Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy -- it’s tragic -- when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.
I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?
I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous--
Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?
Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!
Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court---
Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.
(The audio is here, courtesy of the Illinois Information Service.)
Here's what I found particularly ironic about the the whole thing:
Rob Sherman is pro-life.
Monique Davis is "pro-choice".
Now, Sherman is no stranger to this sort of decidedly un-Christian treatment from Christians. (Last fall, for example, his house got egged by vandals who wrote "JESSUS" [sic] in big yellow letters in his driveway.)
Maybe it's because I've met Sherman before (he had me on his radio show last fall because my boss, Joe Scheidler, a longtime friend of his, was originally supposed to be on, but then ended up going out of town and asked me to fill in for him), and because I can't help but like him that I find hearing about extraordinarily obnoxious things said to him by Christians to be so troubling.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but maybe, just maybe, acting boorishly toward atheists may not be a very effective way to win them over.
1 comment:
Great post!
You know, I used to be an atheist, but I was never a jerk about it, I just thought that God was a non-issue and didn't waste time on it. Even then, I detested militant atheists who went around bothering people about it. So you can see that I've never liked Rob Sherman until now. (It used to really bother me when he would put his kid on the radio or TV to talk about how he wanted to be an atheist Boy Scout, but that the mean ol' Scouts wouldn't let him.) I guess I've got to give him a few points for being pro-life.
It also goes to show you that you never know who is going to be pro-life. There are A LOT of pro-life feminists and Stalin, hardly a "pro-life" fellow, thought that abortion just turned sex into a bourgeois commodity, so he banned it in the Soviet Union.
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