Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Barack "Hussein" Obama

In a truck stop in the Texas Panhandle, Fox News was on (shocking!). On the crawl it said something like, "Why is Sarah Palin winning over evangelicals?"

I walked by and asked the question allowed as I read it. A gentleman took the the bait and said, "'Cause she's hot!"

I asked, in all seriousness, "It's not a problem that she has a 17-year-old unwed pregnant daughter?"

Now, I was raised in a Protestant religious family who taught me that one qualification for elected office is moral character and judgment. A classic example of this is, although my parents met while campaigning for John F. Kennedy, my father said he could never vote for Ted Kennedy for elected office, because of the incident at Chappaquiddick (sp?). He felt this incident demonstrated a lack of moral character that is necessary for elected office. (The fact that JFK himself might have been as bad never came up, and since my father has been dead for almost 20 years, I'll never really know if he knew about JFK's own shortcomings or if he felt they were as bad as Teddy's).

So one window into moral character, in my opinion, is the ability to keep your teenage daughter from getting pregnant. I feel that this is one of a parent's top priority: don't let your daughter get pregnant before she is ready, even if she thinks she is.

And if a person can't accomplish this, then that doesn't make them a bad person. But it does show that that person can't juggle all of the responsibilities he/she has, now does it? And a President must be able to effectively juggle responsibilities.

I'm not saying this is an automatic disqualification for me, but it's a very, very, serious problem. Some people may think I set the bar too high, but, how and under what circumstances a girl gets pregnant can determine the course of her entire life. It's a very, very, serious matter.

So my question to the gentleman was very serious. As far as I can tell, the evangelical "morality" is all about furthering agendas but that somehow the personal morality of the candidate who makes decisions on our behalf is not an issue.

His answer: "At least she's not a Muslim."

I had finally met one. Met a person who was willing to admit he thought Barack Obama was a Muslim. At first I thought he was kidding, but he was dead serious. College educated with sources and everything. Redneck colleges, sure, but he was confident Hillary had said he was a Muslim. (He was sure I hadn't attended college because I didn't know these things.)

Hillary has never said Barack's a Muslim, of course.

It's a real shame this country has not come far enough to elect a Muslim as President. It's unclear the country could have elected a Mormon this time around as well.

And it's unclear to me that it's ready to elect anyone of dark skin, but at least it might take making everyone believe he's a Muslim to make it happen. One step at a time, I suppose.

The gentleman said that of course he wasn't going to vote for Obama anyway because, "he's the anti-Christ."

Now that's just silly. Doesn't he know the anti-Christ is supposed to be born in Europe?

Anyway, we can take this one solace: evangelical Christians are on board with electing a woman President. (well, VP, but the same qualifications to each apply because all the VP is is the person who would become President without another election).

Seriously, if you think about it, it's a big accomplishment.

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