Cursing One's Parents

Exodus 21:17 directly says as unambiguously as language can make it that cursing one's parents deserves death, and not the eventual biological death that comes about naturally as one grows older, but execution by other people.  It does not give explicit clarification about what it means by cursing one's parents, though, and despite this verse being overlooked for a variety of reasons (most Christians assume the Old Testament is something other than the absolute core of Christianity, much more so than anything in the New Testament could possibly be), what this cursing is has major ramifications for justice, since this act is a capital offense.  A similar condemnation of blasphemy against God in Leviticus 24:16 provides some possible illumination, but there are many Christians who might think that to use profanity towards one's parents qualifies as this kind of cursing.

They believe in the fallacious idea that because using profanity is today sometimes called cursing, using profanity directed towards one's parents is the same as what Exodus 21:17 means by cursing one's mother or father.  Like the capital sin of blasphemy, another verbal offense, cursing one's parents is a capital sin, but just as exclaiming "goddamn" is not the sin of blasphemy, saying something like "damn/fuck my parents" is not what seems to be condemned.  Not only is profanity itself totally nonsinful unless it is used to intentionally degrade someone when directed at them in a particular way (Deuteronomy 4:2), with saying "damn you" to or about someone not necessarily being dehumanizing, but it is also true that just because using profanity is called cursing does not mean this is what the author of Exodus had in mind when they wrote Exodus 21:17.  Besides sheer stupidity, there is a prominent reason why an evangelicals parent might want to assume that it is indeed what the author meant.

Of course some Christian parents might like it if Exodus 21:17 was referring to this, because many of them are legalistic emotionalists who want as much power over their children as they can get in certain areas, and so even if they do not wrongly want children to be put to death for directing profanity at them, they like the thought of it being inherently wrong to "curse" at them because it makes them feel offended.  Of course, the text of Exodus 21:17 does not include anything about profanity specifically, and cursing at someone is not the same as cursing them.  Blasphemy is similarly misidentified as using profanity in the manner of "goddamn," but in this case, the direct comments in Leviticus 24:10-16 clarify that it is malicious words against God that constitute blasphemy, not using profanity alongside the word for the category of being God is, with God not being a name in itself (and thus is not the same as taking God's name in vain).

Beyond what cursing one's parents is, which is likely just a malicious, unjust sort of statement, another factor relevant to this overall issue is that parents and family members in general are not deserving of special love or respect by default, and it follows from this that they, like other people, might not deserve to not have profanity directed at them if they are irrationalistic, selfish, or abusive, even if using profanity in this way is not morally required in response.  Beyond their status as having human rights as bearers of God's image, even within Christianity, a person's family members are no better or worse than their worldviews and moral alignments make them, and the Bible repeatedly calls for recognizing what one can about people as they are, not as one wishes they were.  It is idiotic to excuse the sins of family members because they are family, and just as one could aggressively speak of family as long as it is accurate, there is no indication that one cannot use profanity when doing so.

Verbal sins are for whatever reason in one of the categories most prone to be misinterpreted by evangelicals.  With sins like kidnapping or murder, evangelicals might acknowledge the Biblical passages addressing them but then either push back against the divinely commanded penalties for them or pretend like there are random exceptions.  With sexual sins, it is prudery and a submission to tradition that keeps evangelicals from understanding what is and is not condemned, and there is a great tendency to think that some personally or culturally controversial thing is being condemned (such as mistakenly thinking that a married person masturbating to someone else they are not married to is adultery when this cannot be true).  When it comes to verbal sins, though, like with sexual immorality and injustice, they are almost universally quick to assume that the Bible must mean by things like unclean speech or cursing God or one's parents exactly what the Christians of their day would mean, when the concepts could wildly differ.