Pitts: Sunday school lessons quickly forgotten

"Thou shalt not bear false witness ..."

- Exodus 20:16

Jim Wallis wants to take Glenn Beck to Sunday school.

On occasion, the Fox News host has spoken of his daughter, who was born with cerebral palsy. According to Sojourners, a faith-based organization Wallis co-founded and leads, Beck recalled last month how doctors warned that the baby, if carried to term, might never walk, speak or feed herself. That was 21 years ago, and she now is a miraculous young woman who defied the dire expectations.

Beck has suggested that under health care reform, the government would be empowered to euthanize children like his. But who is Washington to decide whether a life is worth living? "That's for God to decide," he is quoted as saying. "Not the government."

From this, we learn two things. The first is that Glenn Beck believes in God. The second is that Glenn Beck lies. You'd hope those things would be mutually exclusive.

For the record and for the umpteenth time: No version of health care reform being contemplated by Congress mandates death for the old, the disabled or the infirm. That's a canard. It is mendacity, prevarication, a bald-faced lie.

In other words, politics.

The art of the untruth is, after all, the life's blood of governance. As a brief spin through PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checking Web site will attest, no party, ideology or politician has a monopoly on lying. Lying is as bipartisan as it gets.

And yet, the lies that have characterized the debate over health care are in a class all their own - not simply because they are outrageous, but because they are designed specifically to enflame and terrorize. As such, those lies are deserving of special rebuke. Last week, they got it.

Sojourners, which calls itself the nation's largest network of progressive Christians, says its members sent out thousands of e-mails to five of the biggest offenders: Beck, his fellow Fox personalities Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Bill O'Reilly, and radio host Rush Limbaugh. Each e-mail sa