"Why we should ask candidates about their religion"

[texastoast]

Why we should ask candidates about their religion
By Nancy Jo Tubbs
http://www.timberjay.com/current.php?article=4237

I avoid scary movies, and so when I went to see “The Passion of The Christ,” at the State Theater in 2004, shortly after it had opened nationwide on Ash Wednesday, I was taken by surprise. The movie was controversial for many reasons, but for me the problem was watching 100 graphic, close-up minutes of Jesus in blood-soaked torment, scorned, exhausted, crowned with thorns, and left to die, nailed to the cross in ravaged pain.

I was horrified, as though I’d seen a snuff film. If even a small portion of that portrayal was real, I couldn’t bear thinking of it. And yet, this time of year, around Holy Week, we are expected to think of it—a lot.

I wonder if on March 8, President George W. Bush was thinking of it when he used the presidential veto to declare America’s “right” to torture.

I’m not religious, but as Bush said the night before the 2000 Iowa caucuses, Jesus is one of my favorite philosophers. Actually, Bush said Jesus was his favorite philosopher because “he changed my life.” Explaining his religious beliefs, Bush said, “When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that’s what happened to me.”


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To George W. Bush we could ask, “Who would Jesus waterboard?” To Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, perhaps, “All those Sundays in church, did you think about your philandering?” To George H. W. Bush, “Would Jesus have smeared Michael Dukakis with the nasty, racist Willie Horton commercial?” Of Ronald Reagan, “Did breaking the law by selling arms to Iran and using the profits to support Contra forces in Central America trouble your conscience?”

We would hardly know where to start with Richard Nixon. Norman Vincent Peale once said about the president’s Quaker heritage, “I don’t know that he ever let it bother him.”

Is a religious doctrine ever key to a president’s actions? Yes, for example, Jimmy Carter, the Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher and born-again Christian, seemed to take his religious values seriously in office. After the Watergate scandal, Carter’s pledges of honesty and decency and his promise that he would never lie to the American people tasted like manna from heaven.

“Our commitment to human rights must be absolute, our laws fair, our national beauty preserved; the powerful must not persecute the weak, and human dignity must be enhanced,” Carter said. Wow, what I would give to hear that from a president today!

Carter followed through by renegotiating the Panama Canal treaties, basically relinquishing the canal to the Panamanians “as a gracious apology” for “past wrongdoing,” and championed human rights among America’s allies. Both cost him considerable political capital. He was faced in the 1970s with an oil embargo, an energy crisis, the Iranian hostage-taking and high interest rates, which history has judged he did not handle particularly well. His religious values and acts of Christian kindness couldn’t save his bid for re-election against Reagan—who was embraced by the religious right, yet rarely attended church.

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[terryg11]

1. very well put

It's frustrating talking to many people who believe that because someone is a republican that equals conservative which in turn equals christian. When will the people wake up and realize Bush bamboozled them by playing the religion card?