OPINION:
This past week, a transgender militant named Audrey Hale walked into a private school in Nashville, Tennessee, and proceeded to execute three children and three staff members. By all accounts, she did this for one reason and one reason only: She wanted to kill Christians.
This was clearly a hate crime by anyone’s definition. It was religious bigotry in the extreme. It wasn’t “tolerant.” It wasn’t “affirming.” It wasn’t “inclusive.” It was the targeted murder of men, women and children simply because of what they believed, the values they held, and how they lived out their faith on a daily basis.
Evelyn Dieckhaus (9), William Kinney (9), Hallie Scruggs (9), Mike Hill (61), Katherine Koonce (60) and Cynthia Peak (61) were killed simply because they sought to be biblically obedient followers of Christ.
The reaction from the self-righteous intelligentsia was as predictable as the sunrise. It didn’t take more than five minutes. Our nation’s moral exemplars couldn’t even wait for the bodies in Nashville to grow cold before they rushed into the public square to start essentially blaming the victims and their families for their own executions. The parade of the tone-deaf holier-than-thous was nearly endless. Here’s just a sample:
Those who don’t believe in “common sense gun control have blood on their hands,” tweeted country music’s Rosanne Cash.
“It is the f—-ing guns!” posted 72-year-old rocker Peter Frampton.
“Ban assault rifles, not trans rights,” added actress Valerie Bertinelli.
Now, your reaction may be that none of this Hollywood posturing surprises you. We’ve come to expect such callousness and blatant hypocrisy from these red-carpet elites who can afford to hire personal armed guards while they smugly tell the rest of us that we have no right to bear arms.
But there is one post on social media that should catch your attention. It comes from an evangelical leader from America’s heartland named Ed Rotz.
Pastor Rotz is a former district superintendent of the Wesleyan Church of North America, a purportedly evangelical denomination that one would think would sympathize with its brothers and sisters in Christ being stalked down in a K-6 grade Christian school and summarily shot for little more than their biblical orthodoxy.
But think again. Within minutes of the Nashville massacre, Pastor Rotz, rather than posting support for Covenant Christian School, the victims and their families, posted this: “In the aftermath of today’s Nashville shooting horror, I’m more and more baffled by the intransigence of (mostly Republican) lawmakers to pass common sense gun control legislation. Just baffled. And angered.”
How should we respond? What should we say to “evangelical leaders” who somehow seem to think the way to prevent murder is to blame the victims who simply wanted to preserve their God-given and constitutional right to defend themselves from being killed?
Well, let me take a shot at such a response. Consider this open letter to Pastor Ed and all like him who are “baffled and angered” by those dastardly and “mostly Republican lawmakers” who are a bit nervous about the idea of disarming Christians every time some deranged sexual nihilist decides to go on a shooting spree.
Dear Reverend Rotz:
What “utterly baffles” and “angers” me is this kind of thoughtless evangelical virtue signaling from Christian leaders who should know better. One has to wonder if you would have been at the front of the goose-stepping Brown Shirts who blamed the Poles for the blood in the streets of Warsaw in 1939. I mean, everyone knows it was those “mostly Republican” Polish teachers and custodians with side arms and “assault rifles” who caused World War II, right?
Or maybe, Pastor Ed, you would have proudly stood with the antebellum slave owners of the South in blaming John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman for the bodies in the fields of Bull Run and Gettysburg? Surely a Black man’s right to arm himself in defense of human freedom is to blame for the Civil War, correct?
And Ed, I’m sure you agree that it was a horror of all horrors for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, et al. to write that cursed Second Amendment into our Constitution. I mean, every morally superior progressive knows those crazy armed colonial farmers, merchants and ministers caused the American Revolution and not King George.
And how about those doggone Jews at Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen? If they had just laid down their guns, we all would have had “peace in our time.” Oh, that’s right, I think they did.
Reverend Rotz, you can keep your “common sense gun control,” but I’ll let the Poles, Jews and Christians keep their guns, thank you.
Yours truly,
A “mostly Republican intransigent” who cares more about the kids just killed than parroting the PC pabulum of the one who just killed them.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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