Selective Outrage

In the heated culture wars of 2026, few spectacles are more revealing than the selective literalism displayed by segments of the American right-wing Christian movement. This is not pious fidelity to scripture. It is rank hypocrisy--an embarrassing intellectual and moral failure that undermines any claim to consistent biblical authority.

The Book of Leviticus, the third book of the Torah (also called Vayikra, “And He called”), stands at the heart of the Pentateuch. Narratively, it picks up directly after the Exodus and the building of the Tabernacle at Mount Sinai. God speaks to Moses from the sanctuary, delivering detailed instructions on how the Israelites—a recently freed tribal people—should worship, maintain ritual purity, and live as a holy community set apart for divine presence. The book covers animal sacrifices (chapters 1–7), priestly ordination (8–10), laws of clean and unclean (11–15), the Holiness Code (17–26) with its ethical and social regulations, and rules for vows and tithes (27). Its central refrain is “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (19:2), extending standards of purity and justice beyond priests to the entire people.

Traditionally, Jewish and Christian interpreters attribute Leviticus to Moses around the 15th or 13th century BCE during the wilderness wanderings. The text repeatedly frames its content as direct divine speech to Moses, and it addresses practical needs of a mobile, post-slavery society: centralizing worship around the Tabernacle, preventing disease through purity rules, and reinforcing covenant identity amid surrounding cultures. Conservative scholars point to linguistic features and parallels with second-millennium BCE Near Eastern texts as supporting an early origin, with priestly traditions possibly compiled under Mosaic authority.

Modern critical scholarship, however, dates the book’s final form much later, primarily to the Babylonian Exile (587–539 BCE) or the early Persian period (538–332 BCE). Most experts assign the bulk of Leviticus to the Priestly source (P), characterized by its formal, repetitive style, focus on ritual order, genealogies, and a theology of a holy God dwelling among the people. Chapters 17–26, known as the Holiness Code (H), form a distinct but related section that broadens ritual concerns into moral and communal ethics. While some earlier oral or written traditions may reach back to the First Temple period (10th–6th centuries BCE), the systematic compilation reflects the crisis of exile.

After the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar II and the deportation of Judean elites (including priests), the exiles faced assimilation in Babylon. Deprived of their sanctuary, priests committed traditions to writing to preserve identity and prepare for potential restoration. When Persian king Cyrus allowed the return, these texts guided the rebuilding of the Second Temple and the reorganization of Judean society as a temple-centered community under imperial rule. The laws thus served both practical and utopian purposes: maintaining distinctiveness and envisioning renewed holiness.

Leviticus also draws on and transforms broader ancient Near Eastern (ANE) legal and ritual traditions. Like Hammurabi’s Code or Hittite and Assyrian laws, it uses casuistic formulations (“if… then…”) and addresses topics such as injury, slavery, sexual conduct, and property. Ritual elements, including sacrifices and scapegoat ceremonies (Leviticus 16), have parallels in Eblaite, Hittite, Ugaritic, and Mesopotamian practices for appeasing gods or removing impurity. Yet the biblical text adapts these through a monotheistic covenantal lens. ANE laws often reinforced class hierarchies with harsher penalties for elites; Leviticus ties all rules to obedience to one holy God and democratizes holiness, applying priestly ideals of purity and justice to the whole community. The Jubilee (chapter 25), with its periodic land redistribution and debt release, echoes occasional royal proclamations in Mesopotamia but frames them as recurring divine mandates for economic justice. Blessings and curses (chapter 26) resemble ANE treaty forms but link them explicitly to covenant fidelity and care for the vulnerable.

In essence, Leviticus emerged as a resilient response to historical trauma. Whether viewed as Mosaic revelation or as a product of exilic priestly reflection (with scholarly debate continuing on exact dates and layers), the book offered hope amid displacement: God could still dwell among a purified people through structured worship and ethical living. Its ritual intensity, calls for separation, and ethical expansions reflect the ancient world’s upheavals while shaping Jewish practice for centuries. Later traditions—rabbinic interpretation after the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, or Christian views of fulfillment in Christ—reinterpreted its commands, yet the historical context of exile and restoration remains key to understanding why a detailed wilderness handbook spoke so powerfully to displaced communities.

Right-wing Christians thump the Bible as the inerrant word of God, but glide past the vast majority of commands in the Book of Leviticus with convenient silence. They are most zealous, however, when it comes to Leviticus 18 and 20, which prohibit incest, bestiality, and male same-sex relations (calling the latter an “abomination” punishable by death in 20:13). 

They also love to say that life begins at conception and, thus, abortion is murder, although the only section of the Bible that deals with the beginning of life is Genesis, in which God "breathes life" into Adam's nostrils. According to the Bible, life begins when a baby takes its first breath. Also well-known to right-wing Christians is the fact that the Bible says nothing at all about abortion, yet the Democratic Party's endorsement of Freedom of Bodily Autonomy has the right-wingers reasoning that "abortion is murder, therefore the Democrats are the party of Satan," as they were taught to do, after focus-group studies in the 1970s determined that this idea would convince the most people to follow the Republican Party all the way to Armageddon.

Back in 2002, during the propaganda ramp-up to the US invasion of Iraq (“Saddam might have or soon get weapons of mass destruction, including nukes!”), I had this weird mental sensation, like I suspect tens to hundreds of millions of other people around the world also did. It was a bit like being in a science-fiction movie, though it would be hard to depict onscreen. Maybe They Live! comes closest in mood—the sense that the world had become surreal; that, somehow, the US was, tiny step by step, moving inexorably toward invading Iraq based on a bunch of lies and, at best, cherry-picked and arranged “intelligence” that Colin Powell famously refused to read in a speech advocating UN support for an invasion (until a word or two was changed, and then he once again carried water for his superiors, as he had after the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre). Former ambassador Lawrence Wilkerson debunked the official story in a big way, in a NYT article titled “What I Didn’t Find in Nigeria” (yellow-cake uranium for nuclear bombs), after which Karl Rove (the self-described “architect” of the George W. Bush administration), most likely, outed his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA spy! High treason, no? He was never charged or tried, nor were W, Cheney, Rice, et al.

So watching the US, over a whole year, move inexorably, slowly slide into that war of choice, while a year-old war of choice was already becoming a quagmire in Afghanistan—while its justification was being debunked—was surreal, in the sense that, of a sudden, a narrative that was blatantly false was fed to the media by top officials, based on supposedly reliable sources. 

The other surreal part was that, as the months passed, and the propaganda was repeated (or “catapulted,” as W even said at an appearance on a women’s show? as I recall—no doubt because someone in his administration had just used the term with him, and he wanted to appear smart on TV), the percentage of Americans who believed it ticked up until, when the invasion began in March of 2003, fully __% of Americans supported it. A few months later, W was landed in a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier (which had been stopped and turned so that the photo-op would be in the right light, walked out on deck with his straps still fastened to give him a big codpiece, and announced “the end of major combat operations” under a giant banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED in red, white & blue (later claimed not to have been arranged by the administration, but a surprise from the Navy, or some such hogwash). Oh yeah, and over 20 years later, the US would leave Afghanistan and Iraq in ruins, and the Muslim world more convinced that the US was evil. And the US had blown trillions of dollars, and its infrastructure and social services were falling apart.

A couple of weeks ago, after Israel and the US began an all-out attack on Iran, I got that same surreal feeling that I first had in 2002. This time Trump & Hegseth sounded, like W had, like 4th-graders cosplaying as four-star generals in one-star Hollywood movies, while dozens of scholars, former military, and on and on warned that a so-called “regime-changing” attack on Iran could easily become a quagmire, cause a worldwide economic depression, social breakdown, revolutions, famines, and the longterm domination of Europe & Asia by Russia & China…if not quickly escalate to a nuclear strike, which could easily lead to more nuclear strikes, and the end of life on Earth, for all but the 0.001%, a result with which They in the Epstein Class seem to be ambivalent, unbothered, and maybe hopeful.

With the passage of time and development of technology, historical change (like climate change) has entered a period of seeming exponential acceleration. This time the whole world will be so affected by the words and actions of a few in the White House; the period of surreality-before-manifestation is so global, I wonder if mass hallucinations or “visions” of the apocalyptic variety are in the offing.

In 2006, I attempted to emigrate to New Zealand (long story, the plan fell through). Because my country, after W had started two wars which were already both proving to be disasters for everyone involved, had re-elected the fool, at age 42 I was really embarrassed to be an American. If things had worked out in NZ, I would have tried to become a citizen.

Where I live in India, the first thing strangers always ask when I meet them (which is often, because hitch-hiking is my preferred mode of travel, when I go 12km west and 1000m up to Mcleod Ganj, Dharamsala) is some variant of “What country are you from?” and I have always answered the US ("America, as it is known"), even since the re-election of the despicable Donald Trump. Since the invasion of Iran, however, I'm feeling that 2006 embarrassment again, but worse. “I'll start telling people I’m from Switzerland,” I thought. Then I thought, “No, you idiot, you speak only a little French, and zero German and Italian—just say you’re Canadian.”

A week ago, I was standing around during a long walk, near my local bus stop, enjoying the clean air of the late afternoon after some rain, when a young man in his 20s was walking by. He seemed friendly as he asked, “What country?”

I automatically said, “Switzerland,” forgetting my newer, improved lie. As I said it I discerned, by the clothes he wore under his translucent blue rain-poncho, and the old Crocs on his feet, that he was a poor young man, probably a laborer and probably unschooled. “What country" was probably 20% of his English vocabulary.

“Switzerland?” he said. Now I thought the whole thing was funny, and said, “Canada.”

“Canada?”

“Okay, anywhere except the US,” I laughed, and we parted, as I walked back towards my humble abode, and he toward the bus stop.

The last time I flew out of India, in May 2025, the Army soldier doing the body-scan, seeing my passport, said, “American? Are you a Republican?”

Like I always reply to this kind of question, I said, “No, I hate Trump. He should be in jail.”

“Jail is too good for him,” said the guy.

“Okay,” I said, “he should be tortured slowly,” which put a smile on my new friend’s face. And, honestly, Trump couldn’t be tortured enough to make up for all the damage on all the levels he has done. Luckily…karmically, he will soon start a term of eons in one or more of the Tibetan Buddhist hell-realms. Really, considering his many negative traits, he might have to visit all of them, and the hungry-ghost realm, due to his avarice. In the Sipa Khorlo ("Wheel of Life" or Bhavacakra), the hell realm at the bottom is typically depicted as having 18 main sections, categorized into 8 hot hells and 8 cold hells, along with neighboring/subsidiary hells. These represent the lowest of the six realms of existence, caused by intense hatred and aggression.

The malignant narcissist psychopath leading the Thanatos-driven millenarians—right-wing Christians who want the Apocalypse-Armageddon of the Bible to happen in their lifetimes, in the absurd belief, I suppose, that they will be “raptured” up into Heaven—that is to say, saved from horrible deaths. The fanatics in Israel, and the Christian & Muslim worlds, are happy that the attack on Iran by the US and Israel is escalating into a regional war. Vanity of vanities! To paraphrase Carly Simon, they’re so vain they prob’ly think this war is about them, when—in the US and the West in general, they’re the witless pawns of billionaire fascists & theocrats, power-hungry maniacs.

Today’s right-wing Christians may not even be intelligent enough to understand that they are hypocrites for ignoring nearly everything in Leviticus, but taking seriously only the part about gays, which is only one glaring example of their hypocritical moral bankruptcy. The same book that brands male same-sex acts an abomination also demands the death penalty for cursing one’s parents, working on the Sabbath, wearing mixed fabrics, eating shellfish, and a host of other behaviors that virtually no modern believer follows. It regulates the sale of daughters into servitude, endorses slavery with specific rules, and treats menstruation as a source of ritual pollution requiring isolation. These are not quaint cultural relics to be allegorized away when convenient; they are presented with the same divine authority as the verses on homosexuality. To cherry-pick one set of sexual prohibitions while discarding the rest is not faithful exegesis—it is cultural prejudice masquerading as piety. It reveals that the real driver is not timeless biblical truth but contemporary social animus, conveniently sanctified by selective scripture. In an age of accelerating global crises—from endless wars to environmental collapse—this brand of hypocritical moralism offers no wisdom, only division and self-righteous blindness. The world deserves better than leaders and followers who use ancient priestly codes to project their shadow-psyches onto convenient Others while the planet burns.