Losing Sleep

by Kelly Bulkeley

Last night the students in my "Psychology of Dreaming" course at John F. Kennedy University turned in their first assignment of the quarter: a personal sleep history from childhood to the present. I like to begin my dream classes with a focus on sleep because it's a great way to jar people into taking a fresh look at the nocturnal dimension of their lives. Most people have never reflected on their sleep patterns or thought about sleep in relation to their life's development and growth over time. When they're encouraged to do so, the results are often startling. As soon as I opened the discussion in class last night, one of the students quickly raised her hand. I called on her, and with no further ado she declared:

"I'm 45 years old, and I just realized I've been sleep deprived for the last 40 years!"

Several other students followed with their own tales of sleepless woe, just like I've found every time I give this assignment in a class and just like I found in the research for American Dreamers. The conclusion is hard to avoid: We are becoming a chronically sleep-deprived nation. Problems with sleep afflict a surprisingly large number of people in contemporary American society, and we don’t really know how widespread these problems are or how they impact people’s long term health and well-being.

Florida Fairytale or Tale of Terror?

by Patricia A. Gozemba

Draft a constitutional amendment that is divisive and sweeping in its possibilities for endangering committed and established relationships of all Floridians, straight and gay, and call it the "Florida Marriage Protection Amendment." Make sure that it’s ambiguous enough to ultimately be able to do away with domestic partnerships that are recognized in a number of Florida municipalities. Use seemingly transparent language, "Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized." Consider the legal arguments that can be hung on "substantial equivalent."

Just pretend that the amendment is aimed only at preventing the marriage equality of same-sex couples and that it is vitally needed. Posture that the 1997 Florida Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) statute is not solid enough to prevent "activist" judges from undoing it. Keep up the pretense for four years as you gather the requisite 611,009 signatures to place the amendment on the November 2008 ballot. When you get 612,192 signatures by late December 2007, weeks before the February 1, 2008 deadline, hold a press conference in Orlando and announce it with fanfare.

Start preparing to host Marriage Sundays and Citizenship Sundays in churches throughout 2008 in the run up to the November 4 election. Matt Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel based in Orlando, advises church leaders that this is all legal. He also counsels them on where to set up tables, what to preach about, how to conduct seminars and conferences to support the so-called marriage amendment. He’s available to help in any way. Liberty Counsel has been fighting marriage equality nationwide for years.

Depending on one’s commitment to equality this scenario sounds like a Disney fairytale or a tale of terror emanating from Orlando. Besides the Liberty Counsel and Disney World, Orlando also happens to be the home base for Florida4Marriage and its chair John Stemberger, who is also the President and General Counsel of Florida Family Policy Council. Behind Stemberger and Staver are the other national stars for inequality, in particular Focus on the Family leader James Dobson along with its policy analyst Glenn Stanton who is still pushing his skewed research about same-sex parenting that is not recognized by any respectable academic or professional body.

The fairytale that Florida would become the 28th state to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage came up against reality on January 10th. Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning announced that signatures from Miami-Dade County had been double counted in a computer error and Florida4Marriage needed 22,000 more signatures by the Feb. 1 deadline to get their amendment on the ballot.

Dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival

by Thomas N. DeWolf

The snow is falling outside the home several of us have rented in Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival in support of our cousin Katrina Browne’s film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. It is 19 degrees outside, which is warmer than it has been. The cold and the white stuff haven’t diminished the size of the audiences in the films I’ve seen so far.

I’ve not been to this or any other film festival outside my hometown before. I doubt that I ever would have were it not for the high honor of having Sundance select for competition the film that features our family struggling with the legacy of slavery by exposing New England’s—and our own ancestors’—complicity in the slave trade.

The film premiered here, appropriately enough, on Monday, January 21: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We were honored by the presence of Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. On Monday morning, he participated on a panel dedicated to the message and mission of Traces of the Trade, and attended the film’s premiere that night. It was particularly significant to be with the man who introduced the legislation—four days after Dr. King’s assassination—that ultimately resulted in the establishment of the national holiday fifteen years later in 1983. Conyers has introduced legislation (H.R. 40) that would establish a commission to study the legacy of slavery and possible remedieseach session since 1989. It has never had a hearing until last month. As Chair of Judiciary, he is finally in a position to move this important legislation forward that has languished for so long.

A Positive Conversation About Religion

"We live in a moment of religious conflict around the world, and that's precisely why we need to be proactive about a positive conversation about religion."

Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith and founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core, appeared with a panel of IFYC fellows on a Good Morning America segment (part one aired this morning, part two will run tomorrow.) In the segment, Eboo explained that interfaith dialogue does not equate to saying that all religions are essentially the same:

I'm a very proud Muslim, and some of my best friends are people who are very proud Jews, very proud Christians, very proud Hindus, so in the conversations that we have, we try to steer towards how our different faiths lead us to be merciful, to be passionate, to be of service to others.

But it's the kids who are at the center of the report. Jessica Kent, one of the young people interviewed, sums up the challenges and importance of creating open and honest connections between faiths:

People say don't talk about politics, don't talk about religion at the table, but how else are we supposed to express who we are, what inspired us, what keeps us going, what motivates us, why we do things?

UPDATE 1/24/08: Part two of the conversation is now available online.

Monday Link Roundup: Tuesday Edition, featuring Tom DeWolf, Kai Wright, and Eboo Patel

Beacon Author Tom DeWolf (Inheriting the Trade)—who blogged here on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the U.S.—is at the Sundance Film Festival this week with his cousin Katrina Browne, director of Traces of the Trade. The book and the film deal with their shared family history as descendants of the most successful slave-trading family in our country's history, and they present an opportunity for greater discussion slavery's legacy in the U.S.

One of the many salient points DeWolf makes in his book is that slavery was not a "Southern problem," but an integral part of the economic lives of those north of the Mason-Dixon Line as well. This interview from NECN highlights DeWolf's Rhode Island roots and New England's "hidden history" of slavery. When asked by host Chet Curtis why the subject of Northern culpability in the trade isn't explored in the history books, DeWolfe offered this insight:

The North won the Civil War, and the winners get to write the history books. A professor we met with called it "constructed amnesia," that we create this mythical story of the great abolitionists from the North marching south to straighten out those Southerners. When in fact, there were portions of New York that contemplated seceding with the South prior to the Civil War.

(We embed the NECN story here—if it doesn't appear in your reader click here to watch).

While DeWolfe ducks the paparazzi at Sundance, Kai Wright is reading tonight at the Hue-Man Bookstore in New York. Time Out New York interviewed Kai about his new book, Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Kai talked about his own feelings of alienation as young, black, gay man living in Dupont Circle, a gay neighborhood in Washington, D.C.

“It started to dawn on me that yes, it was a gay neighborhood, but it was a white gay neighborhood, and I was a young black man. I didn’t belong. And I didn’t feel any better.” He recalls that there was a “layering of race over sexuality, and the feeling that there had to be a choice.” (Link)

On Colorlines, Wright discusses the Obama-Clinton campaigns, in the wake of "their racially loaded fight over the comparative historical import of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson." He warns both Democrats of avoiding "the diversity debate," citing the 2004 race of an example of a "weak-kneed dodge" that served neither the Democrats nor the country well:

The Democratic establishment cried foul when Republicans loaded state ballots with divisive initiatives on gay rights. Eleven states asked voters to weigh in on same-sex marriage, pumping up the conservative vote and, some argue, costing John Kerry a win—he lost nine of the states, most infamously Ohio.

The problem, however, wasn’t the existence of a debate about gay rights—that’s inevitable as long as gays refuse to cower in the closet—it was national Democrats’ refusal to participate meaningfully in it. At the state level, 94 percent of legislators who voted against the 22 proposed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage won re-election, according to the gay rights group Equality Federation. (Link)

Finally, be sure to Tivo Good Morning America tomorrow and Thursday. Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, will be featured in a two-part segment highlighting the Interfaith Youth Core. We'll post a link to the segments when they hit the ABC website.

Dare I Ask?

by Laila Halaby

During graduate school, I worked at the library with an African American girl named Carmon. One quiet Saturday morning, she asked if I would mind trimming her hair. Carmon had handfuls of thin braids that she wanted layered in the back so there would be a cascading effect.

We sat outside the library--our fifteen minute break--and I snipped away as instructed.I was curious about the texture of the braids and she explained that in weaving you could choose what kind of hair you wanted, synthetic or human and that human hair was usually Asian. When I wondered aloud why I almost never saw braids on White women, she explained that Black hair was very dry, which was why it was more suited to adding braids to than White hair that tended to get oily.

Over the years, this conversation evolved into a larger look at hair choices made by African American women and what it meant politically and socially to have braids or an afro or dreadlocks or to use a relaxer. I learned a great deal about African American culture during those conversations (because it was never only about hair) and I have always been grateful to Carmon for being so open with me.

During those same years, she asked me a lot of questions about the Middle East, about women, and particularly about Islam. I was happy to offer whatever knowledge I had and was often struck by the overlap in what we each had to say: personal decisions often carried larger social or political reverberations; and you are always an ambassador for your culture. To this day I am thankful for those years of talking we shared and I firmly believe that we widened one another’s horizons with our conversations.

In the intervening years, the last few in particular, I have been approached with all sorts of questions about the Middle East and Islam--some of the very same ones Carmon asked me, though usually presented in a rapid-fire sort of way, without any context or conversation to go along with them. The questions range from the simple (why do women cover their hair?) to the more complex (how can you tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites?--which sounds like it’s going to be a joke rather than a question) to the personal (how are you raising your children?) to the ignorant (does your husband wear a turban?) to the blatantly racist (how can you show that Islam is not a violent religion?).  I am always happy to offer any understanding I can to offset American “jahiliyya,” or generalized ignorance of other cultures, but more and more I am struck by the assumptions that are made in the asking of these questions, first and foremost that any and all questions are acceptable, and second that Arabs/Muslims are almost solely governed by their ethnicity/religion.

The Republican Candidates’ Abortion Problem: It's not Just about Abortion Anymore

by Carole Joffe

"I haven’t sorted out the penalties...of course there’s got to be some penalties to enforce the law, whatever they may be." So spoke George H.W. Bush, in one of the major gaffes of his first presidential run in 1988, during a debate with his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Bush, who had only recently begun to trumpet his antiabortion sentiments to dubious Republican social conservatives, was responding to a question about appropriate punishment for women who would obtain illegal abortions should Roe v Wade be overturned. The next morning, after frantic late night discussions, Bush’s handlers called the press for a "clarification." Bush meant to say doctors who performed abortions, not women who received them, should be jailed in such a situation.

Twenty years later, Mike Huckabee, running for the Republican nomination, makes no such missteps. With none of the discomfort that Bush I showed, Huckabee at his rallies gets the party line of the antiabortion movement right: if Roe is overturned, doctors who perform abortions should be punished, while the recipients of such abortions must be seen as "victims."

But Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher and the candidate of choice of evangelicals, is an exception in the clarity and consistency of his position on abortion. There is a long history of "evolution" on abortion from politicians in both parties. For example, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, both from Southern states, had mixed records of support for abortion early in their careers before they each went on to become staunch allies of the abortion rights movement. But in the campaign of 2008, it is mainly the Republican candidates who are squirming.

Monday Link Roundup: Public Funding for Military Academies, Religious "Tolerance" in Europe

Bill Ayers, founder of the  Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, is an expert on urban schooling. He also, incidentally, wrote the excellent Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2005). His blog is pretty low-traffic, so it's always a great happiness to see him show up in the feed reader. Last week, he posted a piece co-authored with Therese Quinn and Erica Meiners about the increasing militarization of the Chicago school system.

Today, Chicago has the most militarized public school system in the nation, with Cadet Corps for students in middle-school, over 10,000 students participating in JROTC programs, over 1,000 students enrolled in one of the five, soon-to-be six autonomous military high schools, and hundreds more attending one of the nine military high schools that are called “schools within a school.” Chicago now has a Marine Military Academy, a Naval Academy, and three army high schools. When an air force high school opens next year, Chicago will be the only city in the nation to have academies representing all branches of the military. And Chicago is not the only city moving in this direction: the public school systems of other urban centers with largely Black and immigrant low income students , including Philadelphia, Atlanta and Oakland, are being similarly re-formed—and deformed— through partnerships with the Department of the Defense.

Unsurprisingly, these military schools "are located overwhelmingly in low income communities of color, while schools with rich curriculums including magnet schools, regional gifted centers, classical schools, IB programs and college prep schools are placed in whiter, wealthier communities, and in gentrifying areas." Ayers, Quinn, and Meiners are troubled by this and other problems with the academies, including the inherent problems with transforming public civilian education into a military recruiting tool, the fact that military academies promote conformity and discourage individual freedom of thought, and the discrimination practiced by the military via the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy."

Responding to last weekend's New York Times Book Review's Islam Issue, Eboo Patel (Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, reviewed recently here), addresses the struggle between white Europeans and their Muslim neighbors. Citing Philip Jenkins, Patel draws parallels between the African-American struggle for civil rights and the situation in Europe,  where young Muslims are not offered the same opportunities as their white counterparts. Part of the problem, he says, is that "Europe proudly “tolerates” its minorities, but it continues to view even the second and third generations as foreigners."

Tolerance allows you in and indulges your needs, but treats you like an infant and an outsider. Pluralism respects you and your identity enough to require that you make a contribution to the broader society. One reason for the success of American Muslim immigrants compared to their European co-religionists is America’s instinct towards pluralism.

Friday January 11 is Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day

by Gayle F. Wald

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was gospel’s first national superstar: the musician who, beginning in the late 1930s, took the sounds of the “Good News” music then developing in black churches to popular stages and Saturday-night audiences. Rosetta Tharpe had honed her skills as a singer-guitarist on the southern Pentecostal tent-meeting circuit, which she traveled with her mother, the evangelist Katie Bell Nubin, but her ebullient personality and masterful showmanship translated well to such prestigious New York nightspots as the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom. Her defiance of church strictures against engaging with the “wordly” world made her an outcast in some Christian circles, but it also made her a trailblazer and the most important popularizer of gospel before Mahalia Jackson.

Like many musicians, Rosetta Tharpe struggled to stay professionally viable as musical styles and industry allegiances changed. “Sister Rosetta” (as she was known in the church) was a force to be reckoned with in the 1940s, when she had hits such as “Strange Things Happening Every Day” and (with fellow singer Marie Knight) “Just Above My Head” and “Didn’t It Rain.” In 1951, more than 20,000 fans paid good money to attend her wedding at a baseball stadium in Washington, DC, where she entertained the crowd by playing electric guitar in her wedding finery. By the 1950s, however, as record-buyers gravitated to rhythm and blues, she was reduced to playing small gigs and was dropped by her longtime label, Decca Records. Her career was boosted in the 1960s by a series of successful European appearances (especially in England and France), and when Rosetta died, in Philadelphia in 1973 from a massive stroke, few people—in or out of the gospel world—seemed to notice.

Today Rosetta Tharpe lies in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia’s Northwood Cemetery, a casualty of short memory spans and, perhaps, an ongoing inability—even now—to reckon a female gospel musician from Cotton Plant, Arkansas, one of U.S. popular music’s most forceful innovators. Thanks in part to fans like Bob Dylan, who has showcased her on his popular satellite radio show, Rosetta Tharpe has become a minor sensation on YouTube, where her dazzling guitar moves, charismatic singing, and even a pre-Chuck Berry duckwalk amaze viewers. Notwithstanding this and other recent accolades—a 2003 tribute CD featuring the likes of Joan Osborne, Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Raitt, and Sweet Honey in the Rock; a 2007 induction into Blues Foundation Hall of Fame—Rosetta has never quite gotten her due. The unmarked grave is a potent symbol of that neglect.

A concert at the Keswick Theatre in suburban Philadelphia on January 11, 2008 (which Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell  has proclaimed "Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day") promises to pay tribute to Tharpe and, in the process, do some fundraising to finally get her that gravestone. It features Philadelphia stalwarts and gospel greats The Dixie Hummingbirds, the legendary singer Odetta, and Rosetta’s old partner, Marie Knight, now embarked on her own resurrected gospel career. If you haven’t seen ’Birds lead singer (and original member) Ira Tucker get down on his knees to sing, you’re missing an essential gospel experience.

Gayle F. Wald, a professor at George Washington University, is the author of Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20th -Century U.S. Literature and Culture. She wrote the liner notes for a critically acclaimed 2003 Rosetta Tharpe tribute album. Wald lives in Washington, D.C. Read more about Sister Rosetta Tharpe at www.shoutsistershout.net.

Perfecting the Death Penalty

by David R. Dow

When the death penalty was resurrected in 1976, following a brief four-year hiatus, death penalty lawyers made a fateful tactical decision. They decided to abandon the goal of abolition and instead elected to chip away gradually. Rather than arguing that the death penalty is always unconstitutional – that it is necessarily arbitrary, that it is necessarily racist or class-ist, that it is necessarily cruel and unusual, that it is always wrong for the state to execute – lawyers representing the condemned chose to home in on a particular feature of their client’s case that made his death sentence unconstitutional, while leaving other death sentences intact.

A lawyer’s job is to save her client, not to save the world. For that reason, the legal strategy that death penalty lawyers have embraced over the past generation is undoubtedly the correct one. Lawyers will save individual lives, but not every life, because abolition will not come from the courts – especially not the current Supreme Court. The courts believe in perfection, and perfection is the enemy of abolition.

Abolition will come anyway, because perfection (even if there is such a thing) costs a bundle. You can send a murderer to prison for life, or you can spend a million dollars more and execute him. In Texas, more than four hundred men and women have been executed in the modern death penalty era. Four hundred million dollars could have built quite a few schools; it could have raised teachers’ salaries, provided health care for uninsured kids, and filled lots of the state’s potholes. It could have paid for more police and more social services that would have averted many of those murders in the first place.

The Food Gap, Poverty, and Income Disparity

by Mark Winne

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
—Plutarch

We have in America today a tale of two food systems—one for the poor and one for everyone else. The poor cobble together their week’s groceries from a combination of food stamps, food bank donations, and bus trips to Wal-Mart. If they are lucky, parents won’t be forced to skip meals to feed their children. The rest of us, driven by an ever expanding food consciousness, choose from an unprecedented abundance which increasingly leans toward the organic, local, and expensive end of the food chain. Our toughest choice is whether to pay for our food with Visa or Mastercard.  And as the numbers attest—35 million hungry or food insecure Americans (USDA); 50,000 emergency food sites visited annually by 10 percent of the country’s population (America’s Second Harvest); 26 million people receiving food stamps—we have allowed a significant segment of American society to eat at the lowest end of the food chain. These parallel food systems have become the norm, and like the streets and buildings that surround us, we have come to accept them as just part of our everyday landscape.

The United States is unique among developed nations in that it has evolved a stingy, crazy quilt of a social welfare system that places a disproportionate emphasis on food relief. Rather than address hunger’s underlying cause—poverty—in a direct and aggressive fashion, we rely on fifteen separate USDA nutrition programs, a vast network of private emergency food sites, and thousands of community-based food projects to, in effect, manage poverty.

Monday Link Roundup: Interfaith Heroes, Praise for Our World, Womb Outsourcing, and Vet Suicides

Read the Spirit, an ambitious and thoughtful site devoted to issues of spirituality and religion, is devoting a portion of their impressive energies to a month of Interfaith Heroes. Featured so far, brief, illuminating essays on the lives of such disparate voices for tolerance as Moses Maimonides, Jaluddin Muhammed Akbar, and Roger Williams.

(Incidentally, we also owe a word of thanks to Read the Spirit for their link to us and a very flattering mention for Beacon Press generally and the blog specifically.)

In other good reviews of work from Beacon, the L.A. Times ran a thoughtful and moving piece by Susan Salter Reynolds about Our World, a book that collects Molly Malone Cook's photographs with accompanying text by her life partner, the poet Mary Oliver.

The photographs Oliver has chosen reflect Cook's intuitive relationship with her subjects (even inanimate objects). The little girl on the stoop in New York City looks directly at the photographer, as does a kindly Robert Motherwell and a fierce, almost intimidating Walker Evans. Even though most of the photographs are dominated by a central person or object, there is a lot to look at in the margins, all part of the story. The stance of her subjects -- reading a book, looking through a telescope -- is always distinctive, creating the mood of the entire composition. The two photos of Oliver could have been taken only by someone who knew the subject well.

Marketplace ran a story over the holiday break that many, including Judith Warner on the New York Times opinion blogs, found troubling. The story highlighted the practice of "womb outsourcing," an increasingly popular surrogacy option involving hopeful parents from wealthy countries paying what amounts to "bargain rates" (when compared with the high cost of surrogacy in the U.S.) for surrogates in India. Amy Tiemann at MojoMom condemned the practice – "Is this what colonialism looks like in the 21st century?" – and invited Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption, to comment as well:

We women of the wealthy world profit from the exploitation of poor women, men and children with almost every shirt we put on our backs, almost every bite of food we take. We exploit people in poverty and never have to think about it. And now we can profit in our motherhood -- but unlike the shirt and the food, this time the product is going to grow up and demand an explanation. (Read more here)

And, to return to a topic  we discussed during Veterans Day Week last November, Penny Coleman, author of Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War, has been writing about the issue of veteran suicides regularly at Alternet. Her latest post is an account of her experience testifying before Congress alongside Mike and Kim Bowman, who lost their son to suicide after he returned from Iraq. In the piece she quotes Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida, who displayed a stunning lack of tact and understanding of the issue when he passed the buck to the Bowman family for their son's death:

"The building up of the self-esteem is the key," he said, "and the parents somehow have to convince him or her that everything is going to be all right, we're going to work through it. And in this case it didn't happen, and so, tragic and sad."

It is precisely because of this tendency to blame the victims that the work that Coleman and the Bowmans do is so important. The hearing ultimately resulted in a dressing down of the head of mental health at the VA by the chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, Bob Filner, along with the appeal that the VA start listening to the stories of families who have lost loved ones to suicide. Excuses and passing the buck are not going to save any lives.

Now It Begins, and Heaven Help Us All!

by Peter Laarman

There was never any question that religion would play a huge role in the electoral pageant now fully unfolding as those frozen Iowans at last begin to caucus.

After everyone saw how the well-organized voting faithful on the Right gave Bush his margin of “victory” 2004, the Democrats vowed (and here I will paraphrase losing candidate George Wallace from 1958) never to be out-Jesused again. No Democratic candidacy that didn’t feature an effective religious outreach operation could thereafter be taken seriously.

Not that it ever really went away, but religion in our politics is back with a vengeance.

So now barely a day passes without reports on whether Obama continues to receive the most donations from individual clergy members, whether Hillary actually has a vast United Methodist network to tap into, and (most entertainingly) whether Mike and Mitt can avoid turning the race for the GOP nomination into a doctrinal throwdown reminiscent of the 17th century religious wars in Europe.

As historian Charles Mathewes observes, the appropriate point of reference for understanding the politics of piety is Dwight Eisenhower’s famous (and also somewhat hilarious) pronouncement that “our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious belief, and I don’t care what it is.”

Jesus is Not on the Ticket

by Rev. C. Welton Gaddy

As a Baptist minister and as a patriotic American, I’m deeply disturbed—although no longer surprised—by the inappropriate use of religion as a political tactic in presidential campaigns. I’m particularly disheartened by former Gov. Mike Huckabee comparing his sudden rise in the polls and his new frontrunner status in Iowa to the biblical miracle of Jesus feeding the multitudes. Even more alarming, his Iowa state chairman claimed on MSNBC’s Tucker that Huckabee’s training as a pastor makes him better qualified to run the “war on terror [because] it’s a theological war.”

In my capacity as president of The Interfaith Alliance, I have written Gov. Huckabee  two letters recently asking that he and his surrogates refrain from such statements and that he reexamine his understanding of the Constitution and the responsibilities of the presidency.

Maybe in light of Oprah’s endorsement of Senator Barack Obama, Gov. Huckabee decided that he had to go beyond his own endorsement from Chuck Norris. But there are limits. I asked him to make it clear that while he endorses God, he should make no claim that God endorses him.