Clinton’s gay supporters must now line up behind Obama to prevent McCain from making Supreme Court appointments
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LAURA DOUGLAS-BROWN
Friday, May 09, 2008
JEREMIAH WRIGHT IS not Barack Obama. But for all the attention focused on the pastor’s controversial comments about race and other issues, he may as well be.
In the fiery Wright, Obama’s opponents found the perfect proxy for inflaming racial tensions to derail the man who could become our first black president.
In Wright’s repeated media comments in recent weeks, the mainstream media found yet another controversy to write about to avoid the harder work of parsing the actual policy differences among the three leading presidential contenders.
And in the ensuing furor, we got yet another lesson in how anti-gay bias remains acceptable in America.
It’s not that either Obama or Wright are anti-gay — far from it. Obama, as I’ve argued before, is one of the two most gay-friendly viable presidential candidates in history (the other being Hillary Clinton), and I believe he is the better choice on gay issues.
And Wright, despite his statements that the U.S. government might have used AIDS to destroy black people, is also far from homophobic. As documented by my colleagues at the Washington Blade, a sister paper to Southern Voice, Wright welcomed gays to his massive Trinity United Church of Christ, where he recently retired as pastor. While the church never officially adopted its denomination's “open and affirming” status, it was one of the first to launch an AIDS ministry and also had a ministry for gay singles. Wright has also spoken out about anti-gay religious bias in his sermons.
So the anti-gay sentiment apparent in the attention to Wright’s past and more recent comments isn’t coming from either Obama or the pastor who mentored him.
Instead, it’s inherent in the disproportionate media coverage of Wright’s comments about U.S. policies versus the comments of another outspoken pastor, Rev. John Hagee of Texas, who just happens to be a prominent endorser of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
As reporters churned out headline after headline on Wright’s renewed public comments and Obama’s reaction to them, McCain visited New Orleans to speak out about the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the government’s inept handling of the disaster.
There, he was asked a question about Hagee’s comments that essentially blamed Katrina on gay people in New Orleans. Hagee drew the connection in a 2006 interview on NPR, when he argued that Katrina “was, in fact, the judgment of God” since “there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came.”
Hagee renewed the claim as recently as April 22 in an interview with radio talk show host Dennis Prager, two days before McCain was asked the question in New Orleans.
At his April 24 campaign stop in New Orleans, McCain called Hagee’s Katrina comments “nonsense,” but refused to renounce his endorsement.
He also offered an explanation of why Wright’s comments merit media attention and Hagee’s don’t: “I didn’t attend Pastor Hagee’s church for 20 years,’’ McCain said, according to the Associated Press.
TO BE CERTAIN, there’s a difference between someone who has been your personal pastor and someone who only endorses you — even if, in the case of McCain and Hagee, you sought their endorsement.
But with Wright’s comments already making news, the Hagee story was ripe for examination about the roles pastors (or endorsements in general) play in this year’s presidential contests, or a story about all of the biases bound up in such sweeping generalizations.
Instead, it merited only a paragraph at the end of an Associated Press story about McCain’s New Orleans trip, which attributed concern over Hagee to “members of the liberal group MoveOn.org” — as if anti-gay bias is only of interest to that small group of people, and as if what is important about the issue is that MoveOn.org has “seized on” it, instead of the substance of what Hagee said (for which he issued a belated, certainly pressured apology late on April 25).
Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog group, criticized CNN’s coverage of the issue, noting that on April 24, correspondent Dana Bash played a clip of Hagee’s statement that “sin” brought on the hurricane, but left out that the minister specifically blamed the gay parade.
Why is it considered so much more offensive — and therefore so much more newsworthy — for Wright to suggest U.S. foreign policy invited the 9/11 attacks than for Hagee to suggest that homosexual “sin” invited the hurricane?
And why would a CNN reporter leave out the specific “sin” Hagee blamed, unless she thought his comments may be more controversial without the qualifier?
Unfortunately, the answer may be that more Americans agree with Hagee’s statement — not explicitly that God destroyed New Orleans because of gay events, but at least that homosexuality is sinful, and therefore at least theoretically able to provoke God’s wrath. His comment is less controversial because the sentiment is more common.
In an ideal world, none of this would make headlines night after night. Instead of combing a candidate’s list of supporters for anyone who might have ever said something offensive to anybody, journalists and voters would spend our time delving into the details of the candidates’ plans to solve the problems facing our country.
The differences between Clinton and Obama on gay issues are the perfect example of why this is necessary. Both candidates support granting federal benefits to gay couples, although neither support allowing gays to marry. They differ, however, on how what they would do about the federal law that deals with gay marriage.
Obama advocates repealing all of the Defense of Marriage Act, the law passed by Congress in 1996 that forbids federal recognition of gay marriages and allows states to refuse to recognize gay marriages performed in other states. Clinton wants to repeal only the part of DOMA that deals with federal recognition, and has argued that keeping the state clause provides a useful tool to ward off an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage.
WHETHER YOU SUPPORT or oppose recognition for gay relationships, it’s a substantive difference. Without the work of gay political organizations and the gay press, it would never have come to light.
Instead, the candidates’ positions are collapsed into statements like “both candidates support gay rights,” so the media can move on to the controversy du jour.
We know that John McCain is for the war and Clinton and Obama are against it, but we have very little information and objective media analysis on the details of their plans and how they differ. The same is true for health care, the slowing economy, the environment and countless other issues.
Young journalists are taught that articles should include the “five W’s and one H.” In this year’s presidential election coverage, we are being given sound bites of the “who” and “what,” and sometimes the “when” and “where,” but almost none of the “why” and “how.”
And in the case of the disproportionate attention paid to John Hagee and Jeremiah Wright, we’re getting it with a subtle dose of another “H” — homophobia.
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