Dirty Politics

Someone forwarded to me an e-mail about Barack Obama entitled: “A man will come from the east.” It starts out in capital letters saying: “LETS ALL PRAY FOR WISDOM AND DISCERNMENT AND PRAY FOR EACH OTHER.” Then it says: “GOD BE WITH US ALL! God help us if this man is elected!! But it is all stated in the Bible and it will happen sooner or later.” It then goes on to say: “I believe the Bible has warned us that ‘A man will come from the East that will be charismatic in nature and have proposed solutions for all our problems and his rhetoric will attract many supporters!’ When will our pathetic Nation quit turning their back on God and understand that this man is A Muslim….First, Last and always…. And we are AT WAR with the Muslim Nation, whether our bleeding-heart, secular, Liberal friends believe it or not. This man fits every description from the Bible of the ‘Anti-Christ’.”

The piece then presents its puny evidence that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that it is the plan of the Muslims to destroy the United States by electing one of their own to the presidency. The e-mail postures itself as a Christian reaction to the candidacy of Barack Obama and ends with the words: “WITHOUT GOD, WE ARE NOTHING!!!” It is a loathsome, despicable piece of right-wing slander.

It was supposedly written by Darlene Millican, wife of the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Sun City Florida. The church, however, denies that she wrote it, saying: “Mrs. Millican has absolutely no idea how this horrible e-mail was started AND named her as the originator of such slander. Darlene has spent her life teaching others to be and do their best for Christ . . .which includes not slandering others!”

The e-mail asks people to forward it to others, and I have no doubt that many thousands of people have forwarded it on just as one person did to me. If you have received it, I suggest that unless you are trying to refute it, you not forward it to anybody. It is pure falsehood. It is pure libel. It is pure excrement.

Why is it that people who claim to be “Christian” are so often right-wing hate-mongers? When I was raised as a Christian we were taught to love others and never to spread slander. The purveyors of this odious e-mail stoop to the bottom level of political discourse in order to malign a man whom they hate because of his color, his background, and his politics.

It is self-evident that Barack Obama is not a Muslim or anything like one. Even if he were a Muslim, that would not be grounds for such hate. We are not, as the e-mail contends, “AT WAR with the Muslim Nation.” We are not at war with any Muslim nation. We are at war with the same kind of extremist fanatics as those who wrote the e-mail.

The e-mail claims that “Barack Heussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background.” Are the morons who wrote this nonsense ignorant of the fact that Obama joined that church over 20 years ago and has attended services there regularly? Obama was married in the church and had his children baptized in the church. Does it take very much education to realize that such actions would be profoundly sacrilegious to a genuine Muslim?

I do not believe that this junk was issued by the campaigns of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I doubt that the Republican Party had anything to do with it. I am sure that this was the work of a lunatic fringe of the religious right, a group that stokes the embers of bygone racism and thinks America should be a strictly “Christian Nation.”

The Democratic primaries are still going on, and the main presidential election campaign is yet to be officially started. Nevertheless, this is an example of the kind of dirty politics we can expect in the future—not from the McCain campaign, but from the disaffected zealots of the religious right.