By Larry Jones
On August 16, the evangelical
pastor of the massive Saddleback Church in California,
Rev. Rick Warren, took the stage before a very white largely evangelical
audience and introduced a non-debate with Barrack Obama and John McCain. Having watched the proceedings on TV and
having reviewed the transcript provide by CNN, here are some impressions of
what was said.
Overall, it was not an exceptional
performance, although McCain, who went second, seemed unusually well prepared,
which led to speculation by some that McCain overheard Obama’s portion. Warren
insists that McCain was in another room and unable to hear or see any of the
first half. McCain said he was in his
motorcade on the way to the forum. In
any event, McCain quickly shot off his answers, many of which contained
frequently told personal stories about his time in Vietnam. Obama, as usual, spoke more slowly and was
far more nuanced. But do voters want
nuance which is less memorable than a story?
Very possibly not. Both made
references to Bible verses.
“Campaign 2008 is
starting to feel like a Sunday School Bible drill, said The Rev. Barry Lynn of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “We”re electing a president, not a national
pastor” Candidates should appeal to the
voters based on their qualifications for office and their stands on the issues,
not their religious beliefs,” said Lynn. But religious beliefs were what the
Saddleback forum was all about.
OBAMA SOUNDED LIKE AN EVANGELICAL
Obama began with some obsequious
comments about how much “I love the ministries” of Saddleback Church
and later spoke in evangelical code about how “Jesus Christ died for my sins,
and ” I am redeemed through him.” Ever
since he decided to go after religious conservatives, Obama has sounded more
and more like them, although that does not reflect his own religious past.
He said that America’s
greatest moral failure “has been that we still don’t
abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my
brothers, you do for me. “” He went on
to say that America
has not been “thinking about providing ladders of opportunity for people to get
into the middle class.” Obama is right
that the Bush administration has done all it could to slash programs designed
to lift people out of poverty, and that is a great moral failure.
However, the greatest moral failure of this
nation is its drive to expand American empire, its current malevolent
compulsion to gain hegemony over the entire Middle East
as it seeks to control the world economically and militarily, at the cost of
hundreds of thousands of lives. Obama
doesn’t speak to that because he supports American imperialism.
The presumed Democratic candidate
went back on his “least of these” stand when he said he had changed his mind
from ten years ago when he spoke against President Clinton’s so-called welfare
reform. He was right then because the
“reform” negatively affected many social service programs — Aid to Families
with Dependent Children, food stamps, school meals, summer meals, Medicaid,
SSI, child care, etc. Women and children
were the greatest victims.
Now Obama says that Clinton’s gutting of the
social service net for the poor “worked better than, I think, a lot of people
anticipated.” It did work better if the
goal was to get thousands of people to fall through the cracks, never to be
heard from again. Obama is simply wrong
in his change of heart, although it spins well with conservatives.
AVOIDING THE HUMAN BABY QUESTION
Obama waffled on the abortion
question. When asked at what point a
baby gets human rights he said the question is “above my pay grade” and then went on to say that life begins at
conception but the point is to find ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies. It is true that at conception the cells that
comingle are living, but those cells do not equal a human being. The religious right makes the unscientific
claim that at conception there is a human being, and thus any abortion whatsoever
is murder. Obama failed to deal with the
question head on. He can be very
slippery when he needs to be. The true
answer is that a fetus becomes a human being, not just an internal appendage of
the mother, when it enters the world at birth.
One of Obama’s most
disappointing answers was to the question “does evil exist” and how do we deal
with it? No normal human being could say
there aren’t evil things going on in the world.
But the religious aspect of the question was about the objective existence
of evil, as in The Devil. Obama evaded
that point and talked, instead, about evil things happening from Darfur to the
streets of America. And then he said “we are not going to, as
individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task ” “ It’s almost as if he had to throw that in to
please the evangelical crowd.
Warren
asked Obama if he thought faith based organizations which receive federal funds
should be allowed to hire only people of their own faith. Obama said that the law was always clear on
the notion that such a practice is unacceptable. “If I took people to Katrina,” he said, “and
I wanted to hire some people to do relief, if I took federal money to help in
that relief, I wouldn’t be able to say, I only want people who believe like we
do.”
It was surprising
that neither Warren nor Obama said anything about the constitutional guarantee
of the separation of church and state on this question. This is a problem because faith based social
services often take place in structures with religious pictures and symbols on
the walls and the people providing services, such as drug counseling, often do
resort to religious proselytizing. Since Warren didn’t ask about it, Obama
didn’t go there because a great many on the religious right think that
separation of church and state is a myth and he didn’t want to alienate them.
EVERYONE IN AMERICA GETS A SHOT. REALLY??
There are a number of other
comments by Obama that one would wish he hadn’t made, like the hypocrisy about China’s political persecution when the U.S. does the
same, but to this writer one of the most egregious was his answer to why he
wants to be president. He said that “what’s made America special is [the] notion
that everybody has got a shot.” He went
on to say “I want to be president because that’s the America I believe in and I feel
like that American dream is slipping away.”
Since when has everyone in America “got a shot?” Not the Native Americans who were decimated
by the European settlers. Not the people
from Africa who were press ganged into
horrible slavery, nor large numbers of their present day descendents. Not the Mexicans from whom the whole
southwest was “legally” stolen. Not the
Chinese who built the railroads and then were excluded as the “Yellow
Peril.” Not the Hawaiians from whom
their land was taken by wily westerners.
According
to a report from The Civil Rights Project at Harvard and The Urban Institute, “Half or more of
Black, Hispanic and Native American youth in the United States are getting left
behind before high school graduation in a “hidden crisis” that is obscured by
U.S. Department of Education regulations issued under the No Child Left Behind
Act that.” Mr. Obama, everyone in America does
not get a shot.
McCAIN DOES THE EXPECTED
It really did seem as if John
McCain knew the questions beforehand because he answered so quickly and with
such certitude. Be that as it may, early
on in his half of the program, he took on the question of what he thought was America’s
greatest moral failure. He said, “[T]roughout
our existence, perhaps we have not devoted ourselves to causes greater than our
self-interest, although we”ve been the best at it of everybody in the world.”
Say what?? The best in the world? The most altruistic in the world? Obviously McCain has long been overcome with
American super-patriotism. Obviously he
has never spent time with the indigenous peoples of the world, or he would have
found some of the most altruistic humans anywhere. The amazing welcoming spirit of indigenous
people is one of the reasons westerners found it so easy to overwhelm them,
just as the U.S. did in
Puerto Rico, Samoa, Hawaii,
and the Philippines
in 1898. In the past, the American
rulers always said they had taken over to carry out Manifest Destiny; only now
it seems better for them to say “to protect our national interests.” Same thing.
ON CHANGING HIS MIND
When McCain got the question about
how he has changed his mind since ten years ago, he quickly responded, “Offshore drilling, we”ve got to drill now and got to
drill here ” “ The rest of his sentence
was drowned out by thunderous applause.
All along, that’s been his plan to lower gas prices, even though all
knowledgeable people in the industry say
new drilling wouldn’t come on line for ten years and it would be years later
before it affected gas prices and then not very much.
In his list of
favorite people to rely on, first (naturally) was Gen. David Petraeus. This fits well with his stance on Iraq that we
will get out only in victory. He tries
to distance himself from the unpopular George Bush, but on war without end they
are very much on the same page, including on attacking Iran. Remember his repeated singing of “Bomb, bomb,
bomb Iran?”
When Warren asked McCain what
his Christian faith means to him, the candidate did not miss a second in giving
the evangelically correct answer: “It means I’m saved and forgiven,” and then
he told a story about an encounter with a North Vietnamese Christian who was
kind to him. The crowd loved it. He knew they would because he’s used it
before.
On the abortion
question he made it clear that he thinks a human being with the rights
attendant thereto is created at the moment of conception. The anti-abortionists at the gathering were
right on top of that one and applauded loudly.
It is interesting that the so-called right to lifers are generally also
war hawks, leading some to say their slogan should be “Don’t kill “em till
they”re born.”
McCain then talked
about adoption being the alternative to abortion and how he and his wife had
adopted a girl from Bangladesh. It was a truly touching story, and adoption
is a good alternative for pregnant women who want to carry their fetus to
term. However, that should not obviate a
woman’s absolute right to choose abortion, and McCain has always planted his
flag squarely with the anti-abortion people.
If he gets elected, during his term or terms he will very likely have
the opportunity to replace Supreme Court justices who will tip the balance in
overturning Roe v. Wade and thus making the choice of abortion unavailable to
the women of America. Nevertheless he did, as he put it, “come down
on the side of stem cell research.”
Both Obama and
McCain defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman. However, Obama spoke in favor of civil
unions. The forum really didn’t get into
the gay/lesbian issue.
A TRANSCENDENT CHALLENGE?
McCain often spoke
in superlatives. When asked about evil
he said with emotion, “Of course, evil must be defeated. My friends, we are
facing the transcendent challenge of the 21st century – radical Islamic
extremism.” The truth is that radical
Islamism has gained great impetus because of the U.S.
action in Iraq. The numbers are growing because in the Muslim
world “America”
is a dirty word to millions. The first
step in dealing with this situation is for the U.S. to give up its imperial
ambitions. But neither Obama nor McCain
will do that.
Is Islamic extremism
the “transcendent challenge of the 21st century?” It may be global warming which could destroy
life as we know it. It may be nuclear
weapons, the stockpile of which the U.S. keeps increasing. It may be an emerging theocratic fascism
which the far Christian right is seeking to bring into being. On the forum, McCain made it clear that he
supports the new FISA spying bill which makes telecoms immune from lawsuits for
illegally participating in spying on innocent Americans. But then, so did Obama in one of his numerous
shifts to the right recently. For
McCain, it’s no shift. He is a long time
supporter of “improving” national security, while giving lip service to the
right of privacy as he did at Saddleback.
The compromise FISA bill is actually one more step toward fascism.
When Warren asked McCain at
what point would you call a person rich for tax purposes. He jokingly said “Five million,” and went on
to say that he wanted everyone to be rich and he didn’t want to raise anyone’s
taxes. Conservatives consider that if the
enormous tax breaks now given to big oil and the wealthy were removed, it would
be tantamount to a tax increase.
Once again the
Christian right should be very pleased with McCain’s views, this time on
education. Warren
told him that “about 80 percent of America says they support merit pay
for the best teachers.” McCain quickly answered
“Yes, yes, and find bad teachers another line of work. (APPLAUSE). ” ” choice and competition, choice and
competition, home schooling, charter schools, vouchers, all the choice and
competition.” There’s no doubt our
public schools need help, but sentencing kids to home schools, which are almost
all taught by evangelical parents who certainly don’t teach about evolution, is
not the answer. Neither are charter
schools and vouchers. McCain’s education
program is nothing short of ignoring one of the basic necessities of our
society, free and universal quality public education.
McCain got some good
laughs when he talked about unnecessary federal spending by stating: “My
friends, we spent $3 million of your money to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Now I don’t
know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue”” But it turns out it was a serious study done
by the United States Geological Service’s Northern
Divide Grizzly Bear Project, the purpose of which was to estimate Montana’s
grizzly bear population by analyzing bear fur snagged on barbed wire.
Three million
dollars total to protect grizzly bears sounds like a pretty good deal. But $12 billion a month to execute an illegal
and immoral war which the Bush regime lied about to justify, sounds like an
absolutely terrible idea. But not to
McCain.
Larry Jones is a long time political activist and former United Church
of Christ minister who lives in Honolulu.