Free Speech friday
May 9, 2008
(In response to “Time for major parties to take out the trash, again,” by Russ Wung, May 5)
Russ Wung continues to hold Barack Obama responsible for the words and views of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, despite the senator’s repeated, unequivocal denunciation of those words and views. At the same time, he is silent about John McCain’s active courting of Revs. John Hagee and Jerry Falwell, whose ideas are equally bizarre and offensive and often a great deal more intolerant.
I do not agree with or condone the more extreme views of Wright, but then again, I’ve had the good fortune of not being raised in an environment of legal segregation, lynching and economic discrimination where such ideas might be forged.
At some point, the motives of journalists and pundits who continue to conflate Obama with Wright while ignoring the relationship between McCain and Hagee, Falwell, and others needs to be examined. Both Wright and Falwell have blamed America for the 9/11 attacks; Hagee (whose support McCain is “very proud to have”) has blamed Hurricane Katrina on homosexuals and called the Catholic Church “the Great Whore” and a “false cult system.” Yet turn on Fox News tonight (or any night, for that matter) and you’re likely to see hour upon hour of Wright’s greatest hits analyzed out of context, parsed and dissected ad nauseam. A charitable explanation for this might be that Obama is a Democrat and McCain isn’t. A less charitable one might be that Wright is black and Hagee and Falwell aren’t.
I hope that Wung is merely ignorant of the facts, as opposed to being naive or intellectually dishonest. He ends his column demanding that, with regards to Wright, Obama needs to “do the right thing,” although it’s hard to imagine what more Obama could possibly do or say that will ever satisfy his critics. When it comes to being fair, one can only hope that Wung and those who share his beliefs will do the right thing as well.
— Pim Lustig
CSE Staff
#1 Russ Wung
commented, onMay 9, 2008 at 1:51 a.m.:
A copy of my e-mailed response, for the record:
Dear Mr. Lustig,
Thank you for your letter, which my editor kindly decided to forward to me. Although it is clear that we hold fundamentally differing points of view on what surrounds the Wright controversy I should like to respond to one of your other criticisms.
You mention that I didn't include Jerry Falwell in my column. Frankly, I believe Falwell is, or more precisely was, a worthless hack, and I did consider listing him in my partial overview of wackos near the end of the column. However, I opted not to do so in light of the fact that the man is dead, and cannot therefore trouble us nearly as much as the still-living Pat Robertson or, of course, Wright himself. One may note as well that on the whole, McCain is hardly the darling of your average social conservative.
Space constraints unfortunately prevent my treating the topic of political extremism as broadly as I would have liked, so I chose to focus on the highly topical matter of Wright rather than McCain's overtures toward Falwell who, despite all his many flaws, has at least done us the supreme favor of departing permanently from our earthly company. If you have the occasion to write under similar circumstances you will appreciate the situation all of us columnists are in, regardless of ideological positioning.
I have no more sympathy for Falwell's wanton politicization of my religion than Wright's (although I would consider Wright more similar to Phelps in the extent of his extremism), but it seemed rather unnecessary to mention a man whose influence is largely consigned to history when equally good examples of currently active, similarly misguided activists (Robertson, Dobson, et al.) were readily available.
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