A post of links

Aug 20, 2008
I don't usually cross-post from my Livejournal, but this is driving me crazy.

So. This thing happened recently.All about asking the presidential candidates what they think about, y'know, Jesus and stuff.

(Including questions like "The Bible says that integrity and love are the basis for leadership" and "You've made no doubt about your faith in Jesus Christ; What does that mean to you?" To draw from the first couple pages of the transcript.)

And the liberal blogs think Obama shouldn't have done it, because evangelicals are McCain's base, donchaknow. Or maybe he should have, to prove that Democrats Are Religious Too.

Aren't we all missing something here? Some larger issue beyond Who Loves Baby Jesus Most?

Oh, yeah.

(Thanks, Jason.)
Posted by Jen Moore at 8:09 PM

2 comments:

Avedon said...

Much as I appreciate the link, I don't think I did discuss whether Obama should have involved himself with this particular event at all - the post you link to only discusses the issue of whether McCain/Warren cheated.

I used to talk about the religious test clause all the time, but after eight years of this crap I'm kind of worn down - I still post about what's going on in the military, or inappropriate vetting for other government institutions, but the Faith of Our Presidents game is so far beyond absurdity at this point that it hardly bears mentioning.

Our candidates are assholes who don't have the guts to address real moral issues head-on, but they get stuck in the Jesus game. They can't say, "Torture is immoral" - which is all they'd need to do to reassure people that they have a genuine sense of right and wrong - but they let themselves get roped into answering these stupid questions because they get mau-maued by the "faith" crowd (which usually just means the anti-abortion, anti-gay crowd) into this bull.

The question of "faith" is a frame. If they don't start seeing through it, we will wake up one morning and find they have excized the religious test clause from the Constitution altogether.

5:34 AM
Jen Moore said...

On rereading, I see that you didn't actually comment on whether Obama should have been involved; I admit that by the time I was writing this post I was mostly scanning references to the event to see if anyone mentioned the religious test clause, and was getting increasingly frustrated that I couldn't find a mention anywhere.

I know what you mean about getting worn down. It's why I don't actually post about politics all that often. But this realization I sometimes have that when they talk about "religion" in politics and the media, they not only don't mean me but they have no conception that my viewpoint means anything at all...well, it's driving me crazy.

12:17 PM

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