THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
(apologies to Keith Olbermann)
Dr. Craig Conner
Dr. Craig Conner, senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Panama City, threatened to stop paying taxes at the risk of being sentenced to jail if the federal government did not defund Planned Parenthood. In his Sunday sermon, Conner argued that the federal government was spending $540 million a year to “fund this evil.”…. “Friend, that offends me,” he explained. “And honestly, I was talking to the Lord about this just the other day and I said, ‘Lord, I can’t continue this.’ You know if Planned Parenthood is not defunded, I just may stop paying taxes. I know that I’ll go to jail for it.”…. “You want to talk about reducing the national debt?” Conner continued. “We could reduce it overnight if they would defund this evil organization and put it on the national debt. Man, we could get out of debt immediately.”
I may not believe in God, but I remember enough of the Sunday School lessons I was force-fed as a child to understand that while Jesus may have been capable of many things, he didn’t dabble in creative math. This is particularly true as it pertains to this question: How will stripping Planned Parenthood of its annual $540 million funding from the federal government immediately balance a budget that’s current at over $18 TRILLION in public debt??
If you want to grab a pen and paper and do the math, go ahead; I’ll wait….
Don’t worry; I’m not in a hurry….
I know, right? No matter how you calculate things, $540 million does NOT equal $18 trillion. In fact, Planned Parenthood’s budget is .003% of our public debt. So how does Dr. Conner (surely a doctorate in divinity isn’t proof of intelligence or a grasp of basic math) account for the other 99.997% of our debt? I realize he’s probably convinced that his Lord and Savior is capable of all things, but making things up out of whole cloth (or creative math) wasn’t really Jesus’ style. Except for the whole loaves and fishes thing. Even accounting for the distinct possibility that Dr. Conner got caught up in a paroxysm of righteous fervor and indignation…man, that’s some industrial-grade stupid, knowhutimean??
Conner said that Planned Parenthood had met the biblical definitions for evil, wicked, ungodly, hellish and shameful.
“It must go because Planned Parenthood is to children what ISIS is to Christians,” he noted. “It’s an extreme threat.”
According to Conner, God had released the recent undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials talking about fetal tissue donations as the last chance for America to repent.
“I am no prophet but I believe with all of my heart and it’s my personal opinion, God is the one that has revealed these videos to give America one more chance to repent of the infanticide that is happening in our country,” Conner observed. “It wasn’t men who came up with this idea to reveal what was going on. I believe God was the one that exposed it.”
Dr. Conner’s right- he’s no prophet…because, in most cases, prophets generally try to have one foot planted in somethign resembling reality. That’s he’s waxing self-righteous over a video that was selectively edited in an effort to paint Planned Parenthood in the worst possible light is as ignorant as it is dishonest and disingenuous. If Conner didn’t know he was using a dishonestly edited video to buttress his argument, he’s either stupid…or dishonest to a fault.
This smacks of Sen. Jon Kyl’s argument that “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does” is providing abortion-related services…when in fact the actual figure is more like 3%. The other 97% is “contraception, treatment and tests for sexually transmitted diseases, cancer screenings, and other women’s health services.” I don’t know about you- and I was a history major, so you may want to double-check my math- but not even I can make a mathematically credible argument that 3% is equivalent to 97%.
Dr. Conner- like Kyl- is certainly free to his opinion…but he’s not free to his own facts. The truth is not a fungible commodity, despite the efforts of American Taliban luminaries like Conner to “prove” otherwise.
As for his threat to stop paying taxes unless Planned Parenthood is defunded by the federal government, that’s Dr. Conner’s prerogative. I think he’d very likely look pretty good in an orange prison jumpsuit at a federal penitentiary, don’t you?
