Here’s a sign the pro-choice side is running out of arguments: praising God as an abortionist.
RH Reality Check, a “reproductive health blog” with strong ties to Planned Parenthood, recently argued that the Bible supports abortion, tweeting “The Bible Is #ProChoice” and “Most anti-choicers claim obedience to the divinely inspired word of God. Does the Bible support that?” on May 6. In the linked article, the staff embedded a video from something called “The Kyle Kulinski Show,” where the host, Kyle Kulinski, revealed that “God actually performs abortions” in the Bible.
To tout Kulinski’s video from late March, RH Reality Check noted that while “Most anti-choicers claim obedience to the divinely inspired word of God,” Kulinski’s video purports to demonstrate how the Bible “appears contradictory to the anti-choice stance.”
In response to a Bill O’Reilly segment, Kulinski decided to “educate everybody 100% on what the Bible and Christianity really teach about abortion” with “facts and with quotes.” Or torturous interpretations of them.
In his rant, Kulinski pointed to Hosea 9:14, where the Prophet Hosea urges God to punish the wicked ways of the Tribe of Ephraim with “a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.” Kulinski deciphered, “This is the part of the Bible where God actually performs abortions.”
But he opened with Psalms 139:13-16 where King David sings, “For thou didst form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me in my mother's womb.” Kulinski proposed a rebuttal for that too: “that says nothing about being against abortion there. It just simply describes how the Bible, how in the Bible, God is responsible for creation.”
For his next verse, he highlighted Jeremiah 1:4-5 (“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.”) Kulinski sobbed, “Stop talking about all people. [It’s] talking specifically about Jeremiah. What an epic fail for the pro-life movement.” Because, you know, God can only talk to certain people in the womb.
But Kulinski’s own “epic fail” in logic appeared when he turned to Exodus 21:22-23 and discovered that if a man harms a pregnant woman, “You pay a fine, you don’t go to jail, you don’t get the death penalty [like if you kill a person].” Getting fined for something in the Bible must mean the Bible supports it.
As his “favorite” verse, Kulinski translated Numbers 5, which describes punishment for women who cheat on their husbands, to mean “cheating wives are supposed to get an abortion in the bible” and consume “poison” that “makes your belly swell and the fetus rot and drop out” –“poison” meaning holy water mixed with tabernacle floor dust.
With Christians, “It’s not about what it [the Bible] says, it’s about what your already held biases and prejudices are,” Kulinski lamented.
Of course, Kulinski, a social democrat, agnostic-atheist and secular humanist is free from such inclinations, even as his show bills itself as a “Progressive Talk Radio Show.” Without apparent irony, the show also describes itself as “dedicated to providing our audience with quality reporting, context, perspective and thoughtful analysis” and “committed to objectivity over fake neutrality and false equivalence” in response to “the media’s failure to remain loyal to the principle of objectivity.”
Sounds more like a version of “The Gospel according to Liberals.”
— Katie Yoder is Staff Writer, Joe and Betty Anderlik Fellow in Culture and Media at the Media Research Center. Follow Katie Yoder on Twitter.
