Barack Obama is demonstrating that talk is cheap and that actions speak louder than words. As I (and many other LGBT bloggers) previously posted, Obama is making a three-day tour through South Carolina, starting on this Friday and finishing Sunday with a concert that includes Grammy Award-winning Gospel artist and anti-gay Donnie McClurkin. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what Obama is doing unless he secretly agrees with McClurkin's views (on several occasions, Obama's religious statements have caused me to doubt whether he is an ally of the LGBT community or not). Yesterday, Obama released the following statement concerning retaining McClurkin on the tour:“I have clearly stated my belief that gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters and should be provided the respect, dignity, and rights of all other citizens. I have consistently spoken directly to African-American religious leaders about the need to overcome the homophobia that persists in some parts our community so that we can confront issues like HIV/AIDS and broaden the reach of equal rights in this country," Obama said in the written statement.
"I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin’s views and will continue to fight for these rights as President of the United States to ensure that America is a country that spreads tolerance instead of division."
If he disagrees with McClurkin, why the Hell is he touring with him?? The words and the action simply do not add up. For those who missed my prior post, here's more on McClurkin and Obama's pandering to anti-gay sentiments via the Chicago Tribune Blog (http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/10/obama_the_gospel_singer_and_ga.html):
McClurkin, who is also a Pentecostal minister, has been a prominent advocate of the view that homosexuality is a lifestyle and that gays can will themselves to heterosexual behavior. McClurkin has said he struggled with homosexual "demons" for 20 years--which he attributes to molestation as a child by male relatives--but is now straight.
Yes, and I am Queen Victoria too. Additional political analysis is here from the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/obama-should-repudiate-an_b_69244.html):
Obama has hitched his string to McClurkin's high flying gay bash kite in part out of religious belief (he purports to be somewhat of an evangelical), in bigger part because he's falling further and further behind Hillary Clinton with the black vote in South Carolina and everywhere else, and in the biggest part of all because he hopes that what worked for Bush's reelection will work for him. Enter McClurkin. He's black, he's popular, and gospel plays big with blacks in South Carolina, especially black evangelicals, and many of them openly and even more of them quietly loathe gays.
A Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies poll in 2004 found that blacks by a far larger margin than the overall population opposed gay marriage. That raised a few eyebrows among some political pundits, but there were much earlier signs of blacks' relentless hostility to gays and gay rights. A survey that measured black attitudes toward gays published in Jet magazine in 1994 found that a sizable number of blacks were suspicious and scornful of them.
This lesson isn't lost on Obama. Desperate to snatch back some of the political ground with black voters that are slipping away from him and to Hillary; Bush's black evangelical card seems like the perfect play. Obama wouldn't dare go down the knock gay path, and risk drawing the inevitable heat for it, if he didn't think as Bush that anti-gay sentiment is still wide and deep among many blacks. And that's what makes Obama's ala Bush pander to anti-gay mania even more shameless and reprehensible.
Obama has spent months telling everyone that he's everything that Bush isn't. He can proof it by saying a resounding no to McClurkin and to gay bashing. He can cancel and repudiate the South Carolina "gospel" tour, and do it now.
It looks to me that Obama is throwing gays under the bus in his quest for black evangelical votes. I'm sorry, but I do not trust Obama any more.
2 comments:
Obama is evidently no longer running for the nomination in 2008, but for appointive favors in the Clinton regime or -- should she fail next November -- for the nomination in 4 more years. This makes it even more pathetic, that he is running now to prove his racial identity at the expense of revoking the African-American community's free pass to annihilate itself in homophobia. His enabler act was at the core of Bill Clinton's betrayal of his mandate -- it was called, "triangulation," hypocrisy sounding too unfashionable -- and it is at the core of his Party's evidently incurable deformity as the spineless society of self-seeking careerists that it is. This conduct may reward Obama with a Supreme Court seat, but it should deprive him of consideration for political leadership.
I hope you're wrong on that account. The impact of an inept president is relatively short lived. However, the deep gouge a Supreme Court Justice makes lasts for decades.
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