God retarded my baby

By Capt. Fogg

Giving birth to a disabled child is God's way of punishing women for having had a prior abortion, says Virginia Representative Bob Marshall, R-13th:

In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There's a special punishment Christians would suggest.

Yes, it's redundant to mention that he's a Republican, a raging mob which for the last few decades has been the party of and a party to promoting such shameless indecencies. Of course, some biblical scholars tell us that the story of Abraham and Isaac was a priestly way of moving away from a prior and very ancient practice of sacrificial infanticide, but indeed, the first born male lamb in the flock of a Hebrew shepherd was to be sacrificed and the first born son was at one, very pre-Christian time, dedicated to service in the Temple.

Of course, there hasn't been a Temple since the 9th of Av in the year 70 CE, and Christians really don't hold with more than 9 or 10 of the 613 commandments and none of the Rabbinical laws, but that doesn't stop the kind of shoot-from-the-hip theology prevalent in these days of the senescence of American Christianity. Christians might suggest anything in truth, but if they're suggesting any such thing, it's a suggestion with no roots in the teachings of Jesus.

One might be tempted to ask Bob why, according to antique Jewish law largely set aside by Jesus and his followers, Christians who don't force their first born to become priests aren't subject to the same punishment, but his answer isn't very likely to enlighten us.

Surely anyone who still believes in a God with some tenuous attachment to decency if not actual justice will have trouble with the bloody Saturnine entity who condemns a child to a lifetime of pain and deformity because of something his mother did. But not Bob Marshall.

Some will have difficulty reconciling the position that it's indecent to mention that someone may be mentally retarded unless the mention is made by some pasquillant Republican creep like Limbaugh; but not Bob Marshall and probably not a large number of morally retarded, power hungry and profoundly ignorant Republican Theocrats who haven't bothered to consider that the enormously vast majority of children with deformities and defects and abnormalities are not born to mothers who aborted their first pregnancies.

Down Syndrome for one, seems more likely to affect children of older mothers. Conjoined twins, anencephalic babies, spina bifida, heart defects -- can anyone show any statistical correlation with sin? Of course not and anyone promising that virtuous people are less likely to give birth to lives affected by diseases and afflictions and deficiencies is likely to be a liar and an idiot, willing to use other people's tragedies to gain political power -- like Bob Marshall.

I await Sarah Palin's response to what could, amongst people who can actually reason consistently, be taken as an accusation of having had an abortion. I'm sure she'll choose to ignore it however, for fear of damaging the fabric of the alternate universe in which the ultra-right lives: where right and wrong, left and right, up and down are nebulous and interchangeable concepts and useful only to defame the enemies of these Insaneocrats and to yoke Jesus to their bandwagon like an ox.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)