My Favorite Liberal

By Yashwanth Manjunath

Happy Easter everyone. On this special day I thought I would talk about my favorite liberal, and one of my favorite people, Jesus.  I mean, there was so much to like about the guy. He really was a man ahead of his time on a number of controversial issues that we are still trying to sort out.

Take gay marriage for example. Now, we don’t know how Jesus felt about the idea of gay people marrying because he never talked about the issue specifically. But we do know that he certainly was not in favor of judging others for what they do in the bedroom because of that time he said “If any one of you is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” It is pretty difficult to imagine an open-mined and tolerant guy like that fighting to discriminate against people solely based on sexual orientation.

Another thing I love about Jesus is how accepting he was about drug and alcohol use. He made that pretty clear the time he said “what goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.” Jesus would never have started a “War on Drugs,” let alone used drug prohibition as a tool to disproportionately incarcerate people of color.

Speaking of war, Jesus made his pacifism well known when he uttered the now-famous phrase “all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” It certainly does not sound like Jesus would have supported the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, let alone the invasion of Iraq.

And how about the time that Jesus healed the blind man for free! Jesus did not even ask him for a deductible, even though the man clearly should have been paying out-of-pocket, since his blindness was obviously a preexisting condition! Like most of the American people, Jesus definitely would have wanted the recent health care bill to do more to provide affordable health care, but he clearly would have supported forcing insurance companies to treat preexisting conditions.

Where Jesus would have really come in handy, though, was during the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. I mean, he was a little extreme with his view that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Talk about wanting to “punish success.” But maybe he could have scared enough Republicans into changing their votes by putting the fear of God into them (haha!).

Anyway, I know many of the Republicans reading this are wondering why I have spent so much time talking about a peace-loving, socialist, community organizer like Jesus, but this is pretty big day for Him.

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