The nightmare pastors

Pub date April 29, 2008
WriterTim Redmond
SectionPolitics Blog

I’m sorry to see Barack Obama’s campaign in so much trouble over the latest comments of Rev. Wright, but you have to admit: This is a great argument for the separation of church and state.

Religious figures say all kinds of strange things — and frankly, while I (obviously) don’t agree with Wright that AIDS is a government plot, it’s pretty well established that the Reagan administration’s failure to respond to the epidemic in the crucial early years was, if not a government plot to kill anyone, certainly a government plot not to save the lives of gay men.

But here’s the question: Why so much media attention on Obama’s religious albatross — and so little on John McCain’s? McCain, lest we forget, is pals with Paston John Hagee, who believes, among other things, that the Catholic Church is a “great whore,” that “all Muslims have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews,” that God wants us to bomb Iran — and that God damns the United States because of gays, Catholics and Muslims.

Me, I’d rather have a guy who rails against the U.S. for racism and imperialism than a guy who says God hates gays. But then, I don’t go to church.