March 18, 2008

The Big Race Speech: Barack Obama Attempts to Heal 300 Years of Division

I just finished watching The Race Speech. It was a nice speech — but I don’t need a history lesson in race relations; I wanted Obama to address the specifics of the Jeremiah Wright issue, and then get very specific about the theology he’s pledged his loyalty to — and the church he’s pledged his money to — for the past twenty years.

At best, he dismissed Wright as a member of a dying generation, for whom “the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away,” and downplayed the constant, consistent message of his own brand of “liberation theology” as only “occasionally” finding “voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.”

It also irritated the hell out of me that he compared Wright’s long history of anti-white rhetoric to Geraldine Ferraro’s one-time gaffe:

We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

And, again, while Wright may sound like a crank to those of us to whom his brand of fire and brimstone are foreign, his divisive demagoguery is entirely consistent with the theology to which Obama subscribes.

That is worrisome.

In short, Obama really didn’t say anything new. It was the same “hate the sin, love the sinner” speech he’s been making since the Wright firestorm erupted, only padded with a lot of historical references.

Of course, I’m a hard sell — but that’s the point: I am the person very Obama had to convince. He didn’t — no matter how his followers praise this as the greatest speech since Lincoln’s “House Divided.”

So, mission not accomplished.

Now, there was something even more interesting to me, as a gay American, that jumped out near the very beginning of the speech:

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.

There’s nothing remarkable about alluding to the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution when discussing slavery; it is, however, highly ironic that Barack Obama — staunch opponent of same-sex marriage equality — would invoke the Equal Protection Clause, on which the most elementary argument in favor of marriage equality is based.

I know his devout flock won’t see it, but Obama’s double standard on issues of equality becomes only more pronounced every time he speaks.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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