In the wake of yesterday’s mass shooting near Odessa and Midland Texas, Tony Perkins got a friendly Fox News perch to argue that guns don’t kill people so much as Godless liberals do!
Perkins was presented on Fox & Friends as some kind of paragon of morality. Host Todd Piro introduced Perkins as a “Southern Baptist pastor and former police officer” as well as president of the Family Research Council. Piro did not tell viewers that Perkins left the force after being suspended for failing to notify his superiors about anti-abortion activists’ plans to violently break through police lines separating them from pro-choice activists.
Piro also omitted Perkins’ coziness with white supremacists and his extreme anti-LGBT activism. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated The Family Research Council a hate group that “bills itself as ‘the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,’ but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians.”
Nevertheless, host Todd Piro said, “Tony, always a pleasure to have you.”
Pastor Perkins wasted no time on brotherly love. He got right to blaming secularism for yesterday’s mass shooting near Odessa:
PERKINS: At some point, we have to realize that ... as a nation we have a problem. And the problem is not the absence of laws, it’s an absence of morality, really the result of a decades-long march through the institutions of America, driving religion and God from the public square.
Piro responded, “Let’s get into a little bit more on that. ... What do we need to do as a country?”
Perkins sounded like he was trying to make a trade of gun control for more Christianity in school. He said he agreed that praying is not enough to prevent mass shootings and was “willing to sit down with the left who say I don’t want to hear any more about your prayers.”
“But it’s also a discussion of the absence of a moral core in our culture today,” Perkins continued. Then, as a lower-third banner read, ‘THE MORAL SOLUTION TO GUN VIOLENCE,” Perkins suggested that teaching evolution is the root of the problem: “I mean, look, we’ve taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime and then we’re surprised that we treat their fellow Americans like dirt,” he lectured.
Next, Perkins suggested that the reason prayer is not enough is because we need more (Christian) religion in public - and less liberalism:
PERKINS: It’s time we talk about the result of the left’s systematic march through our institutions driving religious expression from the public square. I think we have to go back to the point where we instill in these children – or at least give them the opportunity to know that they’re created in the image of God, therefore they have inherent value.
The other guest, Pastor Corey Brooks, an inner city pastor who seems much more anchored in the teachings of Christ, nonetheless agreed that “morality is at a very low in America right now.” He also agreed it’s “unfortunate” that “God has been forced out of the equation” in so many institutions. “Legislation doesn’t stop bullets,” Brooks said. “People’s hearts are changed by God.”
Brooks never spewed any of the animosity that Perkins did. Yet, it was Perkins who got almost all of the airtime in this five-minute discussion. Piro asked, “Does this problem have any chance of getting better if religion is increasingly leaving our society here in America?”
That sent Perkins into another rant about the “systematic march through our institutions.” This time, he specifically blamed the left and piled on more blame. “That’s why you see a precipitous drop in the value that is placed on religious expression, patriotism and the family, having children,” he added.
Yet after all that hate, Perkins had the nerve to say, “We need to come together from the left and the right” and “have a holistic conversation” about keeping guns away from dangerous people.
But Perkins made it clear he was not going to “come together” just for the sake of good will. “I’m not just gonna talk about restricting the instruments,” he warned. “We’ve gotta talk about the inspiration for violence.” Perkins had already made clear what that involved.
Piro closed the discussion, saying, “Pastors we appreciate your insight here on a Sunday morning.”
Watch Fox hold up Perkins as a standard-bearer of virtue below, from the September 1, 2019 Fox & Friends.
In Italy as in France, and despite the existence of several flavours of organised crime (Mafia, N’Drangheta, Camorra, the Russian Mob, etc.), and despite similar rates of certified mental illness, mass killings are rare as hen’s teeth.
The difference is that Americans have triggers to pull and they seem to get a power surge at having very lethal weapons. Proper hunters take pride in using only one shot to down their prey. Anything more than that is butchery.
In the era of Trump this is particularly dangerous. Trump is arguably a heretic (e.g., chosen one, does not need forgiveness), incapable due to his clinical narcissism to practice the Golden Rule and is likely guilty of unapologetically violating every one of God’s commandments except committing murder.
In many other ways such as favoring the rich over the poor or treatment of strangers the GOP violates the basic principles of the religion they wear on their sleeves and make a complete mockery of the teachings of Christ.
