"Dr. King said that the end has to be pre-existing in the means. In other
words, there's no right way to do the wrong thing. The fact that there
are no ethics, there are no scruples, in people who claim to hold the
moral high ground and who seek to indict others for offering
compassionate care that is accepted in general by the public, it is the
ultimate irony. It is the ultimate paradox that you will deceive to
bring about truth. I don't understand how that works."
This wonderful passage was a part of a
piece recently published by
Cosmopolitan magazine and written by Dr. Willie Parker. Parker was defending Planned Parenthood senior director of medical research, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who was recently victimized in a supposed video expose which purported to imply that her organization was making profit off of selling aborted fetuses.
It sounds disgusting, but
video was distorted and edited to cast Nucatola as a villain as well as deliberately give the false impression that Planned Parenthood was marketing human tissue from abortions. The
organization behind it is one of those right-wing groups dedicated to eliminating a woman's right to an abortion because they feel that abortion is murder and a sin and therefore it is their Christian duty to stop it.
And right on cue, folks such as Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback are demanding investigations into the workings of Planned Parenthood. Across twitter, nasty comments and ugly hashtags against Planned Parenthood are spread by people who claim to be Christians, even though it has been shown to them that the videos in questions are distorted.
And I keep telling myself that I've seen this scenario before - i.e. supposed Christian groups
deliberately lying in the name of God but this time by either the spread of
junk science or the distortion of legitimate science in order to
prove a supposed Biblical belief about a group of people along with "Christian" elected officials who create policy based upon these lies.
I should know it well. I've spent eight and a half years fighting it on this blog. It's when so-called Christian groups target the lgbt community with lies to prove the false idea that homosexuality is a "dangerous lifestyle."
And why? Because according to their religious beliefs, homosexuality is a sin.
But in both cases - the one involving distorted videos of Planned Parenthood and the other involving junk science and distorted studies to defame lgbts - I have to ask do the groups and individuals creating these false images really think God approves of their actions? Do they think that a lie told in the name of God is somehow a good thing? Does lying in the name of God suddenly make that lie into truth?
I doubt that these individuals will seriously harm Planned Parenthood in the long run and thanks to a lot of intrepid bloggers (myself included), the lies they tell about lgbts don't have as much power as they once did.
However, it saddens me to think how they hurt Christianity. These deliberately false attacks on Planned Parenthood in the name of
God are similar to the ones perpetrated against gays in the name of God.
And both attacks will do nothing but depict Christianity as a weapon of
lies.
God doesn't like ugly, even when it's supposedly done in His name.
