THOU SHALT NOT LIE – Unless You’re Mitt Romney and Company

by Ruth A. Sheets

People on the Christian Right want everyone to live their idea of the Christian life.  They cry out that God is not enough in our country and our actions.  They want the Ten Commandments (the Protestant traditional list) on every courthouse in America.  One might think these are people holier than most.

It seems to me that one would be wrong.  What the Christian Right wants is to be comfortable and to feel righteous, or rather self-righteous.  They pick and choose from the Bible what they will espouse.  They select the Commandments they like and discard the rest.  They claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, yet find most of His teachings unacceptable and put into His mouth things He did not preach.

Some examples might help to put this into perspective.  Jesus said nothing about homosexuality even though it was a common practice in the Greek and Roman world, yet the Christian Right is so sure that it is against God’s law, they would condemn people for it.

The 5^th Commandment is “Thou shalt not kill."  It works for them when related to abortion and human fetuses, but not when it comes to war, famine, capital punishment, over accessibility to guns.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery” is not a problem because one can simply ask forgiveness and go on with life.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” though, does not even seem to cross their radar.  Their candidate, Mitt Romney, bears false witness on a daily basis, as does his team and PACs, yet the Right does not call him on it.  Why is that?  Lying doesn’t count if it will get you what you want and if it will make America a “more godly place?”

As for Obama’s agreement with the states to make more flexibility in their welfare to work programs--Romney calls this “welfare with no work requirement.”  He knows this is a lie, but who cares?

Mitt said “Nobody ever asked me for my birth certificate 'cause they know where I’m from.”  When called on it, he said he was just using humor.  He knew this was a lie, but oh well.

Romney and Ryan continue to claim that Obamacare will take 716 billion dollars from Medicare recipients.  They know that is not true, but scaring older Americans is worth the lie.

Any true Christians would have trouble with the repeated lying of the Romney campaign, but what can the Right do?  He's all they have. The racism that sits at the core of Christian Right beliefs, and their illusion of having achieved everything in their lives on their own, make it impossible for them to rethink their position.  They have to pretend Romney is everything they want, so to avoid the dissonance, they just don’t hear what they don’t want to hear.  Hypocrisy is better than a Black president for one more term.

The Christian Right can’t help themselves, so the rest of us had better get to the polls  to protect all of us from their fear and deliberate hypocrisy.