In a recent appearance with the vaunted theologians of The View, Gov. Andy Beshear posited Jesus’ teachings as the reason for vetoing legislation protecting children from transgender ideology and the body-destroying interventions that flow from it. He also argued that “every ICE agent should be withdrawn from every city and every community that they are in,” ostensibly on the basis of biblical principles. The strategy isn’t new; Beshear is just a recent example of the Democrat fallback plan of trotting out a cardboard Jesus as justification for “loving” policies that actually oppose what the real Jesus taught.
While giving fellow Democrats some advice on being authentic, Beshear boasted that “most of the decisions I make are based on that Golden Rule that says we love our neighbor as ourself and that parable of the Good Samaritan that says everyone is our neighbor.” He then explained how his application of these teachings led him to veto “the nastiest piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation that ever came through my state.”
The legislation Beshear referred to isn’t exactly clear. In March 2025, he tried to stop a bill that would allow therapists to tell clients the truth about sex and reality while preventing Medicaid dollars from flowing into the trans-intervention industrial complex. Two years before that, he vetoed a measure that protected women’s restrooms and shielded kids from ideology-driven medical procedures. In 2022, he attempted to block a bill keeping men out of women’s sports.
Of course, Beshear isn’t the only Democrat summoning a caricatured Jesus as the supposed driving force behind leftist causes. Congresswoman LaMonica McIver grilled Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons on his eternal destiny this week.
“How do you think Judgment Day will work for you with so much blood on your hands?” McIver spat before asking, “Do you think you’re going to hell, Mr. Lyons?”
Now Bible-believing Christians have never considered the subject of hell off limits (in part because Jesus discussed it — a lot). But Democrats typically treat hell as having room for only two people — Hitler and Trump — when they’re not calling anyone who believes in it a hateful sadist. So it seems strange to see a Democrat eagerly jump into the discussion of that fiery extremity, at least until viewers realize that this was just another form of leftists pulling fake Jesus out of the closet to condemn stuff they don’t like.
Conveniently for Democrats, fake Jesus is flexible: On the one hand he’s holding hell over the heads of those enforcing immigration laws — even when federal enforcement of those laws protects vulnerable women and children from rapists and child abusers. On the other hand, he never says boo to anyone about anything when it comes to something like transing the kids.
It’s an age-old distortion of the truth that God is both just and loving, just as Beshear’s use of the Golden Rule and the Good Samaritan to justify blocking measures to protect children from insidious lies and mutilation is also a distortion of the truth.
The Golden Rule, for the record, is actually “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” But neither the Golden Rule nor the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” creates a moral imperative to give people whatever they want carte blanche, as Beshear suggests. Jesus explains the Golden Rule immediately after telling His disciples to ask for good gifts because their heavenly Father will give them. Regardless of what Democrats think, the context shows that He wasn’t talking about handing out fentanyl and elective mastectomies.
Similarly, the Good Samaritan “bound up … the wounds” of the waylaid Jericho-bound man — he didn’t further mutilate him or offer him MAID. The Samaritan — to the surprise of Jesus’ listeners — acted more righteously than the drive-by priest and the Levite, but the point of the story isn’t his immigration status or LGBT rights or whether all 8 billion “neighbors” should have automatic rights to enter the U.S. whenever they please. Rather, the parable of the Good Samaritan is Jesus’ answer to a self-righteous, eternal-life-seeking lawyer (think Old Testament law) who wanted “to justify himself.”
The context matters, and Democrats seem quite allergic to context, which is why they repeatedly offer manipulative, microwaved interpretations of passages from a book they actually hate. For their own eternal spiritual well-being (and the spiritual well-being of the people they’re lying to), now would be a good time to stop.
Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
