Seven years later, they are still the anti-Christs.

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As we go through the old posts and update their tags, we're finding that some of them are just as relevant in 2015 as they were "back in the aughts," as the old-timers like to say. Here's an example. Hurricane Gustav was bearing down on New Orleans, 2008, and Republican fundamentalists were asking God to drown the city again, because sin. Instead, the storm turned course and threatened to drown the Republican Convention going on in Florida. Our story picks up there:

We're gonna run through this one more time: God is not a member of the Republican Party or affiliated with the conservative movement. In His earthly form as Jesus of Nazareth, these were some of the extremely anti-Republican sentiments He expressed:

• "Blessed are the peacemakers.... love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to them that hate you." This would refer to Barack Obama's plans, ridiculed by Republicans, to meet with world leaders on the "enemies of the U.S." list, talk with them, and listen to them in the interests of creating peace.

• "In the same way you judge, so will you be judged in equal measure." Those who are obsessed with enforcing select passages from the third book of the Torah while overlooking the third book of the New Testament — "Guard against all kinds of greed; a person's life does not consist of the abundance of possessions" — should be extremely careful here. Somewhere along the line, Republicanism and conservatism became about protecting corporations while condemning everyone and everything else. God doesn't appreciate having His name associated with that. He's going to be one very Annoyed Almighty when judgment comes.

• "Sell what you have and give to the poor.... When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind." Here, the Lord was referring to basic health care for all of His people, which is what's been threatened with termination for years now by a wall of Republican social Darwinists who paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge in discussing the poor and uninsured: Let them die and decrease the surplus population. That's not Christian, it's Satanic.

• "When you pray, do not pray as the hypocrites do: for they love to pray standing in public, where they may be seen by others.... When you pray, shut your door and do it in private." This one might resonate with the Misery Megachurch crowds who like to squint their eyes earnestly in front of TV cameras and entreat the Almighty to smite Democrats for letting homosexuality and abortions cause any large-scale destruction and desolation that comes along.

An excellent open letter to conservative Christians by Rev. Gary Vance, written in 2004, bears repeating here. In it, Rev. Vance points out that there is a "long history of liberals who have labored for the betterment of society and the furthering of God’s Kingdom.... No average American would have a fair wage today if it weren’t for liberal Christians and labor activists. Liberal Christians and civil rights activists fought and still fight against conservative America for racial equality. Child labor laws were enacted because liberals fought for them. Medicare and Social Security exist today because of Liberalism. 'Bleeding heart liberals' have long advocated for the homeless, the hungry, the less fortunate, and the disenfranchised...."

WB senior staff have parochial-school educations in their pasts, and can cite Scripture with the best of them. And we are damned well certain that not a line of it calls for leaving the least of God's children to fend for themselves. As Rev. Vance politely sums up, while Democrats and liberals have been taking on a wide range of highly Christian issues, Republicans and conservatives focus myopically on exactly two: gay rights and abortion. For a while, gay rights attention eased up when a  Republican ultra-conservative Vice President of the United States [Dick Cheney] turned out to have a lesbian daughter, but now it's back in full force as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on gay marriage rights. As for abortion, the pattern is clear: the unaborted are born and then left uninsured, untreated, uneducated, underpaid, unemployed—and condemned for being drains on decent, hard-working society.

Which brings the American Taliban fanatics in Washington to a third focus in their Holy Trinity of causes: killing the poor. 

As Jesus himself pointed out in that verse about not being able to serve both God and man: You can't have it both ways at once. Sometimes, when praying (privately and quietly) for deliverance from evil, it's good to realize that the evil is much closer than those devils and sinners parading for sinful rights on national TV.

The evil is in the mirror.

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