When the Washington Post promoted snippets from Michael Moore's forthcoming book on Sunday, they portrayed Moore as a "lifelong Catholic" -- which is a bit of a strange label when a paragraph later, the Post was bashing the "uterus police" who oppose abortion as "really, really weird."
But then, the "Catholic" blurb the Post picked let Moore imagine himself as a playwright composing an "avant-garde" version of Jesus dying on the cross, where he lectured like a liberal about how nobody else had compassion for the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden:
On Jesus: A lifelong Catholic, Moore penned a play — “a little avant-garde number about Jesus’s crucifixion” — while struggling through his first and only term as the lone hippie on his home town’s school board. “ ‘This is where you people want me?’ Jesus shouted to the audience,” Moore writes. “ ‘Just nailed to a cross? So you don’t have to listen to me anymore about caring for the poor or the sick or the downtrodden?’ ” The school board held a special election to recall Moore, but he prevailed.
On abortion: In 1971, while still in high school, Moore cared for a friend who was almost killed by a botched illegal abortion. “Human life begins when the fetus can survive outside the womb,” he writes in a footnote. “Some people, I guess, just like to be the uterus police, the bossypants of other women’s reproductive parts. And that has always struck me as really, really weird.”
Apparently, neither writer Justin Moyer nor anyone else at the Post can imagine that Jesus might be heartbroken at a woman killing her unborn child, that he might have lamented that kind of savagery from the Cross. Somehow, the unborn child is never the "downtrodden." But they can imagine a "lifelong Catholic" who thinks his Pope and bishops and priests are all serious weirdos.
