title “pro-life” to them) groups who claim “the sanctity of life” as the underpinning of their philosophy can be so, well, casual about “the sanctity of life” when it references life that is no longer “in utero,” so to speak.
Indeed, in this group’s scenario per the 9/11 attacks, they rather cheerfully applaud the action of the Almighty in arbitrarily taking a few thousand “ex utero” lives in order to warn the wicked per their evil ways.
It is almost as if the only ones really safe from them and their God are those who haven’t yet navigated their way down the birth canal. Which really helps me understand why some Freudian-types say that, once we leave the womb, we spend the rest of our lives trying to crawl back into it.