Capital Punishment for Rape – Redirected

Democrats have been jumping for joy this over Indiana senate candidate Mike Mourdock’s ill-timed disclosure at a Tuesday debate that his pro-life belief that life is a gift from God extends even to children conceived through rape. “I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen," Mourdock said. (“Indiana GOP Senate candidate stands by rape comment”).

Relieved to have anything at all with which to slow the downward momentum of the Obama campaign, Democrats immediately set about editing Mourdock’s comments to say he believed God willed the rape, not the child. “DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz described Mourdock's comments as ‘outrageous and demeaning to women’ and called on Romney to take his pro-Mourdock ad off the air.”

So far we haven’t heard yet that Wasserman Schultz has condemned Mourdock’s words as also demeaning to God, or worse, were meant to “disempower and disenfranchise” Him, but there’s still time.

Now there’s absolutely nothing the least bit controversial in Mourdock’s belief that a child conceived by rape has as much a claim upon being God’s creation as a child conceived through more conventional circumstances. If that isn’t so, then the opposite logic is even more shocking still, at least to me: that such a child was not intended by God: if the poor kid survives the typical fate of unplanned pregnancies and starts to grow up, that will mean his very life is a contradiction of the plan of God, or at best a divine oversight. (Oh, wait -- there actually are people who believe that it’s “God’s work” to undo God’s mistakes of creation, and of course many of those people are readers of the New York Times).

But the blunt object liberals are now intending to clobber Mourdock (and Romney) with is the simplistic nonsense that the same good and merciful God who, obviously, would never intend a woman to be raped,  also obviously wouldn’t intend her to be saddled with the offspring of a rape (i.e., her baby). The rape baby – innocent but imputed with the guilt of its father’s crime -- falls well outside the ordinarily boundless embrace of the Liberal God.

You might think there’d be little room for arguing the moral insanity of holding babies responsible for the circumstances of their births. Liberals manage to apply this principle sometimes, in other, more questionable, areas. For instance, liberals, sensing all along that the actual erotic activities of homosexuals are never going to appear as ineffably beautiful to the majority of Americans as it does to residents of midtown Manhattan, San Francisco, and Royal Oak, have for years now anchored their defense of homosexuality elsewhere than in the fairly disgusting acts themselves: namely, in the idea “that all of us are born into our sexual orientation and identity.” In other words, “it was never a choice.”  In other words, “it’s not our fault.”   If homosexuals are born that way and have no choice, then anyone daring to criticize the lifestyle is a monster for zinging the poor souls, rather than celebrating with them during Gay Pride Week with open, rainbow-colored arms.

Which is one aspect of the liberal case for homosexuality.  This same “they were born this way” explanation also enables liberals to launch the religious defense that God made homosexuals that way.

It’s a true liberal dogma, or, as Joe Biden would put it, “de fide doctrine,” that God loves homosexuality so much that he specially created each and every member of the LGBTQ community, then blessed them and commanded that they be fruitful and mult—oh, or whatever.    As Minnesota State Representative Steve Simon (D) recently said in opposition to a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage:

“How many more gay people does God have to create before we ask ourselves whether or not God actually wants them around?”

Rev. Earl D. Beshears, an Episcopal pastor in Delaware, appeals to the “best science” in his tract written for his church’s website “On Our Treatment of Gay, Transgender and Questioning Youth”:

The best science tells us that sexual orientation and gender identity probably begin in utero and are in place as early as 2 and 3 years of age. (Confer studies by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.) What this science tells me is that our sexual orientation is a gift from God, not a choice. Our sexuality and gender identity are how God made us. A gay, lesbian, heterosexual or transgender teen is the way God made her or him.

Leaving out as they always do a link or two from their chain of logic, (and as Chesterton said, if a link is missing, then you don’t have a chain) liberals conclude that because Perez Hilton, the flaming homosexual, exists, therefore God, who obviously made Perez Hilton, also must have made him a flaming homosexual. Kind of a designer re-do of the old Cartesian syllogism: “I am, therefore God thinks I’m fabulous.”

But garden-variety homosexuality is so routine these days (not a single sit-com lacks at least a pair of them) as to dawdle dangerously close to being BOOORR-ING when the current fashion focus  is all about transgenderism.  According to the Gender Equity Resource Center at Berkeley, a “transgenderist” is a “person who lives either full time, or most of the time, in a gender role different than the role associated with their biological or chromosomal sex (a gender non-conformist).” In other words, the transgenderist believes he is a man trapped in a woman’s body, or vice versa.   Rev. Beshears notwithstanding, I think that qualifies not so much as a God’s birthday present of “sexual orientation” as a gag-gift of sexual disorientation.

While not detracting even a smidgen from the “Ts” (as in LGBTQ) equal claim to being even delightful to the Lord as engaged queer couples, not to mention the fruitful subject of untold numbers of high-school seminars, I do find a troubling contradiction in Rev. Beshear’s pronouncement that “a transgender teen is the way God made her or him.” (I’m also troubled by the phrase, “God made her or him.” Is he using that klutzy phrase just to protect against “sexist” language, or does he really not know if a given transgender teen he has in mind is a her or him?  But I digress).

What I’m getting at is that, if our sexual orientation is really a gift from God, what kind of gift is it to stick a sensitive, nurturing, vivacious, feminine, beauty queen love cupcake named Jenna inside the body of a testicled manchild named (in utero, apparently) Walter? (“’As soon as I was conscious,’” the disqualified beauty queen told Barbara Walters . . . “I thought that I was in the wrong body.”) (“Transgender Beauty Queen Knew She Was Different at Age 4”). We’re told that the surgery to turn this young man’s penis into his vagina – or, as Rev. Beshears might put it – to turn her or his penis into her or his vagina – anyhow, we’re told that the surgery on Jenna and Walter was “intense.”

“So, hey God,” Jenna may legitimately ask: “you call this a gift? You couldn’t just make me Jenna from the get-go? At least then I could have gotten free birth control pills with the rest of my 6^th grade girlfriends!”

But to ask that is to dare to question God’s supernal wisdom, and, even more blasphemous, to question gay theory. Of course God made Jenna, or Walter, that way.  Otherwise we’d have to admit there’s something wrong with homosexuality.  And we must never ever say – or even ever think --  that there is even one little thing wrong with homosexuality.  So logic forces us to conclude God made Walter that way.  And looking on Walter He saw that he was interesting.

I don’t happen to believe that God made Walter that way. Someone made the Titanic, too, but it would be nonsense to blame what happened to the Titanic on her having “been made that way”: the Titanic didn’t sink because she was made to sink – she sank because her captain made very bad decisions on how she should be sailed.

And in the same way I don’t believe God made Walter that way, any more than I believe He made me a depressive crank, Lance Armstrong a cheater, or Nancy Pelosi a daft harpie. But that He did make me, and all the rest of us, is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, both Catholic and Protestant. Obama may even have run across it somewhere in the grab-bag of his “faith tradition,” while without question it was at one time taught to Joe “I’ve been a practicing Catholic all my life” Biden.   As for Mike Mourdock’s comments, (which are a concrete example of Christ’s warning about not casting pearls before swine (“lest they turn and rend you”) they find their roots in the same teaching, as well. And not only that, but the same faith tells us that God made us purposefully, (as I memorized), “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.” That goes for me and for Walter, for Ted Kennedy, Mother Teresa, bin Laden, Lady GaGa, Obama, or any of the rest of the entirety of the race whose births were either planned or accidental – whether the result of selfishness, poor planning, jealousy, drunkenness, spite, military conquest, or rape. The Christian imperative that human life is sacred is not conditioned on proof of good will by either mother or father in conceiving it. We don’t place moral responsibility on infants for the circumstances of their births.

As God taught the Israelites at Sinai: You don’t put to death children for the sins of their fathers (Deuteronomy 24.16).

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**THIS VERSION HAS BEEN REVISED.  TRC.**