In 2015, David Burge (Iowahawk) posted a now-famous tweet describing leftism: “1. Identify a respected institution. 2. Kill it. 3. Gut it. 4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.” In that short tweet, he perfectly described what leftism has done to the Judeo-Christian religion. And that act of wearing a religion’s “carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect” is the best caption possible for a video in which a female Presbyterian minister, draped in a Planned Parenthood stole, celebrates her abortion and abortions generally.

My parents were not religious. Dad had a snootful of religion being raised in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage in Nazi Germany, even as his older siblings, both ardent communists, castigated religion as the evil opiate of the people. Mom, meanwhile, was the daughter of a non-religious Jewish man and an equally non-religious Christian woman. With both having spent some of their formative years amongst Jewish socialists in British-mandate Palestine and, later, Israel, organized religion was not high on their list.

Even when Mom and Dad had children, it didn’t occur to them to join a synagogue. However, both were deeply knowledgeable about the Bible and Jewish history, and both were culturally Jewish (Dad, obviously, more than Mom). Therefore, while I cannot recite a single Jewish prayer other than the blessing over the Hannukah candles, I grew up in a home imbued with biblical values and morality. I may not practice my Jewish religion, but I have a deep and abiding respect for the traditional Judeo-Christian faiths.

Image: Pastor Rebecca Todd Peters. Twitter screen grab.

My respect has been aided by my decent knowledge of Western history. I’ve figured out over the years that, in the journey from primitive to civilized, the Judeo-Christian faith has always been at the leading edge. If people are pagans who are accustomed to human sacrifice, constant warfare, and slavery, that leading edge is going to be pretty rough and ugly. Nevertheless, it’s a moral compass that, slowly but surely, sets people on the path to true humanitarianism—not the faux humanitarianism of “the government can be trusted to take care of everyone, even if it must do so at the point of a gun,” but the true humanitarianism that recognizes that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.

It’s also a humanitarianism that acknowledges that our reverence for every life must be tempered by rules that make demands on people to create a society that allows everyone the space they need to function optimally and that imposes actual consequences for violating those rules. Dennis Prager argues compellingly that a society predicated on the Ten Commandments will inevitably be an optimal society for the greatest number of people.

One of the core tenets of the Bible is that each human life has value, for each of us is created in God’s image. This has led conservative practitioners of both Judaism and Christianity to conclude that this spark of life inevitably begins in the womb. Indeed, God tells the Prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you…” Your life is sacred and started from conception.

This life, therefore, is covered by the Sixth Commandment: Do not murder. (This was mistranslated in the King James Bible as “Thou shalt not kill,” which has created a lot of confusion over the years.)

This leads us to abortion: If you truly believe that the Bible is God’s word and an instruction manual for living a just, moral, and grace-filled life, you should believe, or at least grapple with, the reverence for human life from conception, and the abhorrence for murder, which is unjust killing.

Of course, ordinary people aren’t always operating with one eye to Heaven or the ultimate resurrection, so they will often put aside these strictures. There are prices to pay, though. I’ve long thought that the complete disregard for the value of life that characterizes gang members in black communities is because abortion is so prevalent there, with staggering numbers of babies killed in utero. If the mother doesn’t give value to the infant, why should you give value to the adult?

Religious leaders, however, aren’t supposed to be ordinary people, at least insofar as moral instruction goes. They are supposed to teach us those core religious principles and uphold those same principles in their own lives. If they don’t agree with religious principles, they shouldn’t become priests, pastors, ministers, or rabbis.

But that’s not how the left operates. Rather than ignoring religious houses of worship and focusing on their own houses of worship (schools, colleges, TV shows, state houses, etc.), leftists infiltrate traditional religions and eat them from the inside out, wearing them as the skin suit Iowahawk described.

And with that introduction, I give you Rebecca Todd Peters, dressed in her Planned Parenthood stole, assuring her congregation that abortion is a religious act and shouting her two abortions. Nothing more clearly shows what leftism has done to America because, when you think about it, human sacrifice is a pagan act. It is the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian ethos:

One last note: Peters is wrong that Roe v. Wade was overturned. Instead, after fifty years, the Supreme Court got it right and returned the matter to the states, where it belongs.