Eating Obama Waffles or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Racist

Just when you thought it was safe to wade back into the water, along comes Obama Waffles, brainfart of Matt Whitlock and Bob DeMoss, two Right Wing Christian Romance book writers who have worked for Focus on the Family(FOF).








Ahhh, Southern Right Wing Born Agains...imagine my surprise.



You know, in the good old days, bigots would wear white sheets or brown shirts, burn crosses in your yard or paint swastikas on your fence and shout racial epithets. There was no gray area. They made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that they hated you, you weren't welcome, and they would simply gerrymander your district and sick police dogs on you rather than hide behind the guise of "political satire" like some Larry Craigesque denial that everyone sees through except them.

Punks.




See, if you're really going to be "brave" enough to put yourself out there, don't try and hide it. "Say it loud: I'm bigoted and I'm proud!" Let the world know that you still live in an outmoded idea that White people are better than everyone else and it's okay to demean and belittle race and culture as long as you put quotes around it. You're funny and hip. We have Eminem now so it's alright to use the N-word. Of course when it turns out that you actually work for Fox, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

I'll say it again. Punks.

Not because they have a bigoted perspective, that's okay. Racist, sexist, xenophobic people have everyright to exist in the Republican Party and anywhere else. It's the hypocrisy that kills me. The idea that you can talk about terrorists as the enemy when you have actual religious extremists like Whitlock and DeMoss (with Rupert Murdoch) funneling their particular brand of "antebellum wisdom" couched as frat boy "humor" when in actuality it is the unique brand of fundamentalist ideaology that allows its members to participate in bigotry and prejudice while still claiming its Jesus' way...maybe this is why I'm a retired Catholic.

Where's George Carlin when you really need him?????

You know, it's been said ad nauseum: Hate is not a family value. But clearly for right wing idealogues, it is, because this kind of thing keeps rising up. My question is why?

Here at the Values Voter's Summit which was sponsored by FRCAction, the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council and featured such confirmed speakers as Phyllis Schlafly, Lou Dobbs and of course, hometown favorite, Michelle Bachman (who the hell was scraping the barrel to put Stephen Baldwin on the agenda), it only took THREE days to realize that selling the breakfast of racist champions might not be a very "value driven" prospect...talk about things that make you go hmmm....

Going back the entrepreneur's "Roots" (pun intended), you look at FOF's mission statement:

To cooperate with the Holy Spirit in sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible by nurturing and defending the God-ordained institution of the family and promoting biblical truths worldwide.

Leaving aside for a minute the typical argument of FOF regarding what constitutes a family, help me understand where debasing people, hate speech and breeding intolerance is in that mission? Is it just a different definition of "Holy Spirit" or is there a Gospel that I'm not familiar with (After John and Paul did someone run across Letters from Ringo to the Ephesians and forget to mention it to the rest of us?).

James D., help a brother out here. You consider yourself a religious man, you promote your organization as one who's primary function is to spread the Gospel of Jesus, where does bigotry come in? Which passage in the Bible, which lesson in Proverbs or Psalms speaks to hate speech? How is it spreading the Gospel to be derisive? I'm pretty sure this would fall under the guise of "bearing false witness" in some respect, or given the way that Whitlock and DeMoss are posturing, I'm sure that Pride, deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins is in there somewhere...

Even better though is the FRC which was founded in 1983 as an organization dedicated to the promotion of marriage and family and the sanctity of human life in national policy...When did marriage end up on the clearance rack? You have an organization dedicated to the promotion of marriage and family like it's on the back shelf and you need to make sure that they're "priced to move" before they go bad...I'm pretty sure they don't need the extra PR. Of course that whole "sanctity of human life" thing takes a dive when it comes to the death penalty. Sure, in their position statement regarding life, it says that the FRC "recognizes and respects the inherent dignity of every human life from conception (whether by natural or artificial means) until death. FRC desires to help build a culture of life, holding that all human life is a gift to be treasured. The life of every human being is an intrinsic good, not something whose value is conditional upon its usefulness to others or to the state....

...which would kind of seem to conflict with the position statement of theirs on capital punishment which says:

The [FRC], mindful of the strongly held and often conflicting views of many of our constituents on this important question, has never taken a definitive position for or against capital punishment.

FRC's Board of Directors and staff wholly recognize and independently grapple with the central question pertaining to the death penalty: Can capital punishment be morally justified? Needless to say, a consensus within FRC has never been reached regarding the moral permissibility of capital punishment.

Hypocrisy, thy name is FRC.

But back to the main points: Bigotry and Hypocrisy. Now I know I'm usually a little more upbeat and mirthful, but we've come to a point where we as nation must learn how to say enough is enough. We have gorged ourselves on reality tv and sanctimonious drivel with pundits who tell us it's okay to be bigoted, that it's just being an American...the original Maverick (well if you look at it, a gambling, fast talking cowboy who was always reluctant to put himself into harms way) and not that we have to better than that.

We have to be better than that.

We have to stand for something more than winning at all costs and the Cheney-style ends justify the means.

We have to be above petty derision and stand for things like honor, integrity and honesty.

Regardless of who you support or where you fall in the political spectrum, if your platform is strong, if your ideas are right and have merit, then you shouldn't need to sink to cheap parlor tricks and bigoted humor and scare tactics in order to win an election. But most of all, we cannot stand idly by while others do this. We cannot allow the hypocritical and disingenous idealogues to march across our airwaves and hearts unchallenged (yeah I'm talking about you Scarborough, Limbaugh and Hannity...oh and Colmes, grow a pair!). We are in a battle for the soul of not just our country, but for our very principles, spirit and standing in the world. For if we lay down and die, if we go gentle into that good night, all of what we are and what we've fought for will have been for naught.

We're Americans and it's time we started acting like it.