03-09-2008, 11:04 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Sassy Lipstick Maverick
Join Date: Nov 2007
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Obama and the Bigots
oh really
Quote:
Obama and the Bigots
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF March 9, 2008
The ugliest prejudices in this campaign season are not directly about race. Barack Obama’s skin color may cost him some working-class white voters, but it’s also winning some votes among blacks and among whites eager to signal their open-mindedness.
Sexism seems more of a factor. Americans have typically said in polls that they are less willing to vote for a woman than a black, and Shirley Chisholm (a black woman who ran for president in 1972) always said that she encountered more prejudice because of her sex than her race.
Yet the most monstrous bigotry in this election isn’t about either race or sex. It’s about religion.
The whispering campaigns allege that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim planning to impose Islamic law on the country. Incredibly, he is even accused — in earnest! — of being the Antichrist.
Proponents of this theory offer detailed theological explanations for why he is the Antichrist, and the proof is that he claims to be Christian — after all, the Antichrist would say that, wouldn’t he? The rumors circulate enough that Glenn Beck of CNN asked the Rev. John Hagee, a conservative evangelical, what the odds are that Mr. Obama is the Antichrist.
These charges are fanatical, America’s own equivalent of the vicious accusations about Jews that circulate in some Muslim countries. They are less a swipe at one candidate than a calumny against an entire religion. They underscore that for many bigoted Americans in the 21st century, calling someone a Muslim is still a slur.
There is a parallel with presidential campaigns in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when one of the most common ways to attack a candidate was to suggest that he was partly black, or at least favored racial intermarriage. For example, the Federalists charged that Thomas Jefferson was “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” And the word “miscegenation” was coined in 1863 and 1864 in charges that Abraham Lincoln secretly plotted for blacks to marry whites, especially Irish-Americans....
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and
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...When Mrs. Clinton was asked in a television interview a week ago whether Mr. Obama is a Muslim, she denied it firmly — but then added, most unfortunately, “as far as I know.” ...
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how nice of Hilary to get into relgion bating as well as rave baiting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/op...hp&oref=slogin
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