Hank Kalet

Son of a preacher….

Call it a preacher pattern, but it seems that the preachers to the presidential candidates are not exactly the shy and retiring types.

All of the attention this week was on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, but Obama is not the only presidential candidate whose spiritual guide has made some controversial comments. Well, not controversial, so much as…well….

Let’s just say that JohnMcCain’s spiritual guide — that’s what the Arizona senator calls him — has made some rough statements, comments that are far worse than anything the Rev. Wright thundered during one of his vitriolic moments.

Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio — whom Sen. John McCain hails as a spiritual adviser — has suggested on several occasions that the U.S. government was complicit in facilitating black genocide.

In speeches that have gone largely unnoticed, Parsley (who is white) compares Planned Parenthood, the reproductive care and family planning group, to the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis, and describes the American government as enablers of murder for supporting the organization.

“If I were call for the sterilization or the elimination of an entire segment of society, I’d be labeled a racists or a murderer, or at very best a Nazi,” says Parsley. “That every single year, millions of our tax dollars are funding a national organization built upon that very goal — their target: African Americans. That’s right, the death toll: nearly fifteen hundred African Americans a day. The shocking truth of black genocide.”

He goes on.

“Right now our own government is allowing organizations like Planned Parenthood to legally take the innocent lives of precious baby girls and baby boys and even footing the bill for it all with our tax dollars, turning every single one of us into accessories to murder,” he says. “You know who their biggest fans must be, that must be the Klu Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people…. African Americans were number one on Margaret Sanger’s list. So this ‘Lady MacDeath,’ as I like to call her, studied the works of Englishman Thomas Robert Malthus, and embraced his plan of eugenics.”

But because these comments were not directed at American foreign and domestic policy, because Rod Parsley’s comments stem from the fringe of the conservative movement, they are allowed to fly under the radar.

Even the comments reported last week in Mother Jones, calling the United States a Christian nation founded to destroy the false religion of Islam, failed to raise much of a storm or even much of a breeze.

Wright’s sermons, on the other hand, spread like viruses around the Web, run repeatedly on cable television and force the candidate to make the campaign’s most impressive speech. An even-handed approach to the campaign would have resulted in both preachers being vetted extensively, their comments explored and placed in context and the candidates they are associated with answering questions.

Obama, though his speech, has answered at least some of them. McCain, however, must be made to answer his own — and to rebuke his own spiritual guide for the ugly comments he has made over the years about Planned Parenthood, gays and others.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

The Wright question

E.J. Dionne Jr. asks an important question — the right question, as far as I’m concerned — about the Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright: “Is he as far outside the African American mainstream as many of us would like to think?”

The answer, as Obama said on Tuesday, is no. And we ignore this reality at the nation’s peril because we can not find unity and move forward without acknowledging this.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Surprising comments on Obama

I’ve pointed out that there were conservatives who reacted positively to Barack Obama’s speech, but James Fallows finds a reaction that runs significantly deeper — and is more impressive — than the positive critical responses to Obama: Mike Huckabee, who “dared speak as a human being rather than as an on-message apparatchik” about the Wright affair on Joe Scarborough’s show.

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…”

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Misreading a cartoon

We received a couple of complaints today about a cartoon that ran on the editorial page of the South Brunswick Post from the Copley News service.

The cartoon — pictured to the right — by Mike Thompson depicted a Muslim woman in Iraq recounting the trouble that has beset her life thanks to the war. In the fourth and fifth panels the woman says “America’s attack ruined our economy. So I’m jobless, homeless and starving.” followed by, “Sadly, a common plight for someone of my sex.”

The word “sex” is the trigger for the final panel, which depicts an American couple meant to stand in for a public that had no interest in her story. “Sex,” on the other hand — like the Eliot Spitzer saga — is of prime interest.

My sense is that the complaints are based on a final reading of this panel, caused at least in part by our publishing the cartoon in black and white leaving it a bit unclear as to whether the couple were members of the public or members of the military. (One of our reporters read it this way, and I can see how the misreading can happen.)

In any case, here is one of the complaints:

That is the most disgusting, inexcusable piece of garbage you have EVER printed. You insult every man and woman who has ever served in the armed forces. As a matter of fact you insult anyone who lives in this country. You owe everyone who reads your paper an apology. You should be deeply ashamed for printing that slander.

Take this for what it’s worth.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.