"Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured--perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this." John Kennedy, September 12, 1960, address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association
My first reaction to this report was to just write the headline off as just another embarrassing, self-serving display of an unhinged republican. It's not as if there isn't already an entire lexicon of wackiness and outright bullshit from the Wasilla Whiner and her wacky band of republican demagogues.
When I saw that she chose Kennedy's defense of his Catholicism to unleash her own special brand of divisive reasoning on, my reaction was amazement at her willingness to upend transformative American history to advantage her appeal with her support base of birthers and bigots.
Her latest anti-intellect diatribe is found in a newly leaked excerpt from her new 'book'. From the AP: (
http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/palin-criticizes-famed-kennedy-speech-1060928.html)
Palin addresses at length Kennedy's noted speech on religion during the 1960 campaign — a speech many saw as crucial to counter sentiment that his faith would hold undue sway over him if he became the nation's first Catholic president.
"I am not the Catholic candidate for president," Kennedy said. "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic."
Palin writes that Kennedy "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are."
Never mind that John Kennedy only raised the issue of his religion defending himself against the same kind of religious bigotry and political opportunism that Palin practiced during her vice-presidential bid where she repeatedly bashed Barack Obama for the views of his pastor; equating his mere attendance at his Baptist church and his ecumenical relationship with his preacher with some of the more controversial statements he had made.
Indeed, Palin includes her demagoguery against the Obama's past association with their church in her book:
Palin returns to the subject of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's controversial former pastor . . ."
"I guess this shouldn't surprise us, since both of them spent almost two decades in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church listening to his rants against America and white people," Palin writes.
Despite the McCain/Palin campaign push to smear Barack Obama for his 'associations' with William Ayers and others, there had been a noticeable ban on criticisms from John McCain of Rev.Wright. Part of that reluctance to highlight Obama's pastor certainly had to do with his own problem with demagogic spiritual leaders.
McCain reversed his criticisms in his 2000 run for president of Falwell and Robertson as 'agents of intolerance', just in time to run for the office again. McCain refused to renounce the support he solicited in this campaign from Rev. John Hagee, a demagogue who has called the Catholic church 'The Great Whore' -- even after Hagee said Katrina struck New Orleans because of a gay rally there.
I think most of their campaign's reluctance to bring up Wright, though, had to do with Sarah Palin's church's 'witch hunter' who she credited for praying her into the governorship and has been videotaped praying directly behind Palin, as she bowed her head, for Jesus to eradicate witchcraft and elevate her political career.
"In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, every form of witchcraft is what you rebuke. In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, father make away now," her Pastor Muthee says in the video.
"Come on, talk to God about this woman. We declare, save her from Satan," Pastor Muthee continued. "Make her way, my God. Bring finances her way even for the campaign in the name of Jesus. Use her to turn this nation the other way around."
It was no accident that McCain/Palin resorted to a witch-hunting campaign against Barack Obama. Palin evidently persuaded McCain that the source of his problems wasn't the lying, hypocritical campaign he was running. Palin must have sold McCain on the Pastor Muthee doctrine.
Pastor Muthee ran a woman out of town after he convinced residents that the source and cause of the crime and poverty rampant in their community was a woman he picked out at random to scapegoat. “We prayed, we fasted, the Lord showed us a spirit of witchcraft resting over the place,” Pastor Muthee said.
McCain and Palin evidently decided that the problems they were promising to take responsibility for were beyond their earthly power to solve. So, they took their supporters on an old-fashioned witchhunt, stirring up 'suspicions' about their rival's character; casting aspersion on his 'associations'; and casting him as the pernicious source of all of that ails the nation. Their witchhunt was oblivious to their own messianic zeal as they stirred the rabble to reject the infidels.
Evidently, that's the type of campaign Palin intends to run in her self-absorbed tilt toward her own presidential run. A witchhunt. That's diametrically opposite what John Kennedy managed in his defense what was seen at the time as public sentiment and suspicion against a Catholic in the WH. Kennedy was a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and no Catholic had yet been elected to the presidency. One of the fears spread during the campaign was that a President Kennedy would somehow take his orders from the Vatican.
In an interesting view of the controversy, Kenneth C. Davis writes in his book, 'Don't Know Much About History', of Martin Luther King Sr.'s reversal of his earlier vow of refusal to 'vote for a Catholic': (
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZWXV2OsfiDIC&pg=PA442&lpg=PA442&dq=Nixon+debate+Kennedy+catholic&source=bl&ots=YR9kfSySdO&sig=Rb6H0DMuMNgGd_jIRRsSe6fG4S0&hl=en&ei=9UbnTIf_F4XGlQfrsMGtDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=31&ved=0CNoBEOgBMB4#v=onepage&q=Nixon%20debate%20Kennedy%20catholic&f=false)
Nixon's running mate Henry Cabot Lodge promised there would be a Negro in the Nixon cabinet. Nixon had to disavow that pledge, and whatever white votes he won cost him black support. A second boost among black voters came when Martin Luther King was arrested during the final debate. Kennedy called King's wife, Coretta, to express his concern, and Robert Kennedy helped secure King's release on bail. Nixon decided to stay out of the case. King's father, who had previously stated he wouldn't vote for a Catholic, announced a shift to Kennedy. "I've got a suitcase of votes," said Martin Luther King Sr., "and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap."
It shouldn't be forgotten that President Obama still has an historic amount of support from the black community which also takes a dim view of Palin's previous attacks on the Obama's black pastor and their attendance of their Baptist church. It's notable that the Obama campaign never took the opportunity to reciprocate the attacks by turning on Palin's own controversial pastor and church.
Moreover, in the aftermath of the public exposure of Rev. Wright's controversial statements, candidate Obama took advantage of the opportunity to practice some racial-healing and transformed the hateful opportunism of the right-wing-inspired campaign against his church into a 'teachable moment'.
Senator Barack Obama delivered a speech entitled "A More Perfect Union" in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008. In it, he laid out a condemnation of Wright's controversial statements, outlined his own views on race relations in America, and sought to put it all in the perspective of the political campaign: (
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?_r=2&bl=&ei=5087&en=159a0f4776d53b1c&ex=1205985600&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print)
". . .we have a choice in this country," Mr. Obama said, "We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words . . .
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”
That's right, Mrs. Palin. We reject the politics of division by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and the rest of the litany of division the republican party has sown in recent decades. This President you're intent on challenging for the highest office in the land rejects your brand of politics. At this political moment, we
will come together and say, not this time.
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