"Do you understand what you are reading?"

Maybe we could lock Valerie Tarico and the Alabama state auditor in a room, and not open the door until the screaming stops:

Moore is a former Alabama judge, now senate candidate, who believes emphatically that the Bible should take precedence over the U.S. constitution and American tradition of jurisprudence. He fought long and hard to keep his preferred version of the Ten Commandments—carved in stone—on display in the state supreme court. Moore boldly proclaims his allegiance to the Bible, citing verses at will. So, when he was accused recently of making unwanted sexual advances toward several young teens while a lawyer in his 30s, people accused him of hypocrisy. But if Moore’s only transgression was exploiting his greater age and status to seek sex or intimacy from teenagers, the accusation is unfair.  His behavior was perfectly biblical.

First, there is no such thing as "perfectly Biblical."  If there were, Biblical theology itself would not be a failed field of endeavor (I know, probably too inside baseball, but stick with me, it gets better).  "Bible," after all, comes from the Latin for "books."  The Bible, then, is not properly a book, but a set of books.  I grew up with pictures sort of like the one above.  The division into categories can vary widely, but the general idea is basically sound.  It's the fundamentalists, who raised Tarico, that treat the entire volume as one work written from beginning to end by one hand (God's, if you were wondering).  The rest of us are bit more sanguine about what "the Bible says."

Which is where the problem with all of Tarico's analyses of scripture starts:  she cherry picks the stories she finds most outrageous and fails to notice how much things change over time.  She would benefit from reading some of the feminist Biblical scholarship, scholarship which points out both how women actually have power in Scripture, are important to it (the presence of the Creation story in Genesis 1, followed by the second story, of Adam and Eve and the Garden, in Genesis 2, is an interesting statement on priorities, if you pay attention to it; Tarico doesn't), as well as ways women were pushed out of the canon (most notably the song of Miriam that isn't, which once followed Moses's song on the other shore of the "Red Sea," but is lost now forever).  It is, in other words, a much more complicated picture than Tarico allows.

And then there is the community reading the scripture.  If Taricot is going to pluck stories from the Bible, why don't we?

26 Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian[a] eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.

31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

32 This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading:

“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
    and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
33 In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
    Who can speak of his descendants?
    For his life was taken from the earth.”[b]

34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” 35 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.  (Acts 8:26-35, KJV)

Scripture is not meant to be self-explanatory, nor read in the vacuum of individual experience and interpretation.   How scripture is understood and interpreted is always a matter of a community doing the interpretation.   I know communities of faith that read the scripture as Tarico wants to.  Interestingly, a number of evangelical Christians of some prominence have stepped forward to condemn the interpretations being applied to Roy Moore, who pretty much has his own hermeneutic that pretty well serves Roy Moore; which is the problem with exegesis gets unmoored from the larger community of believers, the larger Church to which all Christians should (but don't) aspire to be a part.  Tarico, in other words, is taking an interpretation as peculiar and blinkered and narrow as Moore's, and declaring it the true, if disastrous, interpretation.  Well, it's a interpretation, but we Christians don't all agree on any one interpretation of scripture; we don't even agree that the Bible should be read as a single text.  I mean, has Tarico heard of midrash?  It's ancient commentary on the text, with commentary on the commentary on the commentary.  There are volumes of commentary adhered to by some believers, and not others; and every sermon every Sunday in every pulpit is commentary on the commentary as well as on the text.  Which of those do you prefer?

And which of those is the only interpretation of scripture, or even Christian doctrine and exegesis, which is valid, however damaging you think it is?  Does the Bible speak to us?  Or do we interpret it?  I suppose you can interpret it as Taricot does; but that doesn't mean you have to.