Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

We average 500 per Sunday. Since going to streaming, it’s up to 3,500.

 

Amazing. Combo of factors but still amazing.

 

Oh good, there’s a publication called Church Militant that’s working to undermine relationships between faiths.

Pope’s words on interfaith prayer against coronavirus sparks controversy among Catholics | Fox News

 

Yeah, it’s a nothing burger.

I think of the line from Unforgiven: “I’ll shoot for the queen, you shoot for...whomever.”

 

I am shocked — shocked and appalled, I tell you! — to discover that the Fake Republican Jeebus crowd would do something like this.

In the final third of director Nick Sweeney’s 79-minute documentary, featuring many end-of-life reflections from McCorvey—who grew up queer, poor, and was sexually abused by a family member her mother sent her to live with after leaving reform school—the former Jane Roe admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was “all an act.”

“This is my deathbed confession,” she chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.” “Do you think you would say that you used them?” Sweeney responds. “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.” She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. “I’m a good actress,” she points out. “Of course, I’m not acting now.”

Sweeney shows the video of McCorvey’s confession to her friends and acquaintances on the pro-abortion and anti-abortion sides, including pro-choice activist Charlotte Taft who, on the verge of tears, says, “That just really hurts because it’s big stakes. It’s just really big stakes.”

Reverend Schenck, the much more reasonable of the two evangelical leaders featured in the film, also watches the confession and is taken aback. But he’s not surprised, and easily corroborates, saying, “I had never heard her say anything like this…But I knew what we were doing. And there were times when I was sure she knew. And I wondered, Is she playing us? What I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we’re playing her.” Reverend Schenck admits that McCorvey was “a target,” a “needy” person in need of love and protection, and that “as clergy,” people like Schenck and Benham were “used to those personalities” and thus easily able to exploit her weaknesses. He also confirms that she was “coached on what to say” in her anti-abortion speeches. Benham denies McCorvey was paid; Schenck insists she was, saying that “at a few points, she was actually on the payroll, as it were.” AKA Jane Roe finds documents disclosing at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts” from the anti-abortion movement to McCorvey.​

Jane Roe’s Deathbed Confession: Anti-Abortion Conversion ‘All an Act’ Paid for by the Christian Right

 

This is sad:

At Least 100 Catholic Schools Across The Country May Not Reopen This Fall | HuffPost

 

Wylie Mayor Defends Religious Belief That Only Men Should Lead Public Prayer

 

What? Is Saint Betsy of Anway not going to bail them out with taxpayer dollars?

 

Clown take from the mayor.