Eric Zorn gets an earful from Senator Obama in re an earlier column:
Chicago Tribune | Eric Zorn Obama to Zorn: Don't go so easy on the prickly secularists. Am I too touchy about church/state matters?Briefly, I'd scolded Obama for his line, “Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.”
I said it was a false generalization about secularists, whose only real request of believers is that they not enter the public square using “because God says so” as a reason to advance or attack any policy position.
He, in turn, scolded me for focusing on 20 words out of a 4,600 word speech
I'm with you Mr. Zorn, I don't want my politicians to be religious zealots, no matter which party they belong to. If you have a prickly 'blind spot', it is probably for good reason, based on prior experience. Too frequently politicians use religion (or a conveniently altered version of religion) as a cudgel for their own self-interest. I'm not convinced that Senator Obama is in this group, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I realize I am living in a dream world, but why can't politicians honor the separation of Church and State? Of course, they can be Christians or whatever (except Wiccans, I suppose), but cannot they keep that fact to themselves as irrelevant to 'conducting the people's business'?
Perhaps I have a similar 'prickly blind spot', based on meeting too many self-professed Christian evangelicals who were smug, cruel, cold-hearted schmucks. One only need to look at Tom DeLay, or even President Bush for an example of this type of faux-Christian. Is Obama in this group of self-interested faux-Christian? Who cares. Why can't he focus on being a Senator instead of a preacher? Isn't that what he was elected to be?
As Zorn says in his previous article:
Whatever beliefs or philosophies shape your values or guide your personal conduct are of no nevermind to us.If you think stealing is wrong because it says so in your scripture or because common sense tells you it's wrong or because the Ouija board tells you “no” when you ask it if you should swipe something, it's all the same to us as long as you don't steal.
But when all of us come together in the public square to debate laws about theft, we ask that your proposals and your proofs not rely on or require the authority of God.
Why? Because it works better that way. Because it's very hard to settle a debate between people who hear contradictory messages in the voices of their Gods.
Amen. Err, pasta-fazul!
[read the rest, here]
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update:
Upon re-reading the original column which got Senator Obama so 'het up', I count 98 words of Senator Obama quoted. So the claim of '20 words' is a bit disingenuous, isn't it? Or as the Christians call it, a lie. Isn't that some sort of no-no?
Tags: Barrack_Obama, /religion
