Obama's flip-flops are growing worrisome

I’m worried about Obama. It’s not the usual right-wing bombast (he’s an anti-Israeli-crypto-Muslim). In fact, my problems are the opposite of theirs. Now that the nomination is surely his, he’s taken some “centrist” positions in a vain hope to win over moderate Republican support.

First it was agreeing with the Supreme Court’s gun decision. That strict constructionalists failed to notice the words referring to the maintaince of a well regulated militia as the raison d’être of the Second Amendment’s very limited acquiescence to individuals bearing arms amazes. In 1973 the Court said, “Let the slaughter intensify, legally” and it did. Now the Justices are saying it again, and it will. And Obama supports them. Narrowly the case was about whether people in Washington, DC had the right to a loaded gun in their house for self defense and a rifle for hunting, but the chuckleheads who constitute the NRA are going to take this as the opening shot to bring home an alleged right for anyone not yet convicted of a crime to pack a rod.

Then it was his advocacy of federal funds going to faith-based groups. That sound you hear is Thomas Jefferson rolling over in his grave, or maybe it’s the wall of separation between church and state cracking. Or both. Have we learned nothing from the Jim Jones fiasco? You remember Jim. He established Jonesville in the jungles of Guyana after first conning such luminaries as Vice President Walter Mondale and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and then when his frauds were becoming public he had an investigating congressman and his entourage murdered and then ordered the mass suicide of his 900 Kool-Aid-drinking-faith-based-community. And now in his swing to the right Obama wants to give money to people who on the one hand say “We will use it wisely” and on the other object to government scrutiny of how they spend money—based on their constitutional right of separation of church from state.

Not that Obama isn’t getting pilloried from those with whom he is trying to make friends on the right. He is. When he spoke of giving federal funds to religious groups he hedged. “First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them—or against the people you hire—on the basis of their religion.” Bill Donohue (I wrote about him in the December 8, 2006 edition of the Voice & Herald, you may recall) shouted “Fraud!” Donohue, who fronts the “Catholic League,” fulminated: “What Obama wants is to secularize the religious workplace.” He argues that Obama’s position is “a body blow to religious groups that apply for federal funds.”

And in this Donohue may be right (I hate to write that). Obama, who billed himself in this specious speech as “someone who used to teach constitutional law” ought to know better. Part of the reason for the separation of church and state is actually to protect religion from the state. If government can impose a requirement that religious institutions can not insist that people hired share their religious convictions and sensibilities than government would, in effect, be delivering the body blow of which Donohue protests. Oh what a tangled web Obama weaves when first he practices to, to what? To deceive? Maybe.

And has he changed his position on bringing the troops back from Iraq within 16 months of his taking the oath of office? I don’t know. He says “yes” and explains “no.” He challenges those such as me who hold him to our standards. I’ve been saying these things all along, he says; we weren’t listening. Ah, the fault dear reader is not in the man but in ourselves, for we were so desperate for change that we failed to pay attention. Is that what Obama is saying?

Not that John McCain has won my support. He is a Republican. George W. Bush is a Republican. Under Bush, though warned, we were attacked, we’ve fought the wrong enemy, spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives while the price of fuel has skyrocketed, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, the stock market is in free fall and the Taliban is on the rise. McCain is trying to put as much distance between himself and Bush as he can, but he’s still a Republican and while someday that emblem may not be a stigma, it is today. Just ask former Senator Lincoln Chaffee.