Saturday, July 05, 2008

A Candid Look at the Presidential Election and the Christian Right.

My friend Wayne Besen (who I got to know back in 2003 in our joint effort to expose national ex-gay and former Jerry Fallwell puppet, Michael Johnston as a total fraud-I am featured in a video on Wayne's Truth Wins Out website) has a column that looks at the dynamics of the 2008 presidential election and the role the Christianists of the far right will potentially play in the contest. I think Wayne's analysis is on point and it illustrates the way in which John McCain is selling his soul in order to pander to the intolerant, hate merchant demagogues. Candidly, I lose more respect for McCain who I met back in 2000 with every passing day and find it increasingly difficult to understand how some of my LGBT friends can say that they paln to vote for him. I hope that as McCain continues his shameless pandering more moderates and independents will abandon him. On a different note, as I indicated in a prior post, I believe that Obama's faith-based initiative proposal is a very bad idea as believe Wayne's assessment is accurate on that score. Here are some highlights from Wayne's column:
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For a brief moment, it looked as if the GLBT community might escape gratuitous gay baiting in the 2008 presidential campaign. Unlike the past few election cycles where the strategy was to secure the base at all costs, McCain and Obama were vigorously vying for moderate and Independent swing voters.
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Unfortunately, McCain made a strategic decision last week that he could not win without securing the party’s right wing base. My guess is that the campaign’s internal polling suggested that Obama – aided by his bloated bank account - was winning too many Independents, so McCain had no choice but to make peace with social conservatives. . . . Leaders from the Religious Right were reinforcing this reality by making it clear that if McCain did not grovel, they wouldn’t help get out the vote.
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With his divisive new strategy in place, McCain met with prominent social conservatives in Ohio and all but licked their boots. At the meeting, he announced his support for an initiative in California to ban same-sex marriage. In his speech he said that Californians ought to "recognize marriage as a unique institution between a man and a woman, just as we did in my home state of Arizona. I do not believe judges should be making these decisions." (Despite McCain’s anti-gay campaigning, the Arizona amendment failed)
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Obama, for his part, is going after religious voters who are dissatisfied with McCain. He met last month with Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, and endorsed a sweeping faith based initiative. In my view, the faith-based initiative is a nightmare in practice, if not principle. These programs are useless, a waste of taxpayer money and are nothing more than pork barrel prayer and thinly disguised preacher payoffs. The Obama campaign should lose voters over this stunt, but it won’t, as McCain’s flirtation with the fringe no longer leaves him as a viable option.
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This past week will be remembered for McCain abandoning his efforts to win GLBT votes, but it will also mark the moment the GLBT community lost much of its leverage over the Obama campaign. The only way Obama could now lose significant GLBT support is by selecting an anti-gay Vice Presidential candidate, such as Sam Nunn. A presidential race with the religious right on the sidelines was fun while it lasted, but too good to be true. Now, comes the ugly phase of the campaign, where the GOP lies about our lives and our families become fodder to rile up conservatives in an effort to save John McCain’s sluggish campaign.

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