Obama throws pastor under the bus

[USRufnex]

Once again, Ippy, spoken like a true lawyer... void of perspective.  See, I disagree with 80% of what YOU have to say... so I would never attend the "Church of IPLAW"...

And I despise the folks who are obnoxious enought to cherry-pick through years of sermons and go on to cherry-pick through individual sermons... you could easily do the very same things with southern baptists, methodists, etc....... except the Anglicans/Church of England, who rarely have anything to say (..."Cake or Death?")... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZVjKlBCvhg

Quotes from the actual candidate....

BARACK OBAMA, June 23, 2007

"It's 1985 and I'm from Chicago.  I'm working with these churches and with lots of laypeople who are much older than I am. ... They saw that I knew the Scriptures and that many of the values I held ... were values they shared.  But I think they also sensed that a part of me remained removed and detached ... that I was an observer in their midst. ...

It's around this time that some pastors I was working with came up to me and asked if I was a member of a church.  "If you're organizing churches." they said, "it might be helpful if you went to church once in a while."  And I thought, "Well, I guess that makes sense."

So one Sunday I put on one of the few clean jackets I had and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago.  And I heard Revened Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called "The Audacity of Hope."  And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ.  I learned that my sins could be redeemed.  I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him. ...

It was because of these newfound understnadings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. ... Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God's spirit beckoning me.  I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out.  His Works."

ANOTHER QUOTE:

"I believe in the power of prayer.  Through prayer, not only can we strengthen ourselves in adversity, but we can also find the empathy and the compassion and the will to deal with the problems that we do control.  What I pray for is the strength and the wisdom to be able to act on those things that I can control.  And that's what I think has been lacking sometimes in our government.  We've got to express those values through our government, not just through our religious institutions."

------------------------------------------------

And if you're wondering what attracted Obama to that particular church.... instead of listening to the talking heads, maybe we could go to the FULL TEXT of Jeremiah Wright's sermon, THE AUDACITY OF HOPE:

3/16/08  For The Record
The full text of Jeremiah Wright's "Audacity To Hope" sermon in 1990:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/03/for-the-record.html

[USRufnex]

quote:Originally posted by iplaw


News Flash!  The government NEVER infected black people with syphilis.  They had syphilis already.  Not that I would have expected you to read the NPR report YOU linked to.

So the jackass reverend is wrong yet again, but hey, don't let that stop you from defending him and enjoying his sermons, since he is 80% correct...

I read the link, and am sick of lawyeristic BS from you and your ilk... so technically, the government didn't "infect" black folks with syphillus but did something JUST AS BAD.... shame on you for parsing words as bad as Hillary Rodham Clinton......

"The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Nearly 400 poor black men with syphilis from Macon County, Ala., were enrolled in the study. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.

For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance.

At the start of the study, there was no proven treatment for syphilis. But even after penicillin became a standard cure for the disease in 1947, the medicine was withheld from the men. The Tuskegee scientists wanted to continue to study how the disease spreads and kills. The experiment lasted four decades, until public health workers leaked the story to the media.

By then, dozens of the men had died, and many wives and children had been infected. In 1973, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a class-action lawsuit. A $9 million settlement was divided among the study's participants. Free health care was given to the men who were still living, and to infected wives, widows and children.

But it wasn't until 1997 that the government formally apologized for the unethical study.

[Derailed]

quote:Originally posted by Chicken Little

quote:Originally posted by Derailed

People should be quite concerned about a potential president who believes in what many would call a false Christian doctrine.  

, said the pot to the kettle.  You don't see any danger in what the "Right" side of the church is saying?

This thread is about Barack Obama and the type of Christianity he belives in which is very troubling to me.  

Did you know, his church published in the "Pastor Corner" section an article from the terrorist group Hamas?

If you have read it, I can find the link.

As far as the "right" I'm not sure what or who you mean.  Do you have examples?

[FOTD]

Derailed,
Please don't post nonsense if you don't have a link or resource to validate that crappola. Don't just show up and be another meathead, please.
The Devil

Hey Ruf....I attended the Church of IPLAW and caught syphillis sitting on his pew.

[cannon_fodder]

To Godwin this thread...

I agreed with about 80% of what Hitler said, or would have if I lived in Germany at that time.

They were getting shafted by the Treaty of Versailles, their industrial might was being stymied, they had a claim to the Rhineland and were kin to Austria & parts of Czechoslovakia.  Their economy was being kept down by the war reparations.  Poland was weak and Germany could use the space (Poland had been affiliated more with "Germany" than it had been identified as Poland throughout history).  The Russians were out to get the Germans.  The German army was superior to France.  Germany could re-arm and the allies would do nothing about it.  

Most of his ideas weren't controversial.  Just standard politician stuff.  Germany should be a world leader.  The people of Germany were the most hard working and smartest in the world.  Germany was suffering from immigrants who stole jobs and cost the State money.  Germany should be able to take care of it's people better, not fleeced by a small handful of powerful people.  Or even that it needed to regain land that rightfully should be under German rule.

Insert America for Germany and the sales pitch is pretty much the same in our presidential race (but for the fact manifest destiny has been altered to foreign affairs domination).  The thing about total war and the extermination of Jews, the Roma, Gays and others.  That was no more than 20% of his rhetoric.  

So by the same measure, that volume of of rhetoric determines how fallible someone is - Hitler was a swell guy too.  

(I understand the absurdity of the argument, I'm making a point.  If you disagree strongly with what is said the quantity of innocuous language is inconsequential.)

[iplaw]

quote:I read the link, and am sick of lawyeristic BS from you and your ilk... so technically, the government didn't "infect" black folks with syphillus but did something JUST AS BAD.... shame on you for parsing words as bad as Hillary Rodham Clinton......

Yeah...forgive me for actually demanding accuracy, truthfulness and thoughtful research from you.  Shame on me.

The lie from Wright was that "we" injected AIDS into the black community, and that was supposedly a reasonable claim because "we" injected syphilis into black people before. Both claims are lies and prey upon those who are stupid enough to believe in conspiracy theories.

The Tuskegee experiments were awful, but they were not designed as a genocidal experiment to exterminate the black race, that's another nutjob conspiracy theory.

[cannon_fodder]

IP, be reasonable.  Only "us lawyer types" can make rational and fact based arguments.  Logic and  support should not be demanded of everyone.

Also, of course we the white man tried to exterminate the black man.  AIDS was out latest attempt, we're just really bad at it.  Since 1980 the black population has grown from 26mil to 34mil and increased the percent of the population that is black.  We fail.

I tried to infect Holly Berry and pre-1995 Janet Jackson with STDs, but they weren't interested.

But seriously, many of the statements of Wright were just wrong.  A person in a position of authority is irresponsible when they pass on conspiracy theories that are inaccurate or incomplete at best.   Just as it was irresponsible for white democrats to propagate lies about the "biblical inferiority of the Negro" it is equally wrong for Wright to propagate the lie that the white man is out to keep the brothers down - and then invent reasons.

Say what you will as an opinion, but given race relations in the USA there is no reason to invent facts.

[edit] Source: http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_race.html [ /edit]

[iplaw]

I forget that the bar must be lowered for the "hoi palloi"..if only I were a soccer fan, maybe I would understand.  BTW, never trust a man that plays a sport that doesn't allow competitors to touch things with their hands...sounds awful OCD to me.  Did you know you can get gonorrhea from a dirty soccer ball?  Maybe FILA is trying to kill off latinos by giving them infected soccer balls??

Lastly, don't forget that W failed us again when he blew up the levies in N'awlens.  We just can't seem to get the job done.  [xx(]

[USRufnex]

Gee.  CF compares my belief in the core of what Rev Wright says to belief in Hitler... and IPLAW just spouts off all sorts of conservative elitist bull mularkey, signifying nothing...

Govenments lie.  So do lawyers.  And economists.

[iplaw]

No you're just being dishonest.  He said nothing of the sort.

Can you really not read or are you just being obstinate?  Or are simple analogies too much for you Pele?  

I guess things are easier if you just believe anything you hear or read on the Internet.  Just don't bother to research anything and you'll be okay.

[USRufnex]

quote:Originally posted by Derailed

quote:Originally posted by Chicken Little

quote:Originally posted by Derailed

People should be quite concerned about a potential president who believes in what many would call a false Christian doctrine.  

, said the pot to the kettle.  You don't see any danger in what the "Right" side of the church is saying?

This thread is about Barack Obama and the type of Christianity he belives in which is very troubling to me.  

Did you know, his church published in the "Pastor Corner" section an article from the terrorist group Hamas?

If you have read it, I can find the link.

As far as the "right" I'm not sure what or who you mean.  Do you have examples?

My apologies in advance, it was very hard to edit the number of crazy quotes from the "right"... any questions???

So many quotes, so little time:

"All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that." -- John Hagee

"Islam in general -- those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews." -- John Hagee

"Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews." -- John Hagee

"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them." -- Pat Robertson

"A cult is any group that has a form of godliness, but does not recognize Jesus Christ as the unique son of God."....."One test of a cult is that it often does not strictly teach that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God who Himself is God manifested in the flesh."......"Christian-oriented cults include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), the Worldwide Church of God, Christian Science, Unity, Unitarianism, The Way International, Rosicrucian Society of America, Bahai, Hare Krishna, Scientology, the Unification Church, and the Jehovah's Witnesses."  --CBN pamphlet entitled "Cults," dated 1992

"Individual Christians are the only ones really---and Jewish people, those who trust God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--are the only ones that are qualified to have the reign, because hopefully, they will be governed by God and submit to Him." -- Pat Robertson

"The strategy against the American radical left should be the same as General Douglas MacArthur employed against the Japanese in the Pacific... bypass their strongholds, then surround them, isolate them bombard them, then blast the individuals out of their power bunkers with hand-to-hand combat. The battle for Iwo Jima was not pleasant, but our troops won it. The battle to regain the soul of America won't be pleasant either, but we will win it." -- Pat Robertson

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." -- Pat Robertson plays the "victim card."

"The radical left is doing everything they can to destroy the moral fiber of America. They want to do away with the family. I am absolutely persuaded one of the reasons so many lesbians are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement is because being a mother is the unique characteristic of womanhood, and these lesbians will never be mothers naturally, so they don't want anybody else to have that privilege either."  -- Pat Robertson

"The courts are merely a ruse, if you will, for humanist, atheistic educators to beat up on Christians." -- Pat Robertson

"If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it'll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn't necessarily something we ought to open our arms to." -- Pat Robertson

"Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals - the two things seem to go together."  -- Pat Robertson

"I think George Bush is going to win in a walk.  I really believe that I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election of 2004.  It's shaping up that way.  The Lord has just blessed him....  It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad.  God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him." -- Pat Robertson

"The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement... We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America." -- Pat Robertson

"I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches?  The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice... [Your children] are acting out Satanic rituals and participating in it, and don't even realize it." -- Pat Robertson

"We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." -- Ann Coulter, writing about 9/11

Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last one of which was a 9-year-old girl.  And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah either.  Jehovah's not going to turn you into a terrorist that'll try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people."
--Rev. Jerry Vines, former President of the Southern Baptist Convention, speaking at the June 2002 SBC convention

"Patrick Leahy is a 'God's people-hater.' I don't know if he hates God, but he hates God's people."
--Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family

"In your re-election, God has graciously granted America - though she doesn't deserve it - a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ."
--Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University in a letter to George W. Bush after Nov. 2nd

"That's the phoniest argument there is. (Referring to separation of church and state)  This whole nation was founded as one nation under God."
--Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), speaking at the "Road To Victory" convention

"This is not a political speech. I am in fact apolitical. But why is George W. Bush in the White House? #65533;You must recognize that we as Americans saw a miracle unfold with the election of George W. Bush. Whether you voted for him or not is irrelevant. The fact is he is there today not only to lead America, but to lead the world, and that is what he is doing. Where does he start his day? He starts his day in the Oval Office at 4:30 with a Bible in his hand."
--Lt. General William G. Boykin

"We need to tell both parties, 'It's our way or the highway.'  You and I can bring the ruling reign of the cross to America."
--Bishop Harry Jackson at Justice Sunday II

"What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time... I honestly believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians..."
--Religious News Service, 5/1/1990

"Atheistic secular humanists should be removed from office and Christians should be elected...Government and true Christianity are inseparable."
--Robert Simonds, founder & president of Citizens for Excellence in Education

"As the church watches from the sidelines, the ungodly elect atheists and homosexuals to school boards and legislatures to enact policies and laws that destroy our Christian children and discriminate against Christian families."
--Robert Simonds

"Most American children do not know that this is a Christian nation...

• ur Constitution won't work in Russia, won't work in Haiti, won't work in Iraq. It only works where the people believe in the Christ of the Bible. The United States of America."
  --Jerry Falwell on "Sunday Live with Jerry Falwell," July 23, 1995
  
  "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called on by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."
  --Randall Terry, The News Sentinel, (Ft. Wayne, IN.), 8/16/93
  
  "The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief. They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior."
  --Jerry Falwell, Listen, America!
  
  "If he's going to be the counterfeit of Christ, he has to be Jewish.  The only thing we know is he must be male and Jewish."
  --Jerry Falwell commenting on the anti-Christ, January 1999
  
  "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."
  --Jerry Falwell
  
  "We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism ... we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today ... our battle is with Satan himself."
  --Jerry Falwell
  
  "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country."
  --Jerry Falwell
  
  "The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant--baptism and holy communion--must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel."
  --Gary North - Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, p. 87
  
  "Most politically active Christians don't want equal time with homosexuals, abortionists, animal worshipping pagans, witches, radical feminists and pornographers. We want them silenced and mercifully disciplined according to the word of God."
  --Jay Rogers reviewing Ralph Reed's Politically Incorrect in "Chalcedon Report," 2/95
  
  "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
  --George Bush Sr. to a reporter August 27, 1988, while serving as vice-president and running for President
  
  "We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."
  --Gary Bauer
  
  "So let us be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will be get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."
  --Gary North, "The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right" in Christianity and Civilization: The Failure of the American Baptist Culture, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), p. 25
  
  "Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free."
  --Pat Buchanan, speech to the Christian Coalition, Sept. 1993, as reported in ADL Report, 1994
  
  "This is our land. This is our world. This is our heritage, and with God's help, we shall reclaim this nation for Jesus Christ. And no power on earth can stop us."
  --D. James Kennedy, Character & Destiny: A Nation in Search of Its Soul, 1994 (p. 85)
  
  "Anybody that doesn't believe in God isn't a good citizen....  If an atheist found a wallet on the ground, they would pick it up, plunder the money and throw the wallet back on the ground."
  --Glen Schmidt, district committee chair of the Chief Seattle Council [Boy Scouts]
  
  "We're going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America."
  --Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan addressing the anti-gay rally in Des Moines, 2-11-96
  
  "Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING, and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."
  --Jesse Helms, part of a fundraising mailer sent out by the Helms campaign
  
  One day, I hope in the next ten years, I trust that we will have more Christian day schools than there are public schools. I hope I will live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!
  --Jerry Falwell, America Can Be Saved, 1979
  
  "The public school system is damned. Let me tell you how radical I am. Christian students should be in Christian schools. If you have to sell your car, live in a smaller house, or work a night job, put your child in Christian schools. If you can't afford it homeschool."
  --Jerry Falwell, "Trends in Christian Higher Education," Regent University, 9/22/93
  
  "State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse."
  --James Dobson, Life on the Edge, p. 233
  
  "I'm a radical!  I'm a real extremist.  I don't want to impeach judges.  I want to impale them!"
  --Michael Schwartz, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn's chief of staff, at the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference
  
  "Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was the focus of evil during the cold war. I believe that the judiciary is the focus of evil in our society today."
  --Alan Keyes at the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference
  
  "I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the country in the South, and they did great wrong to civil rights and to morality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's what you're talking about."
  --James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, April 11 radio broadcast
  
  "You ask anybody that's investigated homosexual murders and without question they are the most violent...even the sex act itself is violent in homosexuals."
  --Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council
  
  "Those who practice homosexuality should swiftly be put to death by the government. God emphatically condemns the practice of exchanging proper gender characteristics among men and women. God justly calls for the death-penalty for anyone who practices homosexuality."
  --Citizens for the Ten Commandments
  
  "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."
  --Jerry Falwell
  
  "The homosexual blitzkrieg has been better planned and executed than Hitler's."
  --Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA), The New Republic, 08-01-94
  
  "The end goal of gay activism is the criminalization of Christianity."
  --Robert H. Knight, Director of Cultural Studies at FRC
  
  "The agenda of the left is to make religion strictly private and pornography public. And the people behind this agenda, more often than not, are homosexual activists."
  --Robert H. Knight, director of the Concerned Woman of America's Culture and Family Institute
  
  "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariottiers."
  --Jerry Falwell
  
  "Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family."
  --Pat Buchanan, 1977
  
  "Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in Judeo-Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie."
  --Pat Buchanan, Wall Street Journal, January 21, 1993
  
  "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS)."
  --Pat Buchanan, discussing AIDS in 1983.
  
  "With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide,"
  --Pat Buchanan, October 17, 1990.
  
  "The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian."
  --Senator Jesse Helms
  
  "[Vice President Gore] recently praised the lesbian actress who plays 'Ellen' on ABC Television...I believe he may even put children, young people, and adults in danger by his public endorsement of deviant homosexual behavior...Our elected leaders are attempting to glorify and legitimize perversion."
  --Jerry Falwell, quoted in People for the American Way, "Hostile Climate," 1998, p.9
  
  "My observation is that women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership."
  --James Dobson, Straight Talk, pp. 151-152
  
  "I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn't have to vote."
  --Kay O'Connor, (R-KS)
  
  "I listen to feminists and all these radical gals - most of them are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men - that's their problem."
  --Jerry Falwell
  
  "Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism."
  --Pat Buchanan (11/22/83)
  
  "Most of these feminists are radical, frustrated lesbians, many of them, and man-haters, and failures in their relationships with men, and who have declared war on the male gender. The Biblical condemnation of feminism has to do with its radical philosophy and goals. That's the bottom line."
  --Jerry Falwell
  
  "When you know the LORD you have no need for masturbation."
  --Brice Wellington
  
  "I would like to outlaw contraception...contraception is disgusting #65533; people using each other for pleasure."
  --Joseph Scheidler, Pro-Life Action League
  
  "Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest."
  --Jimmy Swaggart, quoted from http://i.am/not_a_crook
  
  "I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like #65533; and if you have babies, you have babies."
  --Randall Terry
  
  "When the temptation to masturbate is strong, yell "Stop!" to those thoughts as loudly as you can in your mind. Then recite a portion of the Bible or sing a hymn."
  --Mormon Guide to Self-Control
  
  "Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them."
  --Jerry Falwell, on CNN's Crossfire, May 17, 1997  
  
  "The Media is ruled by Satan. But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that. Also, will they believe what the Media says, considering that its aim is to steal, kill, and destroy?"
  --Jimmy Swaggart, The Evangelist, January 1988
  
  "When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."
  --Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, speaking of doctors who perform abortions, in an address to the U.S. Taxpayers Alliance, 8/08/95
  
  "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."
  --Ann Coulter, August 26, 2002
  
  I think [the war] is going well.  CNN doesn't always get it right, but it goes pretty well if you watch it on FOX."
  --Jerry Falwell, Guest-hosting CNN's Crossfire, December 2, 2004
  
  "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."
  --William Bennett, September 28, 2005 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America
  
  "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) this is working very well for them."
  --Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the Hurricane flood evacuees in the Houston Astrodome, September 5, 2005
  
  "I said a little prayer before I actually did the fingerprint thing, and the picture. And my prayer was basically: 'Let people see Christ through me. And let me smile.'" --Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, on being arrested and posing for his mug shot
  
  "Did you know that Pat Robertson can leg press 2,000 pounds? How does he do it? Where does Pat find the time and energy to host a daily, national TV show, head a world-wide ministry, develop visionary scholars, while traveling the globe as a statesman? One of Pat's secrets to keeping his energy high and his vitality soaring is his age-defying protein shake. Pat developed a delicious, refreshing shake, filled with energy-producing nutrients. Discover what kinds of natural ingredients make up Pat's protein shake by registering for your FREE booklet today!" --from Pat Robertson's Web site
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

[iplaw]

quote:My apologies in advance, it was very hard to edit the number of crazy quotes from the "right"... any questions???

Here are a few questions for you:

How many of these churches/pastors have the McCains routinely attended?  

Which of these pastors married him?

Which ones counseled him?

Which one prayed with him in their basement before he announced his candidacy?

Which ones were given staff positions?

[USRufnex]

Keep the witch-hunt going... poopyhead.  Although I'd never vote for Rev Wright for president or attend his church, I'd have no trouble at all supporting various members of his congregation for political office...

Sorry, but John McCain, when it comes to religion.... tries to be politically correct... and behaves alot like Hillary Clinton... he regards religion like a politician-style buffet... pander, pander, pander... flip-flop, flip-flop...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1018/p01s06-uspo.html

McCain says he is not "born again" and has not been baptized. He says he is "just a Christian," who for many years has been attending the North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona with his family. He was raised in the Episcopal Church and attended Episcopal High School, an elite boarding school in Alexandria, Va., where he was required to attend chapel every morning and church on Sunday. At the US Naval Academy, church attendance was also required.

http://www.theyoungturks.com/story/2008/3/19/12226/1730/Diary/Different-Standards-for-Black-and-White-Preachers

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-rod-parsley-spiritual-guide.html

[iplaw]

So I guess you're not going to answer my questions?

That's okay, the response wouldn't have been worth reading.

Why is "religion" only important to you when it comes to McCain?

[USRufnex]

One word:  Perspective.

Barack Obama: Putting faith out front
How the Illinois senator came to embrace religion in his life.
By Ariel Sabar | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 16, 2007 edition


http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0716/p01s01-uspo.html

CHICAGO - On a recent Sunday, the magnetic pastor who led Barack Obama to Christianity was at his usual perch on the dais here, a South Side megachurch where a plaque beneath stained-glass depictions of the African-American struggle reads "Unashamedly Black, Unapologetically Christian."

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., in a casual short-sleeve shirt, preached about Martha as a "single saint," urging unmarried women to draw self-esteem from faith rather than men. He took blacks to task for what he said was their silence on domestic violence, homophobia, and the "illegal, untested, insane war in Iraq, started by a C-student draft dodger."

And in honor of National HIV Testing Day, he alerted his flock to mouth-swab tests being offered in the church building after services. "You can get results in 20 minutes – free and confidential," he said. Then he led more than a thousand worshipers, and a 200-member choir in traditional African dress, in a hymn to the Lord.

It was at Trinity United Church of Christ here, in the late 1980s, that Senator Obama says he found religion. Raised in a secular household, with ancestral roots running from Islam to Baptist to atheist, Obama had grown up a skeptic. But Mr. Wright's blend of scripture and social action resonated with Obama, then a young community organizer in black neighborhoods ravaged by steel-mill closings.

And when Wright preached one Sunday about the sustaining power of hope in the face of poverty and despair, Obama says he found himself in tears.

"The questions I had did not magically disappear," Obama wrote in his recent book, titled "The Audacity of Hope" after Wright's turn of phrase, of the day four years later when he made a formal commitment of Christian faith. "But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."

Attention to 'least of these'

More than the other Democratic candidates for president, Obama has made faith a centerpiece of his campaign.

He has warned the left against ceding the mantle of religion to the evangelical right. He speaks of the church as an abiding force in American public life, from the Boston Tea Party through the abolitionist and civil rights movements. He suffuses his speeches with biblical allusions – "I am my brother's keeper" is a favorite phrase. And he has cast his generation of black leaders as modern-day Joshuas, after Moses' successor, who led the Israelites to the Promised Land.

Many of Obama's political views are "an outgrowth of his reading of some of the seminal parts of the Bible about doing unto the 'least of these' just as we would have done unto Christ," says Joshua DuBois, the campaign's director of religious affairs, paraphrasing verses in the book of Matthew. "He takes very seriously the numerous passages in the Bible that talk not only about poverty, but of people of faith taking God's words and extending them beyond the four walls of the church."

But as Obama promotes faith as a means of uniting a diverse America around a shared set of values, he has at times found himself in a political minefield. To the left are liberals uneasy with religious intrusions into politics; to the right, conservatives who have questioned his Christianity and denounced his ties to Wright's Afrocentric church.

Secular childhood

Obama's childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia was a swirl of faiths and cultures. His father, a black Kenyan economist, was raised Muslim but was an atheist by the time Obama was born. His mother, a white Kansan, had Baptist and Methodist roots but viewed organized religion with a gimlet eye, wary of how often it cloaked intolerance.

"Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example," Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, recalled in a phone interview. "But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways."

In their house, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad-Gita shared shelf space with books on mythology. His mother viewed them all through the eyes of the anthropologist she was. Religion for her was "just one of the many ways – and not necessarily the best way – that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives," Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope," published in 2006.

After his mother was remarried, to an Indonesian Muslim, and the family moved to Indonesia, Obama went first to a Catholic academy and then a public Muslim school open to students of all beliefs.

But he was largely indifferent toward religion until he moved to Chicago in 1985 for a job organizing impoverished South Side residents in campaigns for better jobs, schools, and housing. As the recent college graduate went from church to church to enlist clergy in his causes, he heard an oft-repeated refrain: What church do you belong to?

"He really came here with a very strong passion about how can we change things, and he understood the churches as being a vehicle for doing that," recalls the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of the Saint Sabina Church, a Catholic church on the South Side, who has known Obama since his early days in Chicago. But he also "realized that with some churches there would be a credibility issue if he were organizing churches but didn't have a home church."

'Against "middleclassness" '

Trinity United Church of Christ occupies a tan brick building on West 95th Street across railroad tracks from a public housing project. Since becoming pastor in 1972, Wright grew its membership from a few dozen to more than 8,500. He wore African dashikis, planted a "Free South Africa" sign on the church lawn, and demanded tolerance of gays and lesbians, a maverick stance for a black church.

The church sprouted more than 70 ministries, from AIDS counseling and African cultural exchange to a "manhood" program providing father figures to children of single mothers. Oprah Winfrey and the singer Mavis Staples have worshiped there, as have people on welfare.

While other black megachurch leaders like Creflo Dollar and T.D. Jakes were preaching prosperity gospel, the idea that God rewards the faithful with financial success, Wright asked worshipers to endorse a "Black Value System." One of its precepts is a disavowal of "middleclassness," a selfish pursuit of money and status without giving back to the larger black community.

Wright also preached black liberation theology, an outgrowth of the civil rights era that sees the Bible, particularly the exodus from Egyptian slavery, as a parable of the struggle for black freedom.

However incongruously, Trinity became the largest congregation in The United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination known for its liberal politics and steepled churches in small New England towns. The UCC, or Congregational church, as it is also called, was the first mainline Protestant church to ordain an African-American (1785), a woman (1853), and an openly gay man (1972), and the first major Christian denomination to endorse same-sex marriage (2005).

Wright impressed Obama, and by 1988 the younger man found himself in the pews, listening to parishioners clap and cry out as Wright spoke of "the audacity of hope" in times of suffering, Obama writes in his bestselling 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father." In Wright's words that day, Obama glimpsed the deeper meaning he had been searching for in his work with the South Side's poor, who often had little to go on but faith.

"In that single note – hope! – I heard something else," Obama wrote. "At the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story."

Four years later, after returning to Chicago from Harvard Law School, Obama joined Trinity and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith. Wright later married Obama and his wife, Michelle, and blessed the births of their two children.

By his own admission, Obama's conversion was "a choice and not an epiphany." It owed as much to spiritual yearning as to a recognition of the power of the black church to change lives and society.

"What moved me was the role all the congregations I worked with played in the life of the people I was working with," Obama said in an e-mail to the Monitor. "What touched me was how faith bolstered them against heartache and disappointment and kept them going."

Fancy footwork

After law school, Obama returned to Chicago to register low-income voters for the 1992 presidential election. He worked as a civil rights lawyer and as a lecturer at University of Chicago Law School before his election to the Illinois state Senate in 1996.

From the moment he took the national stage, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama, then running for US Senate, made no secret of his spiritual bent. "We worship an awesome God in the blue states," he said in a keynote address credited with launching his stardom.

But for a liberal Democrat and former constitutional law instructor, the plea for a broader public role for religion has at times required some fancy footwork.

He has called for both "a politics of conscience" based on ecumenical religious values and a clear line between church and state. He has both invoked God in his denunciations of the Iraq war and criticized President Bush for using religious terms like "good" and "evil" to justify it.

"The danger of using good versus evil in the context of war is it may lead us to be not as critical as we should be about our own actions," he said at a candidates' forum on religion last month, calling the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the treatment of suspected terrorists at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp "unjust."

Obama and his advisers have said that his faith has motivated legislation meant to benefit the poor, the uninsured, and minorities. In the Illinois state Senate, Father Pfleger recalls, Obama sponsored measures to clamp down on high-interest "payday loans" in poor neighborhoods and to require Illinois police agencies to record the race of motorists they stop as part of a state effort to monitor racial profiling. He also pressed for a bill requiring police to videotape interrogations of murder suspects, as a safeguard against coerced confessions.

At a speech last month at the annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference in Virginia, he offered his most detailed list to date of programs he said should spring from "our faith, the Word, and His will." They range from a new service corps for disadvantaged youths and a program to have nurses teach low-income mothers good parenting to more jobs programs for ex-convicts and more venture capital for minority-owned businesses.

Elsewhere, he has preached a version of his church's critique of black "middleclassness." He told a crowd in Selma, Ala., in March that his generation of blacks should strive for more than just "some of that Oprah money."

"Materialism alone will not fulfill the possibilities of your existence," he said. "You have to fill it with the golden rule. You've got to fill it with thinking about others."

Last year, he and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, sponsored a successful bill to let people in bankruptcy continue to donate money to their places of worship.

Obama's advisers say his open faith and personal narrative are political assets as churchgoers grow increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Bush. "The ultimate swing voters right now are moderate Catholic voters and moderate evangelical voters," says Shaun Casey, professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington and an Obama campaign adviser. "There are more opportunities for Democrats with them than there have been in about 20 years."

In addition to Mr. DuBois, the campaign has faith-outreach workers on staff in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. It holds conference calls every week with religious leaders in the early primary states. And it has staged a half dozen "faith forums" in New Hampshire, where voters, local clergy, and campaign staff trade views on the proper role of faith in public life.

A Time magazine poll released Thursday found that more voters see Obama as a strongly religious person than they do every major presidential hopeful but Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts whose Mormonism has drawn extensive news coverage.

But whether that public perception translates into votes, even among the 1.2 million members of Obama's own denomination, has yet to be seen.

At the annual gathering for Iowa clergy of the United Church of Christ, which Obama addressed last month, the finance chair of a church outside Des Moines said he had thought Obama was Muslim.

Another church leader, pastor Al Hohl of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Sioux City, Iowa, said he hadn't heard such candid talk of faith from a liberal since his days as a seminary student in the 1960s. He found it refreshing, but plans to vote for Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor and Democratic presidential candidate, whom he views as more politically experienced.

But others there said Obama gave voice to deeply held yet seldom expressed convictions about a progressive role for organized religion. "It's time we stand up to the conservatives," said Barbara Brandt, a parish administrator at a UCC church in Reinbeck, Iowa. "We're as Christian as they are."

Pastor disinvited

Obama's mingling of faith and politics has drawn fire from some on both the left and the right.

"A war of Bible-quoting isn't supposed to be going on during a campaign season," says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "Proof-testing the Bible to see if God is a liberal or a conservative or a uniter or a divider is not relevant."

Some evangelical leaders have questioned how Obama can square his Christianity with support for abortion rights and same-sex civil unions. And conservatives have pummeled Wright for his Afrocentric beliefs, his equation of Zionism with racism, and his remarks on the 9/11 attacks. ("In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01," Wright wrote in 2005 in a church- affiliated magazine. "White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.")

The night before he announced his candidacy for president in February, Obama withdrew an invitation to Wright to give the public invocation, a decision that did not sit well with some other Chicago pastors. Pfleger said Obama told him that he didn't want criticism of Wright to detract from the big day. "I told him I thought it was the wrong decision," Pfleger said in an interview.

Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the campaign, said "the change was made in order to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself."

Wright remains Obama's pastor and friend, she said, but they do not see eye to eye on every issue. Obama, she said, "strongly disagrees with any portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that advocates divestment from Israel or expresses anything less than strong support for Israel's security."

As for the church's Black Value System, she said, Obama "believes its basic tenets of commitment to God, to community, to self-discipline and self-reliance continue to have applicability not only to the African-American community but to all people."

Though Obama was an early and fervent critic of the war in Iraq, he has steered clear of his pastor's sometimes inflammatory rhetoric. At a candidates' forum on faith last month, Obama framed his opposition in more nuanced terms.

"I always remember Abraham Lincoln when, during the Civil War, he said, 'We shouldn't be asking whose side God is on, but whether we're on His side,' " he said. "And I think that's the question that all of us have to ask ourselves.... Are we advancing the causes of justice and freedom? Are we our brother's keeper, our sister's keeper? And that's how I measure whether what we're doing is right."

Wright declined in an e-mail interview to answer questions about some of his contentious remarks. "I have given up trying to respond to conservatives who have done no study of liberation theology, black theology, or African-American history," he wrote.

Obama's message of faith and his ties to a controversial pastor have not been without pitfalls, analysts say.

But "the positives outweigh the negatives," says Professor Dwight Hopkins of the University of Chicago Divinity School, who is a member of Trinity but not affiliated with the Obama campaign. "I think he is one of the biggest threats to the Republican Party and their campaign, because he has seized the religious discursive ground. No Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter has been able to do that."