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James Talarico, the newest Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas, speaks with the moral authority of a 1980s televangelist and the intellectual depth of a freshman gender studies major at Oberlin College.
Sure, enlightened leftists have long mocked believers of the Sky God as both irrational and anti-science. In truth, they’ve only been frustrated by the inability to appropriate Christianity to spread their distinctly secular morality. For decades, candidates have come and gone, promising to “reclaim” Christianity for the Left.
Now, I’m not a Christian myself, but I’m not fond of frauds, either. And even I can see that the problem with Talarico’s pious rhetoric is that his faith doesn’t inform his political values, but rather, the reverse. It justifies his progressivism.
Talarico, for instance, infamously argued that God is “nonbinary.” I strongly suspect that most devout Christians would take issue with applying goofy neologisms to their Lord and Savior. Even now, Talarico insists that “most” people in Texas understand that God is “beyond” gender. Just ask the Apostle Paul, who allegedly made the case in his letters to the Galatians!
If I could speak to Apostle Paul, who refers to God as the “Father” in Galatians while using masculine pronouns, I’d probably be more curious to know which of the six different sexes he was going to choose, the number the Texas representative came up with while opposing a bill prohibiting biological males who identify as female from playing in girls’ high school sports.
Talarico doesn’t prove modern progressivism is compatible with traditional notions of faith but rather that modern progressivism is more prone to embrace social science quackery than the average social conservative.
In Talarico’s worldview, gender is highly malleable in both nature and faith, but skin color is an immutable characteristic that predetermines not only a person’s thoughts and actions but his innocence and guilt — a view that undercuts the entire notion of free will and basic science.
“White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus,” Talarico once tweeted. “But we spread it wherever we go — through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag — to be contagious.”
Did the saintly Talarico suggest to his constituents that the way to shake off the depravity of racism and embrace love was to find salvation in Jesus Christ? No. Talarico didn’t even bother lifting any snippets from Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians to argue that white people are inherently racist. He told them the way to stop being a racist was “proclaiming loudly and unequivocally that #BlackLivesMatter.”
The Texan deserves some credit for embracing racial predeterminism even before the death of George Floyd drove the country into a spasm of lunacy and violence. Most of the time, though, he’s nothing if not predictable.
When a Senegal immigrant wearing a “property of Allah” hoodie murdered three and wounded 13 people in Austin not long ago, the Presbyterian seminarian’s first instinct was to take aim at the most obvious culprits in the massacre … those wishing the victims’ families “thoughts and prayers.”
But forget faith. Any cursory examination of Talarico’s platitudes and tautologies exposes him as an intellectual lightweight, as well.
Take his argument concerning issues such as abortion and gay marriage, which he stresses aren’t very important because they aren’t explicitly mentioned in the Gospels. Jesus, I’m fairly certain, never once spoke on the funding mechanisms of Medicaid or Planned Parenthood, either, and yet, Talarico preaches that both are moral imperatives.
Indeed, Talarico reminisces about attending a Planned Parenthood march as a teenager the way a normal person of faith might recall a confirmation or bar mitzvah. There are, of course, wide-ranging debates over the ethics and permissibility of abortion, but only a few faiths or denominations — perhaps Baalists, Unitarian Universalists, and “cosmic Jews” — celebrate it as others might a sacrament. Talarico’s half-baked theological case for abortion is to contend that the Annunciation, Gabriel’s announcement of Jesus’s coming to Mary, shows that “creation has to be done with consent.”
Talarico fans argue that bringing up comments from five or six years ago is uncharitable and misleading. People change, they argue. Indeed, they do.
Voters, however, can only judge a candidate by their words and actions. And this candidate still uses theology to argue his points rather than admitting he was roped in by ludicrous radicalism. Then again, even if he walked back his wokeness, Talarico is obviously susceptible to embracing a host of bizarre notions — not mere partisan positions that might be wrong, but distortions of incontrovertible truth — that should render him completely unsuitable for public office.
Talarico will almost surely moderate his deranged social views during the general election. Then again, once the patina of religiosity is stripped from his rhetoric, all that’s left is the typical hackneyed socialist sloganeering and the politics of aggrievement, envy, and zero-sum economics. Most of it would fit neatly into a Bernie Sanders speech:
“Billionaires have taken over Texas and taken over America — but together, we can take power back for working people.”
“The reason poverty exists in the wealthiest country on Earth is not because we can’t feed the poor. It’s because we can’t satisfy the rich.”
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“The biggest welfare queens in this country are the giant corporations that don’t pay a penny in federal taxes. It’s not hungry kids.”
And, let’s face it: That’s the rhetoric, not his inspirational faith, that really triggers gushing from the left-wing media and Democrats.
