For those who missed it, while sitting in for Sandy Rios on American Family Radio's morning show, ultraconservative Catholic activist Austin Ruse claimed that a Duke student paying her way through acting in porn movies was evidence that liberal professors needed to be "taken out and shot." Just when her bosses managed to put out that fire, Rios may have poured gasoline on the embers when she returned on Monday morning. She claimed that when Ruse aired his disgusting screed, he was actually speaking--wait for it--"words of life." No, I'm not kidding--People for the American Way got clips.
Rios said that Christians are supposed to bring "words of life" to the unsaved. Sometimes, she said, they can come in the form of condemnation because it may be the only way you can see that you're a sinner in need of Jesus. In her eyes, Ruse was only expressing outrage about how kids are being harmed by things they hear in the schools that are offensive to God. “If you are in the business of defiling them, of perverting their innocence, of sexualizing them," she said, "it isn’t us that condemns you, it’s God himself." Earlier, she said that while Ruse may have made an "intemperate remark," it was something that she and many others may have said in "unguarded, intemperate moments of passion."
When I first heard this yesterday (I was getting ready to post on this before the news that the New Apostolic Reformation has a major foothold in Oklahoma), I was gobsmacked. How in the world can you even try to parse something as outrageous as what Ruse said? How can any halfway decent person see this as anything less than unacceptable and bordering on stochastic terrorism? But then again, we shouldn't be surprised. I'm reminded of how on Free Republic, Jim Robinson's reaction to the numerous threats against Obama was, in so many words, "Please don't do that." I'm also reminded of how the reaction on AFR's Facebook to Ruse's nopology was largely along the lines of "atta boy, Austin!"
If I heard Rios right, she seems to subscribe to the line that all is fair when getting people saved. Many of you know that I was deceived into joining a dominionist campus ministry that seemed to have a similar mentality. The leadership there at the very least looked the other way at some absolutely despicable behavior--lying about who they really were to get people to join, hectoring people about getting saved, the lot. Apparently in Rios' world, it also includes making statements that border on terroristic death threats.