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
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Hank Kalet 