Pelosi can't find bible verse she made up

Slate:
Nancy Pelosi addressed a gathering of presidents of Christian colleges this week in Washington, where she thanked the evangelical community for its leadership on immigration and refugee policy reform. To this end, the speaker of the House quoted a favorite bit of biblical wisdom in her opening statement: “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.”

OK, actually, she said, it might not technically be from the Bible. “I can’t find it in the Bible, but I quote it all the time,” Pelosi said as she introduced the quote. “I keep reading and reading the Bible—I know it’s there someplace. It’s supposed to be in Isaiah. I heard a bishop say, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation … ’ ”

To clarify: It is not “there someplace.”

“The Pelosi passage is not in the Bible,” Will Kynes, an associate professor of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Whitworth University, told me by email. The closest analog he could find was Proverbs 14:31, which switches the order of the two main ideas and focuses specifically on the poor: “Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him.” Greg MaGee, an associate professor of biblical studies at Taylor University, independently suggested the same verse as the closest approximation of the sentiment in Pelosi’s version.

Pelosi got one thing right: She does in fact “quote it all the time.” The earliest example I found comes from the Congressional Record in 2002, in a speech honoring a prominent Catholic priest in San Francisco who had recently died. “The Bible tells us that to minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship,” she said on the House floor. “To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.”
...
The Pelosi approach to helping the poor actually harms them by locking them into dependency rather than lifting them out of poverty with a job.  That is something the Democrats like Pelosi fear because once the poor become independent they can't be scared into voting for Pelosi and other liberals who push a fear of being without government assistance.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains