CGNorena Weekly

A Dangerous Race about Race and Gender

The race for the White House on the Democratic side has reached an irritating and potentially dangerous spot: Hillary Clinton seeks to the be the first woman president while Barack Obama would like to be the first black man in that office. Their ambition is fully justified: both of them are capable of being presidents and the circumstances of the moment make it possible, a historical first. Voters themselves have a historical dilemma of their own; they can choose a woman at the expense of the black man or a black man at the expense of the woman. The conflict between gender and race is as inevitable as it is dangerous.

Hillary and her husband, a former president who barely escaped impeachment, decided that a frank (almost brutal) confrontation with Obama could not be delayed beyond the South Carolina presidential debate. Obama had won the Iowa caucus and had come a close second in the New Hampshire primary, two states with an overwhelming white majority. Polls indicated that South Caroline, with at least a 50% African-American electorate, was leaning toward Obama. The primaries in Florida and California would follow in quick order. The Super Tuesday of February 5 would practically decide the race. Obama, the Clintons thought, had to be stopped at any price. It was risky, but worthwhile.

In the South Carolina debate, and for the first time in the campaign, Bill Clinton, a man with more than thirty-five years of “experience,” an experience that many Americans do not wish for her to bring again, “into the White House”became a surrogate for Hillary (a big mistake).

Part of the strategy was to blame Obama for the acrimonious opening of the debate. “Obama- said Hillary at a press conference—“ca spoiling for a fight.” When Obama made the first reference to Bill Clinton, Hillary pulled a line from her repertoire, a line she had previously used with some success, and said with an icy smile: ”He is not here, I am.” (Of course, Bill knew better, he was conspicuously absent). Obama snapped back:”I still do no know whether I’m running against you or against him.”

After this lovely introduction, Hillary began to recite all the petty charges against Obama, going all the way back to the time he was a member of the Illinois’ legislature. At the same time, the stock market in New York and beyond (the world over) began to collapse: the number of home foreclosures and bankruptcies in the United States reached historical levels. The much-celebrated “culture of ownership” brought about by “the hot housing market” looked like the ruins of Hiroshima.

The Clintons’charges against Obama were indeed petty. Here they are:
-In the past (a long past for him), Obama had been a lawyer for a reputed “slumlord” ( a vague racial reference) who had financially helped Obama in his early political career.
- They accused Obama of promoting a “trillion-dollar tax increase” by raising the ceiling an payroll taxes above the current, $102.000, an increase that would hit (and very properly so, I might add) the top 4% of the earners.
-They clearly misrepresented Obama’s praise of Reagan’s ability to win bipartisan support as a blank approval of Reagan’s social and economic policy.
-Finally, they spread rumors that Obama was a Muslim simply because he attended public school in Indonesia, where he lived with relatives as a child. When Obama became a US Senator he recited the oath of office with his hand on the Bible, not on the Koran, as some Muslim congressmen have done.

Nobody knows for sure how the Carolinian voters would react to all this abuse. The Clintons certainly gambled on this occasion. It would not be the first time that a Clinton gamble has back fired. But the remote possibility that Obama could win in South Carolina, was enough to make them look untruthful and full of hatred, two qualities Martin Luther King saw as the cloud hovering over hs beautiful dream of racial harmony and respect,

The possibility of losing the election should be sufficient to motivate the three Democratic forerunners to make a public pledge of offering the vice-presidency and a position in the cabinet to other two, in case they win the nomination. I will never forget the emotion I felt when JFK offered the vice-presidency to Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1961 elections. I was so impressed by it, that I decided to apply for American citizenship. The question is whether all the Democratic forerunners of today can be compared to JFK in nobility of character and unselfish love to the country. We are going to find out.

The Christian Right after 2006: Wounded but not Dead

The 2006 elections represented a setback to the Christian Right, but not a death blow; its members and aficionados are still voicing utterly un-Christian remarks or attempting to influence public policy in a most unsavory direction.

Let’s start with their “political” vocabulary and speech. It’s true that some of the most shrill voices of the past have been deleted either by death or by the will of the voters. Falwell is not with us anymore to tell us that “God is pro-war” in Iraq, or that the disaster of 9/11 (which happened during a republican watch!) was God’s punishment for American tolerance of gays and lesbians. Pat Robertson can still wish that Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez be assassinated by the CIA, but his voice has been weakened with the mere passing of time. Billy Graham cannot deride any more Martin Luther King’s dream of racial harmony. Max Rafferty left California and the earth and is too far to keep putting down the advantages of sex education in public schools. Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic evangelical and ferocious anti-feminist, cannot any more desire that her children be infected with AIDS rather than “to know there was such a thing as condoms.” The Bush evangelical speech writer Michael Gerson has stopped talking about the “axis of evil” but the Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus is still helping President Bush to ‘articulate such religious things” as stem cell research, a “thing” that is not religious at all.

These and similar voices have either disappeared or been rendered powerless by the noises of “the city on the hill.” But other “gems” of wisdom, moderation, and Christian prudence still shine through “the ever-wider sewer” that “Oh Beautiful America” is becoming, according to Paul Weyrich, the organizer of the Christian Right mail services. One of the voices coming up from the sewer, the voice of a former Presbyterian minister, Paul Hill, did not hesitate to say that assassinating Supreme Court Justices who voted for Roe was “just a way of protecting human life.” John Neuhaus had no qualms in saying that the Supreme Court was so corrupted that any form of civil insurrection was totally legitimate. John Rushdoony, the champion of Christian Reconstruction Theology and the spiritual counselor of Olasky (the father of Bush’s ”compassionate conservatism”) was not compassionate enough to reject the stoning of homosexuals (Leviticus 20.13 ). The leading evangelist of our days, James Dobson, had the guts of asserting that same-sex marriage would lead to incest and bestiality! Erick Kerouack, a leading anti-abortion doctor, upheld the “scientific” theory that premarital sex is a form of germ warfare: it consumes the bonding hormone oxytocin thus rendering impossible lasting relationships with promiscuous women. Daniel Lapin, the rabbi friend of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff (both of them indicted for money laundering, among other charges) has written a whole book to show how secularists use the separation of church and state to “extinguish” religion in America, in spite of the fact that in the eyes of the founders Jefferson and Madison, separation was the condition sine qua non for the blossoming of both, church and state. Lapin seems not to know that Karl Rove has mastered the art of using religion as a political tool of the Bush administration.

Here there are a few examples:

“Faith-based science”: teaching creationism in high school science classes; keeping Terri Schiavo plugged to the wall to exhibit the “culture of life” at work.

“Faith-based justice”: the Pentecostal John Ashcroft was anointed with Crisco oil upon taking the office of attorney general. To Ashcroft the Jeffersonian wall of state/church separation was nothing but a “wall of oppression.” No wonder he resisted for a long time dispatching marshals to quell the epidemic of violent attacks against abortion clinics. Ashcroft subpoenaed hospitals for their files on women who had undergone abortion. After all, as a good evangelical, Ashcroft, who organized Bible study groups in the Department of Justice (!), was convinced that abortion is a form of murder (not a biblical teaching) and that it leads to breast cancer (not a scientific opinion). That is why John Neuhaus called for bishops to deny communion to political candidates who supported abortion rights in the 2004 campaign. No wonder candidate Giuliani (a pro-choice man)is in deep trouble right now. He obviously forgot that abortion is, according to Chuck Colson, is “a horrendous offense against God” and, according to Bill Kristol, the most important political issue of the day.

“Faith-based foreign policy”: General Boykin, who led the search for Bin Laden, was intimately convinced that the Muslim terrorist was nobody else but Satan himself, and that the dark clouds he saw over Mogadishu (Somalia) were evident proof of a demonic presence there. When President Bush had the rare common sense of confessing that Boykin’s point of view did not always “reflect his own,” James Dobson called Boykin “a martyr” in his radio show.

When Senator Brownback, a darling of the Christian Right, invited Senator Obama to “his” church, Obama, who was and is opposed to the Iraq disastrous war, responded “This is my house too. This is God’s house.” The black audience gave Obama a standing ovation.

To make things worse in our own days, two former preachers, the ex-Mormon missionary Mitt Romney and the ex-Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, are running for president in 2008. Huckabee won the Iowa caucus and Romney the Michigan primary. Both of them still have a chance of becoming the republican candidate in 2008. The Christian Right is indeed alive!

The Vocabulary of Political Change

The vocabulary a politician uses is highly symptomatic; it’s the vocabulary of a terminally sick past or the vocabulary of an imminent and promising future. Some candidates to the presidency like to begin their fossilized speeches by reminding their audiences that this country is “the most powerful country in the world,” “the hegemonic leader of free men everywhere,” or simply, ‘THE BEST country anywhere.” Love of country can indeed inspire language like that, but sometimes it breaks through the boundaries of humility and restraint.

American politicians have to learn how to sober down the irritating tone of these questionable statements. America is not the “most powerful country in the world”: we have practically lost all the undeclared wars we have gotten into in our recent past: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. We are certainly not the leaders of Iraq’s civilian population, 200,000 of whom (at least) have been killed by our soldiers and our bombs. And we are indeed not the leaders of the Iraqis we have tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, or those we have “outsourced’ to “friendly allies” we know are experts in disposing of their prisoners by very radical means. A little touch of humility would do great things for our national security.

The first condition for political change is to change the way we talk about it. One of the promising qualities of candidate Obama is the simple fact that no matter what he’s speaking about, he always sounds sincere, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. This can hardly be said about other candidates, like Giuliani, Romney, or even Clinton, whether Hillary or Bill. According to the New York Times (1.7.08, front page) the former President is becoming soporific on his speeches in New Hampshire — on behalf of his own wife! A well-choreographed tear has helped her more than all of his speeches.
An administration that is still hemmed by old linguistic habits (“unilateral hegemony,” “enemy combatants,” “collateral damages,” “sub-prime mortgages.” etc) will never bring about the change most of us are dreaming about.

The vocabulary of most Christian Neo-cons who indulge in politics seems to be neither Christian nor political. Falwell, for instance, said in repeated occasions that the disaster of 9/11 was a divine punishment not only for the sins of gays and lesbians, but also for the sins of a nation that encourages gays and lesbians. This manner of speaking is certainly not Christian: Jesus admonished his disciples not to judge others in order not to be judge by God. To make things worse, Newborn Christians seem obsessed with “moral” issues Jesus never spoke one word about, such as same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia. abstinence, pre-marital sex, condoms, etc. In a way, those Christian preachers sound more like Taliban thugs than like the mellow disciples of the Master who encouraged only those men without sin to throw the first stone against an adulteress woman. The promiscuous, self-righteous, religious-political vocabulary of the Christian Right is radically strange to the vocabulary of the Sermon on the Mountain, a sermon Jefferson admired as the most elevated moral code preached to humanity, anytime, anywhere, by anybody. Maybe Neo-Christian preachers should learn the vocabulary of assistance to the poor, a language that now seems reserved to Hollywood celebrities and Wall Street magnates, or to former Senator Edwards.

The most important political change at the moment is about the very definition of America, about our ownself-understanding, about what America can and must do for others and for the planet itself. The language of unilateral hegemony has to be thoroughly displaced by the vocabulary of human solidarity and equality. Jeffferson’s vocabulary in the Declaration applies to ALL human beings, Christians, Jews, Muslims, North and South Koreans, Cambodians and Nigerians, Buddhists and Shintoists. We are all equal in our rights: the right to be free , the right to seek our happiness; the Creator is One and the Same.

To refuse signing the Kyoto protocol was not an exemplary act of solidarity, but an act of betrayal and American exceptionalism, that feeds, once again, on national arrogance. In the next period of global warming characterized by more persistent droughts, more intense mega fires, more devastating floods, Americans should be the first on line to assist humans in distress in any part of the world. We don’t seek a policy of isolationism; we seek the honor of being among the first responders to suffering humanity, to the poor and the sick not only in America, but everywhere, a novel outburst of globalization.