God Save Us

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Does God take an interest in criminal justice and human rights?

If He, She, or They did, would there even be a reason to write about criminal justice and human rights?

A bit more than a week ago, The Atlantic magazine asked a question like that: “Did God Save Donald Trump?” An unsurprising number of people believe God did just that. That it wasn’t that the registered Republican who tried to kill him had voted more times in his young life than he had pulled the trigger of the weapon he chose. No, “it was God and God alone,” said the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, God who Personally spared the convicted felon and sexual abuser and somehow overlooked the family man with the clean record.

Me, I haven’t listened to a Southern Baptist since the ones who told my pre-adolescent brother and me that if we didn’t baptize into the faith we’d burn in hell like our mother who only weeks before converted to Catholicism on her death bed (and me, I took the paved road).

Is it lack of divine interest that accounts for laws that now prohibit Afghan women from speaking in public, from singing or reading aloud even in their own homes, from exposing any part of their bodies, even faces, in public lest they lead the apparently helplessly weak Taliban men unto temptation?

Is it for lack of divine interest that children hunger, that people slaughter each other, abase each other?

On the day that Donald Trump was shot at, one hundred seventy thousand seven hundred ninety-one people died, virtually every one of them dear to someone.

To suggest that God would let every one of those dear ones go, and not that man, not that man, is to seriously undervalue whatever god you do or do not believe in.