Pelosi clings to — and misquotes — her Bible
posted at 11:15 am on April 24, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Maybe Democrats can’t understand the call to faith many Americans feel because they’ve been reading the wrong Bible. Via the boss, CNS News provides evidence for this conclusion with Nancy Pelosi’s Earth Day speech on Tuesday. Apparently hoping to reach out to the bitter gun-hugging xenophobes of middle America, Pelosi adopted the Sunday Schoolmarm pose and told us that God wanted us to worship Gaia:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is fond of quoting a particular passage of Scripture. The quote, however, does not appear in the Bible and is “fictional,” according to biblical scholars.
In her April 22 Earth Day news release, Pelosi said, “The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’ On this Earth Day, and every day, let us pledge to our children, and our children’s children, that they will have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and the opportunity to experience the wonders of nature.”
Cybercast News Service repeatedly queried the speaker’s office for two days to determine where the alleged Bible quote is found. Thus far, no one has responded. …
Claude Mariottini, a professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Cybercast News Service the passage not only doesn’t exist - it’s “fictional.”
“It is not in the Bible,” Mariottini said. “There is nothing that even approximates that.”
I wrote about Barack Obama’s impulse to do some text-searching of Scripture ex post facto to cover for his Crackerquiddick comments. As I wrote then, people with religious faith are used to people throwing Bible quotes out of context at them to challenge their faith and their values. It’s the hallmark of someone who treats Biblical faith with contempt. But at least they usually get the quotes correct, even if out of context.
Let’s see if we can get something close to what Pelosi said from Bible Gateway, a fairly encyclopedic search engine that covers several different editions of the Bible. “Minister to the needs of God’s creation” comes up with no hits. “Environment” comes up with no hits. “Dishonor” comes back with 29 hits in the NIV (only 10 in KJV), none of which have to do with stewardship over God’s creation. Even “Steward” comes back with only 10 hits, none on point.
We do, however, find this in Genesis 1:28:
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
No one argues that mankind has stewardship of God’s creation, with the exception of the enlightened atheists that somehow insist on telling us what our own Bible says. However, the essentially illiteracy of our betters in San Francisco — the same crowd who laughed in approval to Barack Obama’s description of middle America as bitter xenophobes who cling to our Bibles because the GDP didn’t expand last quarter — perfectly exemplifies the contempt in which they hold our faith and the condescension they exude when trying to talk down to us.
I’d say that Pelosi may really be clinging to the Bible out of desperation, but desperation borne out of her own political ineptness. Maybe while she’s clinging to it, she could open it up and actually read it.