Presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s dangerous cocktail mixing religion and politics has finally got him so punch drunk that he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth.Obama’s latest – and high profile – mistake was inviting Donnie McClurkin to headline a gospel tour throughout the early primary state of South Carolina to shore up the African-American Christian vote. The problem is that McClurkin is a so-called “ex gay” who has campaigned hard against gay and lesbian civil rights.
How bad is McClurkin? This is what it says about him on Wikipedia: “In his book, ‘Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor,’ he writes that homosexuality is a spiritual issue, from which one can be delivered by the power and grace of God stating, ‘The abnormal use of my sexuality continued until I came to realize that I was broken and that homosexuality was not God’s intention... for my masculinity.’ He then describes himself as going through a process by which he became ‘a saved and sanctified man.’ McClurkin has also stated that homosexuality is a curse and that gays ‘are trying to kill our children.’”
When gay groups, led by the Human Rights Campaign, asked the Obama campaign to pull McClurkin from its gospel roster, it did not, opting instead to continue giving McClurkin a platform.
To deal with the fallout from gay activists and organizations, Obama gave an interview to Advocate.com, under the headline, “Obama explains why he’s the best candidate for LGBT Americans.” Hardly.
Obama tries to explain away the McClurkin mess by saying that the campaign was not aware of his “attitudes.” That’s completely disingenuous since a simple Google search brings up a plethora of information about McClurkin and his “attitudes.”
To make matters worse, Obama tries again by saying that McClurkin was simply singing at a gospel concert, “as opposed to [acting as] a spokesperson for us, [so] it probably didn’t undergo the same kind of vet that someone who was serving as a surrogate for me might have.”
In the Advocate.com interview, Obama goes on to say that he’s trying to build a bridge between two disparate constituencies – gays on one side and African-American Christians on the other. That’s an admirable goal, so it’s too bad he’s doing such a horrible job at it. He is never going to build a bridge to gays and lesbians by giving a platform to someone like McClurkin, who uses religion as a foundation for his hateful homophobic bigotry.
In fact, Obama isn’t building bridges at all; he’s using religion as an excuse to keep certain civil rights away from gay Americans. At a campaign stop in the first-caucus-in-the-nation state of Iowa, he told questioners that he did not support marriage equality for same-sex couples because of religion.
“You want the word marriage and I believe that the issue of marriage has become so entangled – the word marriage has become so entangled with religion – that it makes more sense for me as president, with that authority, to talk about civil rights that are conferred” with civil unions, he told a group in Cedar Rapids, as reported by the Des Moines Register.
This, again, is disingenuous since Obama’s religion, the United Church of Christ, became the first mainline Christian denomination to back marriage equality over two years ago. On top of that, Obama has said he understands the issue since he is biracial and his own parents’ marriage was affected by miscegenation laws.
But if he genuinely felt our pain so intimately, he wouldn’t be using religion to justify the same kind of discrimination felt by his own parents.
Obama’s campaign, however, has never really wanted to use religion as a theme to bring people together. Instead, he uses it as a political weapon for political gain, the same tactic used by Republicans for decades.
In last week’s Democratic debate, Obama was one of the candidates hammering frontrunner Hillary Clinton for acting too much like a Republican. But it is Obama who is using the most cynical weapon in the GOP arsenal – religion – to drive a wedge between voting blocs.
If that’s Obama’s idea of doing politics differently, thanks, but no thanks.
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