Why Sarah Palin Sacrilege Must Not Stand

Conservatives Only Find Fault With Non-Conservatives

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “I had posted this yesterday on the Facebook wall — if you want to follow me on Facebook, it’s Mike Church Show Fan Page — under pretty much an identical title, pointing out that using one of the holy sacraments, which if you are Catholic there are seven.  Baptism is one of them.  Using one of them in a joke about torturing human beings is just sick.  Now, beyond the sickness of using this, and beyond the disrespect shown to our Lord and to the process of baptism, which most of you listening right now were, beyond that, to get a standing, cheering, whistling, loud, raucous ovation for it?  Some of you wonder where the “conservative” movement has gone off the rails.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I had posted this yesterday on the Facebook wall — if you want to follow me on Facebook, it’s Mike Church Show Fan Page — under pretty much an identical title, pointing out that using one of the holy sacraments, which if you are Catholic there are seven.  Baptism is one of them.  Using one of them in a joke about torturing human beings is just sick.  Now, beyond the sickness of using this, and beyond the disrespect shown to our Lord and to the process of baptism, which most of you listening right now were, beyond that, to get a standing, cheering, whistling, loud, raucous ovation for it?  Some of you wonder where the “conservative” movement has gone off the rails.

My friends, there’s no question mark at the end of that sentence any longer, and if there is, you’re just not paying attention or you refuse to admit what it is that’s going on out here today.  We have become a wretched, soulless group of blasphemers, all of us.  We seem to care not.  Most people seem to care not.  They seem wanton and callous in their thoughts, their actions and deeds.  This is just another example.  I don’t want to dwell too much on Sarah Palin because I’ll get enough grief for what I’m about to say, what I’m about to play, what I’m about to read to you from Dreher, among others, here.

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This is a sign.  This is exactly the point and exactly the problem.  If you want to read and enjoy some stories of how Christians, many if not most of them Catholics, actually bested a conquering, marauding, murderous, Muslim army, read the story of the Battle of Lepanto.  If you read that story, you will be able to delight in, for example, the beheading of Ali Pasha, the Muslim who was the leader of the fleet who had been sent down to the Island of Cyprus to begin the process of finishing off what prior attempts had failed to do, which was to eliminate the infidel.  This was all at the behest of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the time.  Also at the time, Pope Pius V was the pope of the Church.  He had rounded up what he had called the Holy Fleet and sent the great Austrian, Don John, as the head of the Holy Fleet to go and confront the Muslims in the Battle of Lepanto.  It was a similar number of Christians/Catholics as there were Muslim hoards on their ships, one of the greatest naval battles on the history of Earth, and known historically as the battle that saved Europe.  It’s a fascinating story.  I had only heard about it very abstractly and with no detail until I started reading about it last Thursday and then read the entire story yesterday.  G.K. Chesterton actually has a wonderful poem that is written about the Battle of Lepanto.  There are things you can do and things you can read and instances in history when the Muslim hoard has been confronted by Christians and has been repelled.

Mrs. Palin, at an NRA rally, is not one of them.  I’m just going to play you the clip.  Some of you are going to say, [mocking] “Aw, come on, Mike, that’s just a joke.  That’s just a speech.”  Yeah, yeah, right.  There is no instance where reverence to our Lord is not to be taken seriously and as if it is a life or death situation because it is.  To hear the hoots and howls of approbation for this sacrilegious perversion coming out of the NRA convention in Indianapolis, I want to say, is just shocking.  It shouldn’t be shocking.  This is just another sign of the degradation of too many people’s view of what ought to be a very reverent and devout Christian life.  We talk a good game and demonize and vilify the left and Hollywood when they mock Christ.

I want to get this out.  If some lib goes out there and makes a movie and they mock Christ or some artist drops a crucifix in a vial of urine or something to that effect, all of rightdom, all of conservativedom loses it.  [mocking] “This is an outrage!  This can’t stand!  See, this is what they do, they mock our God!”  I don’t have to detail for you that many instances of this because you are all intimately familiar and aware of how many times that has been said similarly about similar things, from Sinead O’Connor ripping up pictures of the pope of Saturday Night Live — just use your own memory to fill in all the instances of the anger and of the disapprobation and demands that these people stop with all this sacrilege and stop with all this defaming and defamatory talk when it comes to describing Christians and Christianity.  Look, I’m not saying they’re not valid.  If you’re going to say that, then you better be able to be in a bipartisan fashion.  One sacrilege is just as bad and damnable as the rest.  Here is the clip from the NRA convention.  This happened Saturday.

[start audio clip]

Sarah Palin: I do have to apologize for that. I’m sorry. Not all intolerant, anti-freedom, leftist liberals are hypocrites. I’m kidding. Yes, they are. And they are not right with policies that poke our allies in the eye and coddle adversaries instead of putting the fear of God in our enemies. Come on! Enemies who would utterly annihilate America, they who obviously have information on plots, say to carry out jihad. Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, [applause, cheering] they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. [applause, cheering]

[end audio clip]

Mike:  You’ve got to see the video.  They stand and applaud.  Who is it that has not had the fear of God put into them?  Rod Dreher writes this:

[reading]

Man, the 12-minute speech Sarah Palin gave at the NRA convention is awful. It’s just witless, red-meat blathering, delivered in that nasal whine of hers that makes it sound like she’s chewing wads of tinfoil. For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.

[end reading]

Mike:  Let me tell you, if you like something like that, please don’t throw any more soil on the already dingied-up and soiled term that is conservative.  Please, pick another name.  I suspect there are probably people listening right now delighting in that.  [mocking] “What’s wrong with that, Mike?  That’s good red meat stuff, man.”  Operative term “fear of God.”

[reading]

Fast-forward in the video to the 6:30 mark, though, and listen to what she says about terrorists. [Mike: Then he quotes what you just heard.]

OK, stop. Not only is this woman, putatively a Christian, praising torture, but she is comparing it to a holy sacrament of the Christian faith. It’s disgusting – but even more disgusting, those NRA members, many of whom are no doubt Christians, cheered wildly for her.

I’m with my Lutheran pal Mollie Hemingway on this. Excerpt:

“I’ve long defended Palin against the offensive treatment she’s received at the hands of a blatantly biased media, a media that collectively lost its mind the moment she entered the national stage. But that hardly means she must be defended at all times. … This is a perfect example not just of civil religion but also how civil religion harms the church. Civil religion is that folk religion that serves to further advance the cause of the State.”

Palin and all those who cheered her sacrilegious jibe ought to be ashamed of themselves. For us Christians, baptism is the entry into new life. Palin invoked it to celebrate torture. Even if you don’t believe that waterboarding is torture, surely you agree that it should not be compared to baptism, and that such a comparison should be laughed at. What does it say about the character of a person that they could make that joking comparison, and that so many people would cheer for it? Nothing good – and nothing that does honor to the cause of Jesus Christ.

[end reading]

Mike:  Folks, I don’t understand how you look at this any other way.  Of course, if you were devoid of that Christian faith, then I understand.  If the secular looks at this and goes: I don’t see any problem, get yourself a new mirror.  Dreher continues:

[reading]

If I thought that kind of hateful declaration and abuse of the Christian religion was what conservatism stood for, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a conservative. Some conservatives do stand for that. They’re wrong, and they should be called out on it – not because some liberal somewhere is going to be offended, but first and foremost because we Christians who identify as conservatives are appalled by it.

[end reading]

Mike:  Folks, don’t spend too much time waiting for your fellow conservatives to be outraged by this.  You’re probably going to hear on these airwaves this morning, many people are going to rush to the ramparts and defend this, [mocking] “It’s just some kind of a joke.  Come on, you’re being too hard on her!”  Again, a sacrilege committed in this manner as a joke and causing — what is the definition of blasphemy?

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I heard one recently from a Father Wolf of a traditional Catholic church outside of Dallas, Texas.  According to Father Wolf and what I heard him say, if you cause any infamy in anyone’s mind to our Lord or to the Father, that’s blasphemy, which is a mortal sin, by the bye, if you’re keeping track of these sorts of things.  Using it in that manner is just not kosher, not cool, not funny, and anyone that says it is, I’m just going to have to strenuously disagree.

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Then if we browse on over to the pages of the New York Times today, we’ll find this from Ross Douthat about the pope’s phone call.  I don’t know how many of you heard this last week.  There was a call that Francis is said to have taken from a woman in Argentina who is a parishioner of his, former parishioner of his.  She wanted to know if she could take communion even though she was living with a divorced man or was married to a man who was divorced and had not sought or gained an annulment.  Francis is alleged to have said: Yes, you can go ahead and take the communion.  No, you can’t, not if there’s any devotion whatsoever left to what the rules are of the Catholic faith and how it is that you try to remain and live your life in a state of sanctified grace.  No, she can’t do that.  The pope certainly shouldn’t be telling her that she could.  Douthat is wondering: Is he getting ready to change or alter, yet again, another part of thousands of years of teaching and canon handed down to us from our Lord?  If you go look this up, you’ll find this in the Book of Matthew.  When Jesus confronted the Pharisees over this issue, what did he tell them?  He told them that man and woman, once joined, by God, let no man cast asunder.  Once you’re married in the holy sacrament of marriage, that’s it.  You’re joined.  There is no getting out of it.  You can’t get out of it.

End Mike Church Show Transcript