It was "fake but accurate"
A fake meme surfaced last week and managed to trick conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza into retweeting it as real. The meme featured a supposed article from the Atlantic that had this headline beneath a picture of a pride parade:
At this weekend's pride parade a man exposed his genitals to my 6 year old. She was horrified. Am I raising a bigot.
D'Souza was incredulous and retweeted it with his own thoughts:
Naturally, once the image was revealed to be fake, D'Souza deleted his tweet and left-wing sites from Yahoo to Snopes jumped down his throat for the error. But it makes me wonder a couple things.
First, what does it say that D'Souza could so easily believe this? Maybe it says that Dinesh is a conspiracy nut always looking to smear his opposition, and that he has no grip on reality. Or maybe it says that the headline is close enough to reality that it's completely believable.
I'm curious if those criticizing D'Souza would say it's reasonable that a child be horrified by being exposed a grown man's genitals? Would they say that it's appropriate for a parent to not want their child exposed to it? Would they say that not wanting children exposed to naked grown men is reasonable? And if rules were made to prevent it from happening, would those rules be just and moral, or would they be bigoted?
And if so, wouldn't it right to back off D'Souza and maybe just refer to him and other conservatives retweeting the fake image as the New York Times treated anti-Bush propagandists in 2004:
Reformation first
I have no idea who runs the account "Oldest & Biggest Reformed Podcast," but they stirred quite a pot this last week with this post:
I saw commentaries that blasted the tweet for being as brazenly anti-Catholic as the trans posse honored by the L.A. Dodgers this month. Others took issue with the tweet for discouraging Christian engagement of the political world. I didn't see it as either of those two. In fact, it seems to be asking a completely legitimate question.
While roughly 70% of Americans claim the Christian faith, Barna research has put the number of those Americans who possess a biblical worldview at less than 10%. That begs us to ask what the remaining number of Christians who don't rely on the Bible as authoritative use to calibrate their moral compass?
There's no denying that a pursuit of political power as the primary means to addressing and solving society's woes has become a default position for the church. Is it that bad of a theory to say that reformation in the church must precede any revolutionizing of our system of government? It's promoting biblical discipline not disengagement.
Is this the last time?
This image got to me this week. I'd not ever thought of it this way, but once I saw this, I thought about it for days.
See what I mean? It got me. There was a day that my friends and I grabbed our little Hutch mini-football and headed out into the yard to play a pick-up game for the last time. And none of us knew it at the time.
I guess that's true of so many of our life experiences. There is coming a day when I will pick up my child for the last time and not realize it. There is coming a day when I will go out to eat with my parents for the last time. There is coming a day when I will hold my wife's hand for the last time. And the same goes for you with your kids, your parents, your spouse.
Maybe that should affect how we live today.
