I get impatient. It’s difficult to write every day about the latest examples of right-wing denseness, and do it in what is hopefully a coherent and lucid manner — and then find fresh new examples of that thick-headedness the next day, sticky and hardening like freshly poured asphalt.
Michael Gerson’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post is the latest example:
Barack Obama has run a campaign based on a simple premise: that words of unity and hope matter to America. Now he has been forced by his charismatic, angry pastor to argue that words of hatred and division don’t really matter as much as we thought.
Obama’s speech in Philadelphia yesterday made this argument as well as it could be made. He condemned the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s views in strong language — and embraced Wright as a wayward member of the family. He made Wright and his congregation a symbol of both the nobility and “shocking ignorance” of the African American experience — and presented himself as a leader who transcends that conflicted legacy. The speech recognized the historical reasons for black anger — and argued that the best response to those grievances is the adoption of Obama’s own social and economic agenda.
[…]
The problem with Obama’s argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the “U.S. of KKK-A” and urges God to “damn” our country.
Obama’s excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor.
Take an issue that Obama did not specifically confront yesterday. In a 2003 sermon, Wright claimed, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”
This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.
But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.
Obama’s speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama’s grandmother, which Obama said made him “cringe” — both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference.
Yet didn’t George Bush and other Republican politicians accept the support of Jerry Falwell, who spouted hate of his own? Yes, but they didn’t financially support his ministry and sit directly under his teaching for decades.
The better analogy is this: What if a Republican presidential candidate spent years in the pew of a theonomist church — a fanatical fragment of Protestantism that teaches the modern political validity of ancient Hebrew law? What if the church’s pastor attacked the U.S. government as illegitimate and accepted the stoning of homosexuals and recalcitrant children as appropriate legal penalties (which some theonomists see as biblical requirements)? Surely we would conclude, at the very least, that the candidate attending this church lacked judgment and that his donations were subsidizing hatred. And we would be right.
In Philadelphia, Obama attempted to explain Wright’s anger as typical of the civil rights generation, with its “memories of humiliation and doubt and fear.” But Wright has the opposite problem: He ignored the message of Martin Luther King Jr. and introduced a new generation to the politics of hatred.
King drew a different lesson from the oppression he experienced: “I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate myself; hate is too great a burden to bear. I’ve seen it on the faces of too many sheriffs of the South. . . . Hate distorts the personality. . . . The man who hates can’t think straight; the man who hates can’t reason right; the man who hates can’t see right; the man who hates can’t walk right.”
Barack Obama is not a man who hates — but he chose to walk with a man who does.
Let’s attempt to inject some reality here. First, Barack Obama has not “been forced to argue … that words of hatred and division don’t really matter as much as we thought.” That’s not what Obama has argued at all. If words of hatred and division did not matter, Obama would not have publicly disagreed with the words Rev. Wright used in some of his sermons. Obama is arguing that words — especially words that invoke anger, hatred, and division over issues of race — cannot be fully and properly understood without acknowledging and addressing the legitimate concerns that underlie those words.
Far from saying or implying that words of hatred and division don’t matter, Obama argues that we should actually welcome the opportunity for public discussion of the hatreds and divisions in our society — because if we don’t have that discussion, the hatred and divisions in American life will not go away; they will just fester and regularly bubble up into the open, as they have been doing, in different ways, since the dawn of this nation.
Gerson calls Rev. Wright “a dangerous man” because he said that the federal government “invented” the HIV virus as a deliberate tool of genocide against black people. He says, “Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America.” Clearly, it’s not true that the federal government invented the HIV virus so it could be used to exterminate black people. Obviously, that is, at best, a misinformed statement, and yes, it could reasonably be called “batty.” But dangerous? Please. If Obama believed this, it would be dangerous. He doesn’t — duh.
The larger point, though, is that underneath Rev. Wright’s inchoate and even foolish analysis, there is a solid truth: The U.S. government did not “invent” the AIDS virus, nor did it intentionally spread the AIDS virus to harm the black community — but it did ignore and trivialize the seriousness of AIDS when that disease was ravaging mostly homosexuals, white or black, and continued to do so as the disease spread into other marginalized communities — like African-Americans. The Reagan administration notoriously underfunded AIDS research — and although funding has increased, significantly, and there are now treatments that were not available when Reagan was president — the current administration continues to short shrift essential programs for HIV/AIDS research, treatment, and prevention.
Moreover, Gerson’s lament that Wright’s “… pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories” is ludicrous, not to mention hypocritical. Where was Gerson when Pres. Bush appointed Eric Keroack to oversee Title X, the federal government’s family planning program for low-income women and families? Keroack, who was forced to resign a year ago over charges of Medicaid fraud, is notorious for his quack science on the subject of AIDS and HIV:
… To disparage the notion of “safe sex” and make the case that abstinence is the only healthy choice, A Woman’s Concern [of which Keroack was medical director] teaches that condoms “only protect against HIV/AIDS 85% of the time, which means you have a 15% chance of contracting it while using a condom.” […]
These claims have been resoundingly discredited. Recent studies show that condom use can substantially reduce the transmission of HPV, herpes, and numerous other STDs. Condoms also dramatically reduce the risk of HIV infection. The research on condoms and HIV transmission that Keroack’s group seems to allude to is a report by the National Institutes of Health that found “an 85 percent decrease in risk of HIV transmission” for condom users compared with nonusers (my italics). The twisted version of this statistic touted by A Woman’s Concern implies that if 100 kids have sex while using condoms, 15 will become infected with HIV—an absurd suggestion.
Note that Keroack did not resign over any dispute regarding his qualifications for the job; he resigned because the state of Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against him for Medicaid fraud. And note further that when Pres. Bush named Keroack’s successor, Susan Orr, he again chose someone who opposes family planning to run the nation’s low-income family planning program! This is the person who is responsible for overseeing the reproductive health of the nation’s poor women (emphasis added):
Orr has been criticized for public statements which have indicated an anti-contraceptive view in areas of education, public policy and health insurance.
In 2000, while working as a policy director at the Family Research Council, she objected to a Washington, D.C., city council bill requiring health insurers to pay for contraceptives. By not including a “conscience clause” allowing employers to withhold contraceptive coverage, Orr said the council would force employers “to make a choice between serving God and serving the D.C. government.
“It’s not about choice. It’s not about health care. It’s about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death,” she said.
In April 2001, when President Bush proposed ending contraceptive coverage for federal employees, Orr said, “We’re quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It’s not a medical necessity that you have it.”
Michael Gerson, to the best of my knowledge, did not write one word in his former capacity as Pres. Bush’s chief speechwriter, expressing any concern that giving out false information about AIDS prevention, or claiming that birth control is never a medical necessity — when the individual saying such things is actually in charge of overseeing the health of millions of Americans — “puts lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.” Yet, he would have us believe that an African-American pastor mixing fiction with fact in an attack on federal AIDS policy is putting lives at risk.
In Gerson’s world, analogies have to be precisely parallel in order to be valid. Thus, the only accurate analogy to Barack Obama attending and paying dues to a church where the pastor attacks the U.S. government and advocates its demise (which is what Gerson says Wright does) would be if a Republican candidate for president attended and paid dues to a church where the pastor attacked the U.S. government and advocated its demise. In this way, Gerson can ignore the reality that when Obama spoke about the stereotyped views his white grandmother held toward black men, that anecdote was about more than merely the personal “issues” one woman needs to “work through.” He can pretend that it’s just one white grandmother, and not millions of white Americans, who carry around these same stereotyped views of black men as being all potential criminals. And he can pretend that the discrimination and narrowed possibilities that African-Americans still face in where they can go, in what jobs they can hold, in what schools they can attend and what neighborhoods they can grow up in, and in the fears for their own physical safety they must live with on a daily basis are not connected in any way to those stereotyped views.
Gerson ends his peroration with this line: “Barack Obama is not a man who hates — but he chose to walk with a man who does.” In point of fact, this is not true. It would be more truthful if the word “arguably” were inserted between “but” and “he” and between “who” and “does.” What is not arguable is that the Republican candidate for president — and many other Bush Republicans — have chosen to accept money and political support from men who do hate — about which Michael Gerson has nothing to say.
This, however, is a post for another day.
Kathy
Liberty Street 