Get behind me, Senator Ernst

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-Iowa) flippant and tone deaf response to a woman distressed at possible cuts to healthcare benefits during a recent townhall meeting was patronization cloaked in patriotism: “We are all going to die.”

Obviously, everyone in the room already knew that.

What many of her constituents were protesting were proposed policies that could increase the risk of untimely, needless, preventable deaths; in other words, the kind that decent governments around the world care about and try to limit as much as possible.

After she was called out for her bad behavior, she doubled down on the diss and delivered a dripping-in-venom “FAKE APOLOGY!” in which she essentially said that protesting attendees at the townhall meeting were like small children who still believed in the “tooth fairy.”

She ended her mocking mea culpa selfie-video, recorded in a friggen cemetery for Chrissake, with an altar call chock full of contempt, the false doctrine of American Christo-gnosticism writ large across her way-too-close, practically sneering face: “But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Funny. I have searched high and low in the Bible, and I have not found a single instance of Jesus embracing a poor, desperate person seeking bodily healing and saying, “Oh well, my son, we are all going to die.”

Her words were also a cutting knife to those who have lost loved ones “before their time.”

In April 1980, when I was 18, my 47-year-old father died at 4:00 am, and I called the funeral home as soon as they opened to set up his arrangements.

In the summer of 1985, I looked on as two dear friends in their early 40s buried their 13-year-old daughter who had been struck and killed by a car. After the funeral, the two of them took my newlywed wife and I aside and told us that while the pain of losing a child was intense, love was worth it, and they encouraged us to have children anyway.

On New Year’s Day 1999, in front of a packed church, I spoke words over the casket of my nearly 11-year-old nephew and then helped his classmates and my then 10-year-old son, the six of them dressed in suits and sneakers as ones grown up way too soon, carry and place it in the hearse.

In August 2022, I stood over the broken, riddled-from-cancer body of my 50-year-old “baby sister” not long after she took her last breath, my hand on her shoulder, just as I had touched my father years before.

In October 2023, I delivered a eulogy for her 24-year-old son.

There is obviously a difference in both the quantity and quality of grief over someone “ripe in years” and a person who dies “much too soon.”

Get behind me, Senator Ernst.