While faith and politics often intersect, and while the Bible itself says a great deal about politics and politicians, I try very hard never to turn this faith column into a political column. But with the Virginia elections already passed, I believe I can now weigh in on a particular moral aspect of it without risking that.
Just a few days before Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s stunning victory over Terry McAuliffe, a race hoax was perpetrated by the utterly inappropriately named Lincoln Project. How exactly an organization names itself after “Honest Abe” while making lie detectors everywhere blow their circuit boards is beyond explanation.
Nonetheless, this particular lie was more egregious than most, a new low even by the standards of an organization that, based on numerous well-known iniquities, apparently has no actual standards. Days before the election, the Lincoln Project sent multiple tiki-torch-holding individuals in khakis and white shirts to pose as white supremacists in support of Glenn Youngkin.
Now, at first blush, one might be tempted to simply laugh all of this off since their ploy was discovered and backfired on them spectacularly and since one of their “white supremacists” was clearly an African American. (On that one, I suppose either they were trying to ensure enough minority representation in their gutter-level mission, or perhaps they don’t really grasp the “white” part of white supremacy). But no one should laugh off what they did, not at all. It was vile, sleazy, scummy, wretched, filthy, debased, demonic and perverse. Common people are out here trying to live their lives and get along with each other, and trashy stunts like this, when they are gotten by with, make people who would get along just fine hate each other instead, and for no good reason.
Many years ago, God wrote a little thing called the Ten Commandments. The ninth one reads as follows, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” That commandment did not give a loophole for political activists. Bearing false witness against people, lying, is a violation of the highest order, and no amount of spinning will ever make it right, especially not when it is a lie as huge and potentially deadly as the one vomited out by the Lincoln Project. Being tagged as a white supremacist is enough to make one a target for deranged killers; thus, a stunt like this is neither cute nor edgy; it is just wicked.