I passed by a radio today playing Fox News and heard some Republican complain that a piece of legislation was "bigger than the Bible."
I have to assume he was talking size. No politician of either party's about to make Lennon's mistake and claim his work is more popular than the Divine's, so it's got to be the length of the bill. Okay.
We now have the official size limit for Republican acceptance of legislation. Maybe twelve, thirteen hundred pages. (I'm thinking here King James, Scofield Concordance, extra notes in the back.) Just as the Washington Monument limits the height of every building in the capital, so shall the Bible define the maximum number of pages any bill can be.
But why should such a handy (and Authoritative) measure be limited to legislation? There is so much superfluous, impenetrable and just plain, you know, wordy writing around that could be trimmed to a nice, biblical length. Conservatives regularly point out that the US tax code exceeds this standard. Bush's attempted immigration reform legislation also failed the Genesis-to-Revelations test.
How about those pesky repair manuals for aircraft engines and the physical plants of large buildings? Lots of those publications exceed the Good Book in length. Do we really need such secular arrogance overshadowing the Lord's Word?
And what about the number one enemy of true (conservative) believers everywhere, the US Code? At 3.4 million words, the law of our land requires more than 7500 letter-sized pages to print. That's using up the trees that could go into half a dozen Bibles. What simpler and more elegant solution than to simply scrap these inferior, man-made laws and turn to the Good Book for our legal guidance, eh?
Except it's so wordy. Are there Cliff's Notes?