Ignorant academic characterizes the Virgin birth as rape because it’s that time of year for that sort of thing

It’s one part desperate, three parts ignorant.

The professor’s definitely edgy online remarks were picked up quickly by right-leaning outlets, including Fox News, and condemned outright.

“The idea that God has got the Virgin Mary back to his pad, and she’s saying ‘I really must go,’ and he’s saying ‘baby, it’s cold outside’ …” said Fox contributor Mark Steyn. “I miss the days when atheists were at least intelligent enough to take seriously what they were purporting to knock down.”

He added, “The stupidity and banality and shallowness and reductiveness of this is a dismal comment on the state of atheism in America. They don’t seem to make the same kind of Ramadan jokes as they do Christmas jokes.”

Host Tucker Carlson added elsewhere, “It’s not even brave. They never criticize Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. Or Apple. Tim Cook. Or Google. They suck up to people in power and then beat up on evangelicals and call themselves, you know, countercultural. I mean, it is pathetic.”

They’re not wrong to say that the professor’s comments signify a low-stakes cry for attention. They’re also not wrong to say the comments are lazy and unimaginative.

But Carlson and Steyn are missing the bigger problem here: The remarks are astonishingly ignorant. Indeed, of all aspects of the nativity story for the self-described professor of sexuality studies to attack, he chose the moment where the mother of Christ explicitly gave her consent.

As professor Karen Swallow Prior explained in a 2012 op-ed in the Atlantic, “[I]n the sequence of events given [in scripture], it is not until after Mary consents that the child is conceived … Furthermore, Mary’s verbal consent to the conception of the Christ child by the Holy Spirit is premised on her informed consent since the words delivered by the angel foretell also the identity and future of the child she will conceive: ‘the child to be born will be called holy — the Son of God.’”

She added, “So with Mary’s words of ‘let it be,’ we have what just might be the first recorded instance of verbal consent in human history. And considering the times — ancient Middle Eastern cultures were not known for their justice toward women — this verbal consent to being the bearer of the Christ child is quite remarkable indeed.”

Humorously enough, Sprankle doubled down on his unoriginal remarks even after social media users noted that Mary most absolutely gave consent and that her consent is an important part of the nativity story, one that affirms both Mary’s goodness as well as God’s commitment to the human person’s free will.

“The biblical god regularly punished disobedience. The power difference (deity vs mortal) and the potential for violence for saying ‘no’ negates her ‘yes,’” he tweeted, pushing the goal posts all the way back. “To put someone in this position is an unethical abuse of power at best and grossly predatory at worst.”

One can forgive the laziness and lack of creativity in Sprankle’s Christmas tweets (remember: Prior wrote her Atlantic op-ed back in 2012. This Mary-was-raped business isn’t even new territory). The ignorance, however, is a different thing. In an era of instantaneous communication and information with no limits, there’s no excuse for being pig-ignorant.