When the controversy surrounding presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama and his now-former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, began erupting, I was shocked.
Not by Wright’s comments, but by Obama’s obvious ignorance regarding the rules of mixing religion and national politicians.
Since even Obama apparently forgot about them, I’ve taken it upon myself to create a set of rules for any future or current politicians who would like to avoid such problems.
1. You must have a religion.
Politicians in our country are better off declaring they worship dirt clods than having no religion at all. For some reason, refusal to declare a belief in some kind of higher power is incredibly threatening to voters. It doesn’t matter how qualified or brilliant you happen to be ““ being an atheist makes you practically unelectable.
To illustrate this, earlier this year, the Secular Coalition for America offered $1,000 for the person who could identify the “highest-level atheist, agnostic, humanist or any other kind of nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States.”
The organization told The Associated Press it was surprised to learn that Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., was openly atheist.
According to them, he is the first member of Congress to openly take such a stance.
2. It has to be the right religion.
Wrong religions include anything that isn’t generically Christian. Presbyterians, Protestants, Lutherans ““ all are welcome. Occasionally a Catholic, like JFK, is allowed to sneak by. But any belief system outside of this is shunned.
If you think I’m being cynical, name the last Jew who was elected president.
The most current example is former Republican presidential primary candidate Mitt Romney. Romney was very well-liked by conservative evangelicals ““ even more so than presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain ““ but Romney is Mormon. His campaign for the Republican nomination never had a chance.
3. You can be irrational about some things, but not everything.
No one would bat an eye if CNN reported that President Bush returned from church having heard a sermon proclaiming that homosexuality is evil and Adam and Eve frolicked with dinosaurs. Yet the public was outraged when footage emerged of Obama’s former pastor Wright on an anti-American tirade that featured now-overplayed calls of “God damn America.”
To rub some salt in Obama’s political wounds, Wright later suggested that the American government could be responsible for creating AIDS and implanting it in the black community.
It’s perfectly acceptable to be homophobic or to deny the scientific proof of evolution, but it’s not OK to be an anti-nationalist conspiracy theorist. Though you may think one extreme is just as silly as any other, voters like to stick with the ones they feel most comfortable with.
4. If eccentric or downright crazy religious leaders endorse you, you must immediately disown them and everything they stand for.
As far as this rule is concerned, McCain has been a shining example for everyone else in the presidential race.
McCain grandly rejected the support of John Hagee and Rod Parsley, two popular televangelists, who respectively announced that God sent Hitler to Earth to guide the Jews to the promised land and that Islam is the “Antichrist.”
When you take a closer look at these unspoken policies, it’s easy to see how Obama may have become confused. Many of them are seemingly arbitrary double standards, yet they still exist. This isn’t to say that judging a person based on his or her beliefs is wrong, but all people and beliefs should be judged with the same criteria.
Perhaps the best lesson to come out of Obama’s public-relations debacle is not how extreme Wright can be or how horribly Obama handled the issue, but how insane and petty our own standards are for a job as important as the president’s.
E-mail Strickland at kstrickland@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.