The triumph of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama’s Republican Senate primary was a ray of sunshine for those of us who’d like to restore stoning to our legal system and remove the curse of profanity once and for all from our country. Scripture is very clear: “Thou shalt not swear.” But God’s chosen party, the Republican Party, has waffled on this issue, as it has on the issue of adultery and obedience to parents and observance of the Sabbath and the engraving industry. And that is why our country today is on the verge of destruction. The signs are everywhere. Judge Moore is the only man who dares say so.
In Deuteronomy, God makes it clear that a rebellious child should be brought before the elders and stoned to death. It’s there in black and white. We ignore these things at our peril. Establishment Republicans and a great many Christians have adopted the leftist “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone” approach to the law, which would produce utter anarchy — sinlessness as a requirement for service on a jury — and Judge Moore of Alabama is a prophet in our time, calling us to return to God’s Word.
Democrats are fine with the Beatitudes — “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and all that — but blessing people is no substitute for upholding God’s standards, and there are people in spiritual poverty who express that by taking the Lord’s name in vain, or by shopping on Sunday, or disobeying their parents, or by coveting their neighbor’s wife, and if we don’t punish sin, then sin will overrun the nation, as it has done already. That is why Judge Moore is not a Beatitudes guy but a Ten Commandments man. The law is the law.
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” It couldn’t be clearer. And our country is flooded with them. Currency, photo IDs, the Sunday rotogravure, high school yearbooks, television and movies, National Geographic. And the iPhone, an abomination to the Lord. Liberal theologians can try to talk this away but God has made it clear that when you print, or engrave, a picture, you are violating His law. You can draw or paint whatever you’d like, but when you make copies, your soul is in danger. Xerox, beware.
Judge Moore has taken the high road on the issue of homosexuality. The establishment churches have turned a blind eye, and he has been a voice in the wilderness. But that is only one evil and there are a host of them, profanity being one of the most prevalent and insidious.
We have weapons we can use in the war against profanity, if we choose to use them. The very same algorithms that produce graven images on iPhones can be reversed and used to detect cursing anywhere nearby. The phone can be programmed to sound an alarm and to send powerful electrical currents into the body of the malefactor and render him or her inert and insensate so that he or she can be handed over to the elders for stoning. Your establishment Republicans believe in light stoning, using handfuls of gravel, but Scripture is clear about this: we must use rocks so that the stoning results in death.
If we create stoning grounds in the centers of our cities and we publicly execute those who are guilty of rebelliousness, adultery, engraving, shopping on Sunday and cursing, you will see America become great again, assuming you are not one who will be executed.
Let us be honest here. There are too many people in this country. You know it and I know it. When we reduce the excess population by stoning and become a nation of 10 or 15 million, this country will be a paradise. You’ll be able to drive and not languish in traffic. No waiting for tee times. Our enemies will be gone, all of them, bonked to death, and we will gain their homes and their wives and their cleaning ladies. It will be perfect.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio humorist whose Post columns began in 2016, after he left his radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion”. The column, he says, aims to be “funny, cheerful, firmly set in the present, written in American.” He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
(c) 2017, Garrison Keillor