Rahab the harlot hid Israel’s spies in Jericho and lied about it to the city authorities–an act for which she is praised in both Testaments of the Bible.
Okay, let me see if I understand this. Planned Parenthood is caught on videotape selling pieces of aborted babies, much of it “harvested” with the baby still alive… and the ones who did wrong are the folks who made the video?
Catholic blogger Mark Shea is just one Christian who is saying it was a sin to entrap Planned Parenthood: “All that happens is that PP is temporarily embarrassed and prolifers get a thrill for a day or two” ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2012/06/lying-for-jesus-a-faustian-bargain.html ).
Then again, not even that would have happened, had the tricksters from the Center for Medical Progress not caught Planned Parenthood doing its ghoul business.
This reminds me of the argument made against the Climategate emails. Never mind that the ol’ “climate scientists” were using every dirty trick in the book to put over the biggest con in human history: it was the hackers who were wrong for hacking them.
But according to Shea and others, it’s always a sin to tell a lie, even if by telling the truth to the bad guys, or keeping your trap shut when you know the truth, you help the bad guys to do evil.
But the Bible contains a number of incidents in which it is presented as virtuous to deceive the wicked.
Rahab the harlot hid Joshua’s spies in Jericho. The midwives lied to Pharaoh to save the lives of Jewish baby boys. Ehud used guile to assassinate the king of Moab. The Christians in Damascus snuck Paul out of town in a basket, over the walls, deceiving the authorities. When Herod claimed the authority to kill all babies born in Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary frustrated him by fleeing to Egypt with the baby Jesus. And this happened because the wise men, entreated by Herod to report to him after they saw the baby so that he could go and worship him, too, made a fool of him by breaking their promise and going home by a roundabout route that Herod failed to watch.
There are more. Need I go on?
It is not always a sin to lie to the bad guys.
The fact that our glorious rulers still push global warming, and still refuse to defund Planned Parenthood, cannot be blamed on the whistleblowers.
Thanks to those videos, obtained by trickery–a la Rahab or Ehud–Planned Parenthood has lost the ability to deny that it traffics in baby parts.
That’s little enough to gain; but again, that’s not the whistleblowers’ fault.
Mr. Shea, your position is wooden-headed, self-indulgent, Pharasaical, and wrong.