Dueling pastors

For the last word on the non-issue of Jeremiah Wright, I defer yet again to the wisdom of Bill Moyers:

"Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. ...

"But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger ... . I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, 'We the people.' Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic."

As the title of Moyers' piece cautions, beware the simplifiers!  And the simple-minded.

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Outspoken clergymen will remain an issue, however, in the general election.  And for John McCain, rightfully so.   Unlike Obama, McCain eagerly sought the endorsements of two fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists who espouse views that few Americans can easily accept.  Thus far, McCain has refused to denounce them.  The endorsements stand.

Pastor John Hagee is by now fairly well known for his staunch pro-Israel and anti-gay, anti-Catholic positions.  The other, the Reverend Rod Parsley, has not been as frequently mentioned, but he may well be the more controversial of the two.  His characterization of Islam is not only inaccurate and intemperate, it's also dangerous, especially in service of the militant and war-loving John McCain, who at a campaign rally called Parsley "one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide".

Here's what Parsley said about Islam:

"I can't begin to tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam. That we see it for what it really is. In fact...I do not believe that our nation can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam… . The fact is that...America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed. And I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we no longer can afford to ignore."

The media has temporarily forgiven McCain his sin of embracing the two pastors who together make Jeremiah Wright seem a sage and biblical scholar of the first rank.  Why?  Because McCain hasn't had a "close" relationship with either man.  Obama, on the other hand, was a member of Wright's largely mainstream Trinity United Church of Christ for twenty years.

Forgive my naivete, but doesn't that cast the strange political alliance between McCain and his two preachers in an even more tawdry and cynical light?  I daresay it does.

Perhaps the general election campaign between Obama and McCain will reveal a more even-handed media coverage.  Time will tell.

Comments

[Craig]

Bill Moyers (whose defense of Jeremiah Wright can at least be partially understood by the fact that Moyers is himself an ordained minister) said nothing more than Obama himself said in his Philadelphia speech. However, after explaining the origins of Wright's vitriol, Obama, unlike Moyers, pointed out that now is not the time to wallow in or excuse Wright's outrageous statements, but to transcend them. I note also that Moyers has still not commented on Wright's completely baseless charge that the U.S. government invented the AIDS virus to wipe out blacks.

Perhaps, as an educator, you would like to comment on something else Wright said that Moyers has ignored -- that black children are "right-brained" and white children are "left-brained" and, therefore, learn differently. Let's see, if that's true, let's reverse Brown versus Board and bring back segregated schools.

[darrelplant]

The charge of AIDS being invented by the government to wipe out blacks is about as well-sourced as any religious belief, so far as I can tell.

Nor is it a particularly uncommon belief. A 2005 study by the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes found that 50% of blacks thought AIDS was man-made, slightly more than that thought there was a cure being withheld from the poor, and 15% believed that it was a form of genocide aimed at blacks. Part of the research was conducted under the auspices of OSU.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33695-2005Jan24.html

As for the segregated schools, I'd just point out that any number of "reasonable" non-black people bought into "The Bell Curve" thesis of race-based intelligence stratification -- based on claims about genetic differences -- when it was published 15 years ago and still give it credence. And those people wield a bit more power than people like Wright.

[Terry]

Thanks for the references, Darrell, and the comments.

As for segregated schools, given the reality of de facto housing segregation by race and by class, maybe they're not such a bad thing as long as they're funded and staffed equitably. I'm not at all convinced that rubbing shoulders with white kids does much for the academic performance of poor black kids.

We do know that the feeble efforts to desegregate schools --forced busing, for example-- have been monumental failures. The successor to busing --school choice-- has actually resegregated schools along race and class lines.

Let's do away with choice and return to true neighborhood schools.