The New York Times‘ examines Barack Obama’s courtship of evangelical voters who cast their ballots for George Bush, and notes that it has been met “by an increasingly intense reaction from the religious right.”
Part of Obama’s outreach entails a reworking (to put it mildly) of Bush’s initiative to aid faith-based social service providers.
Meanwhile Richard Cohen of The Washington Post believes that the quest for endorsements from religious organizations is warping our politics.
He writes:
For too long now, the term “faith-based” has been synonymous with dumb. It’s dumb to speak of Islam as if the terrorists are its true representatives (F. Graham). It’s dumb to think the Holocaust was God’s way of getting the Jews to return to Israel (Hagee) or that Catholics are not true Christians (Hagee, again) or that “Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world” (Parsley).
It’s dumb to reject evolution when all of science thinks the opposite, and it’s dumb to oppose sex education, as if knowledge was by itself a sin. It was beyond dumb for the Rev. Pat Robertson to predict a natural calamity for Orlando because of Disney World’s policy regarding gay men and lesbians. Yet, the endorsement of such clergymen has been sought by virtually every Republican presidential candidate of our times. To pass this kind of muster is very disquieting.
The liberal clergy in this country is a faded force. Gone are the days when ministers did such things as leading the civil rights movement and marching to end the Vietnam War. Now, the ones with political clout are too often small-minded men who swaddle their bigotry and ignorance in the soothing word “faith.”