That James Inhofe sits in the United States Senate should be a source of embarassment, not only to Oklahomans, but to all Americans. Years ago, when he was a House member, he went to the floor to protest NBC's planned broadcast of Schindler's List because the netweork planned to run it unedited for content and uninterrupted. Inhofe was not upset over the scenes of brutality, the murder of innocents, the depiction of Jewish slavery, or the destruction of the moral universe at the hands of Nazi thugs. No, he was in high dudgeon over nudity and sexuality contained in the movie. Being in Washington, I went to the House Office Building (I do not remember which one) where his office was located and, being informed by his secretary, who was overwhelmed by phone calls, that he was on the floor, I wrote a long note, signed and printed my name and address and telephone number. I was rewarded with mailings from his office, so I had to call and get my name taken of his mailing list, because the cost of fumigating my post office box was too high.
Think Progress has the latest from an interview this morning on Fox & Friends (one can tell a lot about someone by one's friends, or so I've been told . . .) in which he claimed that we had nothing to worry about from global warming (which comes "from the sun"; of course it does, but it is due to human activity that solar warming is held in at a greater rate than it otherwise would) because "God is still there". Using this ridiculous non-logic, no one need do anything about anything - not abortion, not gay marriage, not war, not poverty, not AIDS, not unnecessary death from preventable disease - because, well, you-know-Who is always there.
It is because of cretins like Inhofe (and Sam Brownback, and Pat Roberts - a two-fer from Kansas) that I withheld publicly acknowledging my Christian faith for the longest time. I in no way wanted to be associated with a doofus like him. It was only when I realized that he in no way represented anything I understood as "Christian" and that the persistence of the public equating him with what Christianity is all about would only last until someone stood up and said "No!" that I decided, since I didn't really see a whole lot of that going on, I had better do something about it. I don't know how important my contribution has been; my guess is it is negligible, but that is a topic for another day.
For those of you who might not be familiar with Christian doctrine, or the developing environmental awareness among evangelicals and others, there is this teaching of the Church called the doctrine of creation (and no, it has nothing to do with creationism, another rape of Christian teaching for idiotic ends). It states that all that is came about because of God, and that the act of creation tells us something about who this god is - God is a being overflowing with so much love that God does not desire to exist alone, but to be with others in a loving, free relationship. Over all the creatures, God created human beings as caretakers of this creation. The most basic divine calling is that of stewardship - we human beings are to be those who ensure the creation remains as God created it, good and worthy of divine love. Human disobedience, while introducing a rift between God and creation, has not dissolved this most basic mandate. We are to ensure the integrity of creation through respect and wise use.
Rather than sit back and let God take care of everything (I can't believe this is a subject of conversation; please remove the idiot from public view as soon as possible), we are enjoined to work, and work hard to keep creation as it was first declared - "Very good." The destruction of the earth through human activity is a violation of the trust a good God has placed in our apparently incapable hands. While prayer and confession and a certain trust in divine providence is always warranted, the first thing called for is, at it always hass been, to act. The mess is not God's. The mess is ours. Not only do we need to return to a right relationship to the world - one of loving care and stewardship of this most precious gift - but we need to correct all that our sinfulness - greed, disdain for creation, a forgetfulness of our most primary responsibility before both the world and the world's Creator - has wrought. There is, then, a Christian mandate for care for the earth. Environmentalism has a faith component, and churches are waking up to that fact and acting upon it.
For this numbskull to get on national television and say what he said goes beyond stupid. He has just shown his ignorance of the very God he claims is "still there". That the Republicans trusted him with the chairmanship of a committee having to do with the environment is reason #477 to be thankful for a Democratic victory last week.
