A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on March 30th, 2009 in Progressive Faith

It’s a good thing Dominic Nutt is in London, otherwise I might have to give him a good thrashing (as they say). The aptly named Nutt is now criticizing Madonna for adopting too many children. And – get this – the dumbass runs a children’s charity! What’s the matter Dominic? You afraid you’ll run out of needy kids?

Nutt believes that, ideally, orphans should be cared for by their extended family or “in their own environment by their own community.”

“The thing to do is to support the community, to support local agencies and charities who can look after the child so that the child is at least cared for in their community,” he said.

Oh, yeah – ideally. But if the world were that perfect, we wouldn’t have orphans to begin with. Newsflash number one: Many times the extended family doesn’t have the resources to care for the kid. Newsflash number two: Concentrating the benefits of action through adoption ensures that one person will be lifted out of poverty entirely. On the other hand, if Madonna gave a million dollars to help a million poor children in Africa – well, they’d eat for a week and a half (approximately).

This really got me:

“You cannot literally take every poor child who may only have one parent living, or no parent living, across the world and transport them all into Kensington in London,” said Save the Children UK’s Dominic Nutt in an interview with the BBC’s Newshour program.

I call bullshit. Madonna might not be able to adopt that many kids, but somehow I think the entire population of the earth could handle it. We just aren’t doing it. If you look at Save the Children’s page on Malawi, you’ll discover that approximately 6.7 million people in that country live below the poverty line. Not all of them are children. But let’s say six million of them are – a very unrealistic number – there are more than sixty-one million people in the UK alone. So if one in ten people in the UK adopted a poor child from Malawi, Dominic Nutt would be proven wrong.

What an unadulterated idiot! The problem isn’t that we don’t have the resources to combat worldwide poverty. It’s that we just don’t care enough to do it. We are our brother’s keeper – and Madonna is doing exactly what the Bible tells us we should do. She’s showing compassion on an orphan. This is not the false charity of feel-good charitible giving that has no impact on the lives of the people in Malawi. She has totally and irrevocably changed one child’s entire universe. What Mr. Nutt should be doing is encouraging the top ten percent of UK households to do the same. Imagine that – one country reaching out to another and totally ending poverty by saying, “You are one of us.”

That’s what extended family is, Mr. Nutt. Now shut your mouth, lest well-meaning people are discouraged from actually saving someone from a living hell.

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