Newsweek: Boebert Doesn't Want to "Nitpick" the Bible Over Son's Teen Pregnancy
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's recent announcement that her sixteen year old son would be making her a grandmother at age 36 was accompanied by some remarkably hypocritical comments from her.
"So we can nitpick what the Bible says is right and wrong, but I think just having that heart posture of wanting to serve God and do the right thing is so important," she told Dave Rubin, a conservative talk show host. That comment followed her saying, "Obviously, I'm a Christian and you know there are standards we like to uphold, but none of us do it perfectly."
"It doesn't work that way," Boebert said she told her son, when he claimed that being a teenage parent was "heredity" because both Boebert and her mother had their oldest child at 18. "But I'm really proud of him and my grandson's mom for being responsible, because they could have taken a different route, and both of them chose life," she said.
"It wasn't anything I had to browbeat with them, I very calmly had the conversation when we found out, just let me know if you think something else, I just want to have a talk with you if you decide to go a different direction, and both of them were very excited and wanted to move forward and welcome life into this world," she said.
Boebert is not an articulate speaker, so the position she is actually taking isn't always clear. But for one who campaigns frequently with a microphone and a preacher-like pacing and pointing that frequently makes use of church buildings as campaign venues, and whose rhetoric and perspective is a classic, textbook blend of right wing politics with fundamentalist religion, going soft on the issue of personal morality, which is a major component of both Jewish and Christian doctrine, is inconsistent with most of the rest of her politics and her brand of Christianity.
She's right when she says that none of us uphold standards of Christianity perfectly. But she missed the point completely. It's not a matter of "nit picking." Christianity is a faith that rests wholly on grace. And while she doesn't want to "nit pick the Bible" with regard to her son's situation, she doesn't seem to mind doing the equivalent of that to those she identifies as her political opponents.
In a church service in Colorado, during her campaign for Congress, Boebert declared that she was "tired of this separation of church and state junk. The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That's not how the founding fathers intended it."
She went on to declare that separation of church and state is not in the constitution but it's in "a stinking letter and it means nothing like they say it does."
More incoherent babble from her here, including the failure to identify the nebulous "they" who are declaring that the government should direct the church, if that's what she was referencing. Where is there any government "directing" of the church? That's a straw man argument if I ever heard one.
And that "stinking letter" to which she is referring is, I'm guessing, Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, a group of Christians who had expressed their concerns about whether the new American constitution would set up and support a state church, an institution which they had concluded, through their study of the Bible, was not the church that Jesus had established through the Apostles in the first century. Theirs was a doctrinal and theological concern, based on the Bible. Jefferson's response, in that "stinking letter," explains exactly what the founders intended when they wrote the establishment clause into the constitution, and it was not for "the church to direct the government."
But Boebert's remarks are not surprising, coming from one who doesn't want to "nitpick the Bible" on major doctrine. She is clearly not an expert on government, American history or Christian doctrine and theology. And her oldest son has apparently not picked up on the sincerity of his mother's blend of religion and politics.
I love the fact that the constitutional, representative democracy in which we live makes it possible for anyone who makes the effort and puts their ideology and vision out there in a place where it can be seen can run for public office and have a chance at getting elected and serving. The down side of that it opens the door to those who carry the prejudices of ignorance and fear to get elected and have influence. There are places where ignorance and apathy outweigh the influence of an educated and informed electorate, which are the keys to preserving and sustaining democratic government.
But this closeness to the people, which gave us founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were religious opposites, but politically compatible, has also given us representatives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who is a bright star in the future of Democratic politics, or like our own Vice-President, Kamala Harris, whose success in politics is an example of what an educated and informed electorate can produce.
I'll add this in closing. It's a prophetic word from the obscure, frequently overlooked book of Jude in the New Testament. Readers can decide if it applies here.
For certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who long ago were designated for condemnation as ungodly , who pervert the grace of God into licentiousness, and deny our only Lord and Master Jesus Christ. V. 4
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