In God We Trust Blog

18 March 2008

Thoughts on Barack Obama’s Speech

Posted by Joy Bischoff under: Constitution in Peril; Judaeo-Christian Values Under Attack; Presidential Election 2008 .

I am sick and tired of hearing liberals put down our Founding Fathers for a variety of trumped up reasons. They do this is shake our confidence in the men who wrote a document that has been revered as inspired for generations. If they can shake our confidence in the men, then maybe we won’t fight so hard when they propose changes to that document or interpretations that were never intended.

In Barack Obama’s speech this morning, he spoke of the Constitution. He said it was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery. I have heard many liberals condemn the Constitution by this argument.

The word intolerance is often ill-used but does have a place. It is amazingly intolerant to expect people from a time past to think the way we do. The same critics, if they had been born and raised two and a half centuries ago, would think and react the way others of their time did. Slavery was as old as time and was not new with America. Slavery in Africa was far more wide-spread than it was in the United States. Revisionary history doesn’t show that but go back and read the books by the men who walked the continent of Africa like Dr. Wallace Budge.

Our Founding Fathers saw after intense arguments that threatened to end the Convention, that only a compromise would give our nation a chance to move forward. If one reads the daily arguments of the Constitutional Convention, they will see it was unquestionable that failure was at hand without that compromise. Progress takes time and has to develop. A civil war would have ensued without compromise and Britain would have easily swooped in to reclaim their rebellious colonies.

Changing centuries old traditions takes time. Was it better to fall back into the hands of the British and lose our rights, or set up a climate of freedom that would progress through the efforts of progressive thinkers to the day when slavery would end? For those who do not believe this, I assert that they try to understand history as it was instead of judging it through their modern lense. This is wrong. This is intolerant.

In my opinion, there were some good things spoken by Barack this morning, and some I did not like. Here are excerpts from Senator Obama’s speech:

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

The following sentence is well spoken:

… we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

This next part? Not so much:

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

I have rarely heard anything overtly political in my church and never have I heard hate speech. This next part is better:

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Imagine if Mitt Romney or Ron Paul tried to excuse away a number of clear and outrageous statements made by their advisors:

Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

Barack Obama should not be president of the nation if he does not remove himself from an organization that is exactly the opposite of the speeches of hope he is giving. He speaks of healing the nation and Jeremiah Wright speaks of hatred and divisiveness. Like attracts like. Sew hatred and this is what will be reaped. What we focus on becomes our center. His wife showed she reflects this same attitude when she said she was proud of her country for the first time. And this from someone who personally was given every opportunity in her life but she doesn’t focus on that, she focuses on the negative.

The Mexicans, Asians, Arabs, and other ethnic groups resent the blacks because of the many privileges and advantages they have been handed. They are irritated at the focus of the negative. Many whites are tired of being constantly blamed. I grew up tearing into anyone who showed any prejudice. For years I excused away black prejudice against whites because of what their race has gone through.

But the time came when I decided to stop taking the blame for my own race. When do we hear thanks for the thousands of white men who gave their life to free the slaves? And how about the white abolitionists who stirred up the issue and helped so many slaves gain their freedom at great risk to themselves and their families? When do we get to stop apologizing when so many of us have never been guilty of prejudice?

I will continue to berate the intolerance of whites against blacks but I will also condemn reverse prejudice because if this attitude doesn’t turn around, then the racial divide will explode and destroy everything in its path.

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