All Posts Tagged With: "issues"

Politico reports that the RNC sent out this bulletin yesterday:

“The Honolulu Star Bulletin reports Barack Obama ate popcorn and watched the 3:40 showing of the Dark Knight in theater 9 yesterday.”

Seriously? This is worthy of a bulletin? It is if you’re desperately grasping for straws for anything to smear your opponent with. Jonathan Martin explains:

Seeing a summer action flick and eating popcorn is hardly elitist, but wait, there is more.

Obama has said, the RNC hastens to note, that Batman and Spiderman are his favorite superheroes, citing their “inner turmoil.”

Ahh, there it is.

Real, red-blooded Americans, evidently, are only supposed to like superheroes because they have nifty outfits and beat up the bad guys. To look beyond the surface or glean some larger meaning from the characters naturally implies Obama has the sort of egghead end effette approach to life that would leaad us to analyze our enemies instead of defeat them.

Or something like that.

It would be easier if he just went wind-surfing.

Let’s forget about the issues. Let’s concentrate all our energy on the innuendo. That’s what helps elect the best person to be the leader of the free world. It’s worked well in the past two election cycles, right?

*

This just plain irritates me. Jesus is not a Republican (or a Democrat). I believe with all my heart that He cares about more than just the abortion issue and the gay marriage issue.

Indeed, Jesus is pro-life, but pro-life is more than just about pregnancy and birth; pro-life extends beyond the womb and encompasses all the life issues each and every individual all around the world faces, including extreme poverty and obscene disparity of wealth, famine and hunger, genocide and war.

Jesus certainly cares about the sanctity of marriage, but that extends beyond the issue of a union between homosexual couples and encompasses the union and marriages of heterosexual couples, including fidelity and marriage “until death do us part.” Why do the divorce rates within the Christian Church so closely mirror that of divorce rates outside the Church? If fundamentalist Christians, like the gentleman in the video, care so much about the sanctity of marriage, why doesn’t he focus on the truest threat to the “traditional marriage” — rampant divorce rates among heterosexual couples who even occupy our church pews?

Do I condemn those who have been divorced? Absolutely not. I simply want the same standard of “sanctity” to apply to heterosexual couples as these Christianists want it to apply to non-heterosexual couples. I do not oppose civil unions between two adults, heterosexual or homosexual. Marriage is an institution that should remain within the religious context, and it can be defined by the respective religious institution.

What irritates and frustrates me most are that Christianists like this gentleman continue to reduce every election down to these two issues. And how successful has that proven to be. They’ve had eight years of a pro-Christianist presidency with control of at least two branches of government for the first six years. Look at where it has gotten us.

Has there been significant improvement in our nation and in the world with these two issues? Has the Christianist agenda really worked?

There are more issues than just these two that devoted followers of Christ should consider when voting this November. Failing to consider the other bigger issues — poverty, hunger, war, the Gospel message of faith, hope and agape love — is ignoring the larger messages of Jesus and the Bible.

*
[Stepping down from my soapbox now.]

An editorial cartoon by Patrick Corrigan of The Toronto Star poignantly points out the misplaced priority of Congress dedicating time to the Roger Clemens controversy at the expense of much more pressing issues. Leave it to a Canadian to point out what (many) Americans seemingly fail to see.