Being a white, middle aged, Christian man, I don't have a lot to choose from. I guess I could do like Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who just decided she was black one day and started railing about “White Privilege.” I guess you can do that now; she became president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP.
It's also now possible to decide when I wake up in the morning which sex I want to be that day. I've always said I was a lesbian trapped in a man's body. I could put on a dress and try following a 12 year old girl into the ladies room and then sue her father after he beats the hell out of me. But that wouldn't be a case of me being offended. That would just be me getting the daylights beaten out of me for acting like a pervert. Besides, not only do I look horrible in a dress (never mind how I know this), I also have a serious aversion to pain.
I'm afraid I can't just decide I'm younger than my driver's license says. My back won't let me. It's also hard to get offended by people treating me like I'm old when that usually manifests itself as a 15% discount at hotels and restaurants.
It doesn't do any good to be offended as a Christian. Offending Christians has been a national past time in this country for as long as I can remember. Everything from a cross in a jar of urine being called art to the South Park pilot being a Christmas episode of Baby Jesus in a knock down-drag out with Santa Claus. OK, it was really funny. But it was also very offensive. I hate it when they do that.
I understand why people would make fun of Christians. After all, we believe in a book with dragons, unicorns (yes, they're in there but they're not pretty) and fish that can swallow a man whole and then spit him out alive three days later. Not to mention God being born as a man for the expressed purpose of being tortured and killed. ...and that's the good news. What I don't quite get is: if you put all of this craziness in a movie, people would flock to see it. It's true! Just look at how well The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston did at the Box office, and that was just one little snippet. But for some reason, nobody seems to want to read the Book, knowing full well that the movie never does the book justice.
There are reasons why people don't want to read the Bible. For openers, it's long. Really long. In fact, it's not even a book. It's a collection of 66 books written by 40 different authors. It's also a pretty tough read. If you start from the beginning (Genesis), you only get four chapters in before the genealogies start. I HATE those. Adam begot Seth, then Seth begot Enosh, then Enosh begot Cainan...and begot...and begot...and begot...and every time you think you're through with them, another bunch starts. I keep hearing about all these new translations people are coming up with like the gender-neutral Bible, etc. I wonder if anybody has come up with one that just does away with the genealogies. That would be a lot shorter Bible. That's probably what the Reader's Digest Condensed Bible does, though I worry about what else they might have left out. As it turns out though, there's actually some pretty cool stuff hidden in those genealogies, but you've really got to dig for them. It's just hard to fight through it.
Then, there's all that talk about how God expects us to live. The Ten Commandments (not the movie, we're talking about real commandments) and all that. That seems to offend everybody. They threw a judge in jail for refusing to remove a copy of them from the courthouse lawn. I guess the very sight of it was forcing people into therapy. Given its rules against lying and stealing, it must have been creating a hostile work environment for lawyers.
It's amazing to me that during the 70's I kept hearing, “you can't legislate morality.” Yet that is exactly what is being done now. But it is a completely different morality than what is in the Bible. In fact it's pretty much diametrically opposed to it.
The Bible says “you shall not lie with a man as with a woman (you know what it means). It is an abomination.” That's the Bible's morality. Today's legislated morality says if a man wants to sleep with another man, you have to cater to them or you will be run out of business.
The Bible says “you shall not kill.” Today's legislated morality says a woman has an absolute right to kill the child in her womb any time she wants and if you so much as try to talk her out of it, you could be arrested.
The Bible says, ”a woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment, for all who do so are an abomination”. Today's legislated morality says that if a man want to dress up like a woman, you have to let him in the women's bathroom and locker room.
As I write this, I can already hear all the arguments about the Old Testament not applying today, and I have no right to judge whom someone wants to sleep with or what they want to wear.
Back up a minute! I never meant to imply that anyone should follow these Biblical principles if they don't want to. God knows I don't follow them even to the extent I feel like I should. (Forget about the dress already!) My point is that a morality IS being legislated. It's called “Political Correctness.”
You don't actually have to believe what I believe about the Bible to be a moral person. However, you would have to be politically incorrect. Political correctness was invented specifically to destroy every piece of decency and common sense in this country, and it's working.
This country has gone insane. How else can you explain all the hoopla over global warming while NASA says the global ice caps are actually larger than they were in 1979; Americans are starving all over this country while the government sends Billions of dollars to countries that hate America for “humanitarian aid”; our food is filled with chemicals I can't even pronounce; Americans who pay ZERO in federal income taxes scream and protest about others who are not paying “their fair share”; a presidential election featuring a woman being investigated by the FBI for more crimes than I can even enumerate, a professed socialist, a man everybody knows wasn't born in this country, and a Billionaire reality TV star who brags that while politicians have all been bought, he's the one that's been buying them. Then there's the homosexual community defending Islam when Islamic law says all homosexuals must be killed. I know the Old Testament says that, too (so their distaste for the Bible is understandable) but the Muslims are actually doing it.
So what can I possibly be offended by that isn't politically sanctioned? Make no mistake, I'm plenty offended. But in the current political climate, the things I'm offended by makes my being offended offensive. I'm beginning to think, politically speaking, the most offensive thing around is in fact, me. I'm afraid that would look pretty funny on a protest sign: STOP ME BEFORE I THINK AGAIN!
But in a country where the Federal government pays large farm subsidies to suburban families for the grass in their back yard, pays farmers 2 billion dollars NOT to farm their land, spent $350,000 last year sponsoring NASCAR driver David Gilliland and ran one of the internet's largest child pornography sites last year with 215,000 registered users and more than 23,000 explicit images and videos available so they could make 25 arrests, maybe I could get a government subsidy to picket my own front yard to try to force myself to stop thinking. If that sounds ridiculous to you, then it might just work.
Stay tuned...
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