US bishops warn Obama on abortions

Timothy Lavin 22 November 2008

The US bishops last week fired their first shot across the bows of the incoming Obama administration, warning that "the unity desired by President-elect Obama and all Americans at this moment of crisis" would be impossible to achieve, if the administration's policies increase abortions.

In a statement on behalf of all US bishops at the end of their gathering in Baltimore, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, the bishops' conference president, said the Church looked forward to working with Mr Obama on issues including immigration reform, health care and economic justice, but said that a proposed bill,  the Freedom of Choice Act (Foca), which Mr Obama has expressed support for, was "an evil law that would further divide our country".

If the act was brought forward in the form  it was introduced in the last Congress, they said, it would outlaw any kind of interference with abortion on demand: "It would deprive the American people in all 50 states of the freedom they now have to enact modest restraints and regulations on the abortion industry." more

Realistic Hope and Hopeful Realism: Martin Marty on Niebuhr's influence on Barack Obama

Martin Marty

Award-winning author and professor emeritus, University of Chicago

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history, chiefly in the Divinity School, for 35 years, and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. For a decade prior to entering academia, the “On Faith” panelist served parishes in the west and northwest suburbs of Chicago as an ordained Lutheran pastor. Marty is the author of more than 50 booksincluding Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (1970), for which he won the National Book Award. His additional honors include the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the University of Chicago Alumni Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal of the Association of Theological Schools, and the Order of Lincoln Medallion (Illinois’ top honor). Marty has served as president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He also has served on two U.S. Presidential Commissions and was director of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago. He is Senior Regent of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Close.

Martin Marty

Award-winning author and professor emeritus, University of Chicago

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history, chiefly in the Divinity School, for 35 years, and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. more »

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Realistic Hope and Hopeful Realism

The election of Barack Obama says -- about America and to the world -- that it is open to "realistic hope" and "hopeful realism." Those two two-word phrases paraphrase themes from the mid-century theological great, Reinhold Niebuhr. I mention him because President-Elect Obama is influenced by him and quotes him (as did President Jimmy Carter, the other theologically literate president of our time). Niebuhr is a formidable and sometimes formidably difficult thinker, and some cynics suggest that when politicians quote him, they are just posing Columnist David Brooks checked up and found that Senator Obama could discourse intelligently and expansively about Niebuhr. It is clear to those who know Niebuhr and who read and observe Obama, that he has internalized some Niebuhrian motifs.

I am singling out the combinations of "hope" and "realism" because the nation and the world needs a dose of hope, and hope has been a main theme of Obama the author, who used the word in a book title, and who accurately sensed the need and a hunger for hope. This is as true of a demoralized nation as it is of much of "the world" as it looks on forlornly to a fornlorn America Those of us who have been visited with e-mails from around the world since Tuesday report to each other how consistently correspondents testify to and exemplify a quickening of hope once again.

If "hope" is so manifest also now, after the election, why burden it with the word "realistic?" Or, if you start out with the "realism" that candidate Obama always displayed and will do more so as he begins to come to terms with the presidency in a time whose problems do not need enumerating, though they do get listed by virtually all commenators? Answer: realism can be so realistic that it can breed cynicism, or, as one wag put it recentlry, we observe that "the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out."

"Realistic hope" is a caution against utopianism, naive idealism, the claiming of bragging rights, or politically "not knowing to come in out of the rain." As author, community organizer, law school professor, state and U.S. senator, and presidential primary candidate, Senator Obama tirelessly invoked and promoted hope--and always coupled his invocation and promotion with cautions We hear it all the time: righting wrongs and charting new courses in a dangerous world and with a destroyed economy allows no chance to relax and sit back.

Niebuhr liked to quote Psalm 2:4, where the Psalmist witnesses to a God who sits in the heavens and laughs, and holds the pretentious and conniving powerful "in derision." Yet he kept reminding us that the same God held people responsible and did not dishonor human aspiration.

So: the election of the first African-American president, a choice that went beyond the wildest hopes of most of adult America is only a part of the "hope" package the nation will be opening in the months ahead. And the election of THIS African-American to the presidency means a turning to a leader who may be young, but wasn't "born yesterday." His reading of Niebuhr and his experience and observation of life as it is lived in complex times will show up in his "realistic" activity. Or am I too hopefully naive even to hope that this will be the case? Realistically: no.

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Posted by Martin Marty on November 5, 2008 4:38 PM  

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Obama Dilemma

That at Obama Speech
from Pickled Politics by Sid

Following worldwide dismay from Wednesday’s speech to AIPAC, Obama has now changed his tune:

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama amended his support for Israel’s stance on Jerusalem on Thursday, saying Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the future of the holy city.

Palestinian leaders reacted with anger and dismay on Wednesday to Obama saying Jerusalem should be Israel’s undivided capital.

“Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations,” Obama told CNN when asked whether Palestinians had no future claim to the city.

Asked if he opposed any division of Jerusalem, Obama said: “As a practical matter, it would be very difficult to execute. And I think that it is smart for us to — to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city.”

Adam LeBor has written a balanced and sensible article on CIF on why Barack Obama was wrong to make the outrageous promise, while speaking to AIPAC, that Jerusalem will remain the ‘undivided capital’ of Israel. Seems strange since the US and UK embassies are in Tel Aviv! You can read more here.

Meanwhile, back at Harry’s Place, Adam clarifies further:

Personally I find AIPAC a rather creepy organisation. I remember ten years ago when I was making some radio programmes for the BBC on Israel at 50 trying to interview one of their officials. Trying to get any information out of her about how AIPAC worked reminded me of interviewing suspicious ex-(not really)-Communists in eastern Europe.

I agree with this writer:

AIPAC has become more militant than the Israeli government. Its messages reflect more the oppositionist Likud doctrine than the moderate stance of Prime Minister Olmert. Moreover, whereas the American Jewish community is known for its liberal, progressive pro-Democrat party heritage - some 80 percent of the Jewish voters traditionally cast their votes for the Democrats - AIPAC is geared to an extreme-right-wing agenda, often more in line with the Jewish neo-cons than with the majority of American Jews.

Far better, he opines, to support the new, pro-peace Israel lobbying group, J-street.

The author? David Kimche, former Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and veteran Mossad agent.

Personally I thought it was a good speech. But it’s always better to have someone, preferably with a progressive outlook, with more detailed knowledge of the background to unravel the intricacies. It’s easy to fall for Obama’s delivery over the content. I stand corrected. And hopefully, so is Obama.

Obama rejects pastor

Obama rejects pastor in latest Church flap



WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama on Friday faced new questions over his Chicago church, after video emerged of a pastor mocking his rival Hillary Clinton with racially tinged rhetoric.


Obama rejected the remarks by Father Michael Pfleger, made in the same pulpit at Trinity United Church of Christ as inflammatory sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which pitched the campaign into turmoil earlier this year.

In a guest appearance at the church Sunday, Pfleger mocked Clinton for appearing to cry days before the New Hampshire primary in January, saying she was on the verge of tears because "there is a black man stealing my show."

"She always thought, 'This is mine. I'm Bill's wife, I'm white and this is mine,' Pfleger said in the dramatic sermon, which now has 100,000 hits on YouTube.

"And then out of nowhere came him, Barack Obama. And she said: 'Damn, where did you come from? I'm white, I'm entitled, there's a black man stealing my show!'"

"She wasn't the only one crying, there was a whole lot of white people crying," said Pfleger, a white Catholic priest.

Obama, seeking to quell the controversy that could provide ammunition to Republican critics, quickly rejected Pfleger's rhetoric in a statement Thursday night.

"As I have traveled this country, I've been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that unites us," he said.

"That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn't reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause."

It was unclear how deeply the new drama would damage Obama's campaign as he stands on the verge of capturing the Democratic nomination, with the last two primary votes on Tuesday in Montana and South Dakota.

Videos of Wright earlier this year claiming AIDS was a racist government plot and suggesting black citizens sing "God Damn America" to protest their treatment by whites threw his campaign into major damage control mode.

The Illinois senator initially declined to reject the pastor, using the row to make a wider comment about race in America in a speech in March.

Later, however, he later rejected Wright after a round of media appearances by the pastor reignited the affair.