2008 Election CoverUps
The Distorted Testament
June 2008
By Andrew Peterson
For CoverUps.com
Associated Press religion writer Eric Gorski has written a fascinating account of efforts by Barack Obama to enlist evangelical groups in his campaign, but he has done so in a way that has got him in hot water.
In June 2006, for example, Obama spoke to the liberal christian group "Call to Renewal".
"Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?" Obama said. "Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?" referring to the civil rights leader.
Comments like this have earned Obama the ire of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.
Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, "a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application."
Dobson and Tom Minnery, Senior Vice President for Government and Public Policy at Focus on the Family said Obama was disingenuously comparing Old Testament texts and dietary codes – which no longer apply – to Jesus' New Testament teachings:
"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology," Dobson said.
"... He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."
Obama's campaign released a written statement claiming that Obama, who supports completely unrestricted abortion rights, is reaching out to people of faith and purportedly standing up for families.
But Dobson remained unconvinced, countering that Obama:
... is trying to govern by the "lowest common denominator of morality," with "a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution."
"Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?" Dobson said. "What he's trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe."
Our Take
Barack Obama's political beliefs and the political beliefs of Christian evangelical groups like Focus on the Family are so far apart they cannot be bridged – unless one side or the other betrays itself by caving in completely or watering down its ideas so much as to make them meaningless.
Obama is either deluded, or he is trying to deceive people with his supposed religious outreach.
Read the original article.
