Forget EBOLA: The Greatest Threat To Africa's Medical Missionaries Is Ann Coulter!

“If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia,” Coulter wrote in a column.

It's easy to take cheap shots at Ann Coulter these days: Ann Coulter is without a soul. Ann Coulter is heartless. Ann Coulter is evil. Ann Coulter is ... Ann Coulter. "Coultergeist." "Skeletor." OK, this writer has done it because, well, it's easy. Yes, making fun of Ann Coulter is the liberal's easy way of pointing the finger at the Right's misuse of tragedy or disaster. She's the b*tch counterpart to God's Ambulance Chasers. Of course, she doesn't heap Bibles on disaster victims, just disdain on them for being victims in the first place and anyone helping them - causing "dependency." If she is a compassionate mood at all, she might give a victim a used copy of one of her books (it having been paid for, thus no good for more royalties).


That Ann Coulter is one hell of a publicity hound there is no doubt: if you see her on any program outside of FOX News (she lives, apparently, under Sean Hannity's desk) you know that she has a new book to sell. Her outrageous comments are only fueled by the amount of publicity they get, from 9/11 widows who have "so much fun being victims" to tweets about having a "Fathers disowning their Son's Day" (after National Coming Out Day), to mocking Michele Obama's plea for the safe return of the Nigerian girls ("We want our country back."). So it's easy to look at Coulter's latest mockery in disgust as just another publicity grab.

Missionary Position

The grab, however, may have been a bit overreaching this time because her mockery was aimed at the heart of her own self-professed religion: Christianity. And not just any Christianity, but Evangelical Christianity and its missionaries: Dr. Kent Brantly was part of Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse. If Coulter had mocked Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing, she could not have picked a more overtly Christian missionary team to add to her list of enemies. She also compounded her anti-Semitism by insinuating that Hollywood was controlled by Jews who needed to be saved (or rather, "perfected").

Missionaries have always been prey for satirists, depicted as extremely upright and holier-than-thou. The position of Missionaries during times of stress, however stodgy, has always been looked upon as noble and human in the face of adversity (think Katherine Hepburn's Rose Sayer in African Queen). Attacking medical missionaries in any way, is particularly galling, since saving lives (as well as souls) and alleviating suffering was what Jesus Christ did.

Ann Coulter's own missionary position, however, is that opposition to missionaries means publicity. She considers herself, after all, a provocateur. But now even Evangelicals consider calling her something else. Her manner of converting or "perfecting" people seems to involve looking at a loaded revolver rather than hearing the Word of God. No one has told her that forced conversions went out with Queen Isabella and her minion, Torquemada.

But perhaps to Ann Coulter, Publicity is the real God, with book sales being the reward of Publicity's Prosperity Gospel. Poor Ann. Poor greedy, deluded Ann.

Is Ann Coulter Worth The Effort?

Writing about the latest Coulter outrage may seem to be futile since even her supporters know the obvious: Coulter is for Coulter is for Coulter is for Coulter. But oddly enough, she does have followers/readers who live vicariously through her outrage and mockery: most of them do not dare to enact her opinions for fear of seeming too un-Christian or inhuman. Still others, like Pastor James Manning, take comfort that her grabs at publicity overshadow his, or make him sound like more of a cartoon than a Conservative provocateur:

Manning goes on to call on God to give ebola to all homosexuals and their supporters. "All the world needs to know that sodomy and homosexuality is more deadly than the ebola virus that is spreading all over the world. Everybody who stands up and embraces sodomy, BE THOU CURSED WITH EBOLA! Cursed be ye for embracing this!"

Yes, the furthest of the religious "wingnuts" are in fact overshadowed by Coulter (who, by the way, never derides them): sheltered by her outrageous comments in the form of immediate dismissal by the mainstream media.

Yes, a "provocateur" is always worth the effort to focus upon when one knows the people she is provoking.