Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcast Network and former Republican Presidential candidate, on Israeli Prime Minister's suffering a major stroke: "He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."
"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone,'" he said.
[From CNN.com] According to The Associated Press, Robertson spokeswoman Angell Watts said of people who criticized the comments: "What they're basically saying is, 'How dare Pat Robertson quote the Bible?'"
"This is what the word of God says," Watts told the AP. "This is nothing new to the Christian community."
I credit the Bush administration for immediately and unequivocally renouncing Robertson's statement. Free speech is a great thing, and I hope that I would always defend vigorously someone's right to say that which makes my blood boil. But with that freedom comes great responsibility, and a comment like Robertson's makes me think that he doesn't grasp that in the slightest. It's so sad that his version of Christianity promotes a vengeful God and puts no value on sympathy or sensitivity or grace.
MORE POLITICS
Earlier this week, Today's Papers on Slate.com flagged a "signing statement" President Bush submitted with the McCain anti-torture amendment seeming to assert that the administration was not ultimately bound by the law. TP suggested that the papers ask the White House where it stands on the amendment.
Well, the Boston Globe, at least, has done just that. The White House's answer: Sure we're bound by the torture ban—except when we decide we're not. Or as an (anonymous) administration spokesperson put it, ''Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case." That did not make Sens. McCain, Warner, or Graham happy.
FINAL POLITICAL THING TODAY
This is from the NYTimes a couple days ago:
For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States.
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In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.
Abortion is legal on demand in the region only in Cuba, and a few other countries permit it for extreme circumstances, mostly when the mother's life is at risk, the fetus will not live or the pregnancy is the result of rape. Even when pregnancies do qualify for legal abortions, women are often denied them because anti-abortion local medical officials and priests intervene, the requirements are unnecessarily stringent, or women do not want to incur the public shame of reporting rape.
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this is me -- This will never happen in the United States right.
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