Loyal To LibertyBeta

WND reports that "Glenn Beck fans are fighting back... "against an Obama faction effort to destroy the advertiser base for Beck's Fox News commentary program. "Now a husband and wife team of Beck fans has launched a website-DefendGlenn.com- that lists the contact information for advertisers for Beck's and other Fox News programs…" Though the Obama faction effort purports to be a reaction to Beck's remark that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," I suspect that their real motivation has more to do with the role he has played as a focal point for opposition to the Obama faction's drive to subject the United States to a totalitarian national socialist regime. People who oppose their intention should do more than applaud the defenders of Beck's freedom of speech; they should pitch in and help them out.

That said, I find myself unable to agree with Beck's statement about Obama's anti-white attitudes. Casting Obama as some kind of anti-white racist re-enforces the false notion that he speaks from or in any way represents the aggrieved heart of black Americans, the heart that tragically leads some black people (like Henry Gates and other members of the leftist black elite) to wallow incessantly in the world of hurt connected with what they feel is the persistent reality of white racism in America. All too often, however, the wallowing has an ironic "the lady doth protest too much" (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2) quality about it: Blacks who enjoy all the benefits and prestige American society can offer, using exaggerated gestures of condemnation of white racism to affirm their continued identification with the plight of other, less favored blacks. Is their show of angry resentment for the benefit of those less favored, or does it mainly serve to exploit (for "professional" purposes?) the embarrassed guilt that still influences the actions of so many other Americans who wish conscientiously to deal with the nation's heritage of racial injustice, fear and mistrust?

Barack Obama surely epitomizes this ironic exploitation of racial embarrassment. It was, and continues to be, a ruthlessly deployed weapon in his arsenal for political warfare. Consider for example elements of the Obama faction who now absurdly claim that people who notice and declare Obama's commitment to totalitarian national socialism are doing so because he's black. Actually, Obama's commitment to totalitarian socialism is more likely related to the emotional role and influence of anti-American leftists (e.g., his mother, Frank Davis, Bill Ayers) in his life and upbringing than to the facts of his racial biology.

After his father abandoned him, these communist/leftist figures provided emotional compensation for that abandonment. Did they redirect the pain and resentment it occasioned away from his father? Did their ideological fervor refocus it instead against the supposedly unjust American economic and political system? The hatred most characteristic of those who influenced Obama's emotional core is not hatred of whites or of white culture- it's hatred of the United States and of all that it stood for while leading the fight against expansive international communism.

Nothing about Barack Obama authentically represents or invokes the heritage of black Americans. Throughout his career he has championed the so-called right to abortion. From its inception with people like Margaret Sanger, to its genocidal implications for black Americans today, the promotion of a so called right to murder children in the womb has been allied with forces aiming to eliminate "inferior" races from the catalogue of human existence. (Given the anti-black implications of his fanatical commitment to the abortion agenda, the question arises: Did Obama's emotional pain over his father's abandonment result in sub-rosa resentment against his black racial heritage?) Authentic Christian faith has also been characteristic of the black American identity, reflecting the Gospel of love and reverence for God's will. That is a far cry from the peculiar mélange of race hatred and covert Islamism that claimed Obama's allegiance as a member of the congregation that assembled to hear the hate speech that passed for sermonizing in Reverend Jeremiah Wright's services.

And despite the leftist cant characteristic of the manipulated media's preferred black figureheads, many black Americans reject totalitarian socialist schemes to establish government domination and repression. Like my father, they donned the uniform of America's armed forces and fought with courage, pride and good conscience against the communist/national socialist devaluation of unalienable rights, and its collectivist/elitist assault on respect for the intrinsic worth of each and every human life.

Given Obama's upbringing, the self-avowed leftist predilections of his university life, the socialist stances characteristic of his brief political career, and the national socialist policies he is trying to force on the American people today, I would suggest that his race has nothing to do with the deep animus that characterizes his policies and actions. The target of his ill will isn't just whites- its black Americans, Jews, Asians, South Asians, Africans, Hispanics and yes, Europeans, Aussies and Brits, indeed any human beings who hold fast to the idea of liberty and the principles of God ordained human rights and moral dignity from which it springs. Rather than surrendering to the racial division Obama seeks to exploit, Americans of all backgrounds should unite on the common ground of decent humanity offered by our American creed.

In every important respect Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election was a victory for racism. First there was the racist claim that his skin color made his election somehow significant for black Americans with whom he otherwise shares no common moral or historical heritage. Second, his stubborn advocacy of the parent's right to murder her child made it a victory in principle for the racist notion that "inferior" physical development leaves people with no rights that must be respected by their supposed betters. Third, the US Constitution has been openly set aside on account of fears that racist violence would result from investigating the facts regarding his citizenship at birth (lest they support the conclusion that he is constitutionally ineligible to serve as President of the United States.) Truth, right and the Constitution all sacrificed for the sake of racist fears and premises.

The reaction in some quarters to the Sotomayer selection smacks of the same racist mentality. "Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, called Sotomayor's nomination 'a monumental day for Latinos. Finally we see ourselves represented on the highest court in the land.'" There was a time when we understood that those who served on the Supreme Court had first and foremost to prove that they represented the whole people of the United States, whose sovereign will constitutes the legitimacy of the Constitution it is their duty to uphold. The notion that someone would serve as the representative of this or that race or special interest tended to disqualify them from service.

Of course, a person proposed for a seat on the bench can't be held responsible for how others see her. But in a speech she reportedly gave in 2001 "Sotomayor has said that personal experiences "affect the facts that judges choose to see….I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging…but I accept that there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

If her assessment of herself was correct, her own words disqualify her from serving on the Supreme Court. Unless we mean to overturn the whole idea of Constitutional government, the decisions of the justices of the Supreme Court should be based on the Constitution and the laws. No justices can be allowed to "accept" judgments based on gender or ethnicity. If they do, what becomes of the promise of liberty and justice for all, of equal rights and the equal protection of the law?

Does the notion that it's somehow acceptable to disregard the Constitution on account of race in Obama's case now make it acceptable to confirm as a Supreme Court Justice someone willing to allow their ethnic identity to distort their judgment of facts, and the basis for their decisions? Tragically, this is exactly the racist legal culture we would expect to result from the racist political mentality the Obama faction exploited to achieve his electoral victory.

Unity is always on their lips, but their hearts are far from it. Instead of a national government that represents our common heart for justice and liberty, the Obama faction means to create a fractured reflection of all our differences, until we forget how to see, think and act as Americans, regardless of those differences. With this dissolution of the American identity they prepare the way for the dissolution of the United States itself, so that a strong sense of our national identity no longer poses an obstacle to their plans for a new, global regime that sets aside our "provincial" concerns with right and ordered liberty.

Of course, those concerns are precisely what raise our national consciousness above the level of mere group selfishness, so that our concern for the good of our nation becomes a concern for the rights and decent freedom of all humanity. The sacrifices we commemorate every Memorial Day are marked by headstones and memorials in far flung corners of the globe where Americans gave ultimate proof that this concern is no pious abstraction. But it seems that what they died to preserve for others, we are now quietly surrendering ourselves under the mesmerizing influence of racist fears and lies.

Such is the change Obama represents. But where is the hope in it, except for those who succeed, as he did, by invoking the power of the very evil their success has supposedly overcome? "Racism is dead," they seem to say, "Long live the tyranny of race."

Ordinarily when I write about something I trust solely to the good sense and logic of my reasoning to represent my thoughts to the reader. There are times, though, when thought is as much an expression of identity as of reason; when the words express not only what you think, but what you are. The topic of this post brings me to such a moment.

The reaction to injustice is rarely a matter of cold logic. I believe that God has written His law of justice into the very fabric of our being. It is as much a part of our nature as our freedom, and even more deeply involved in the formation of it. My own sensibility toward injustice has much to do with my first encounters, in my youth, with the reality of racial prejudice and the humiliation and discouragement it occasions. This resulted partly from my own experiences, and partly from my intellectual and emotional encounters with the experience of others, including my enslaved ancestors. The former wound the heart, but also rouse it to action. The latter break the heart, at least in part because there is no action that can relieve the suffering of those long dead, whose anguish lives on only in the borrowed currents of our own sympathetic emotions. But like all heartbreak, it does not so much destroy the heart as open it to the inner reality of injustice, so that it becomes like a taut guitar string, tuned to the frequency of heartbreak as its sound escapes the breaking hearts of others.

I guess I was fresh tuned to that frequency when I had my first adult encounter with the special quality of evil involved in the twentieth century holocaust of European Jewry. Years before my father had taken us to see "The Diary of Anne Frank" and then the documentary film "Mein Kampf" which included graphic images of the death and grimly emaciated life associated with the Nazi death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto. But only later, during my college years, did I come fully to appreciate the meaning of the events represented in those films. As one of the work-study jobs I did to help defray my school expenses I read to a blind researcher, from the English translation of Anatoly Kuznetsov's book Babi Yar. The book recounts Kuznetsov's experiences as a 14 year old boy who lived through the German occupation of Kiev, and the slaughter "in the Kiev ravine…one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust." Perhaps it was the fact that it was written from the perspective of a youngster about the same age I was when I first delved into the history of American slavery, but something about the book impelled me to begin reading all that I could about the Holocaust.

In the course of my life and work I have had other encounters with evil, but I think these early encounters with slavery and the holocaust left behind an indelible conviction as to the reality of evil. I don't mean reality just in the sense of events that actually happen, but in the sense of a persistent state or condition of human being, which reflects the essential truth of what we are, and therefore gives rise to such events. This conviction surely forms part of the common sense that warns me against the specious promises of utopian leaders and ideologies. Evil is not an accident of circumstances, or even an incident of human ignorance, weakness or disability. It is the conscious manifestation of the power implied by human freedom, to make or break with the future God makes possible for us, accepting ourselves in His image, or fearlessly asserting our will in order to carve out an image we can call our own. But because they lack His power of creation, people who choose the latter alternative end up, like the warrior Macbeth in Shakespeare's tragedy, "nothing afear'd of what thyself did make, Strange images of death."

The twentieth century could well be called the century of Holocaust. I think it had something to do with the powerful assertion of godless self-sufficiency that characterized its most deadly and infamous ideologies. The communists, the fascists, the Nazis- all have this in common, that they fancy themselves creators of new worlds of human possibility, willing servants of a fantasy in which the future, wrought by human hands, will advance beyond God's limited vision of human nature to birth before the universe the superman, the everlasting Reich, the workers' paradise, the endlessly perfected revolution of hope, change and unimpeded progress. Obtusely brushing aside the intrinsic contradiction between unlimited being and the objective possibilities of existence, these fantasies of human pridefulness have ended, all of them, in murderous nightmares. They expanded the possibilities of humanity alright, but only to the extent of adding hitherto unimagined horrors.

As they are part of a people who, on account of their very existence as a people, experienced the full brunt of this murderous pride, it has always seemed incongruous to me that so many Jewish poets (using that word in its broadest sense to include all manner of creative artists) and intellectuals seem at ease with the utopian delusions of the left. I wonder at times if it might be some ethnic version of the Stockholm syndrome, until I remember that such "psychological" explanations are themselves the fruit of the twentieth century's predilection for prideful, self-idolization. According to the Biblical account, the will to assimilate our own destruction is one of the principles of our nature, one of the reasons we are as we are. Just as Eve reached for the deadly fruit, so we are inclined to surrender to the siren song of future godhood that distracts us from the voice and presence of God within. Because, in a sense beyond our rational understanding, we are already what we seek to become, the urge to realize our freedom in action makes it harder for us to accept our freedom in fact. Though time and again we experience, or inflict upon others, the mortal consequences of our vain ambition, we will not let go of it.

In this sense, I think Jewish leftists are exactly what they often claim to be- people determined to transcend their ethnicity, to be more wholly human than partial to Jewishness. I think this even as my own Christian understanding prompts me to understand it differently. For, who is more likely to misunderstand their true relation to humanity than those in whom the wholeness of humanity was, from their beginning, destined to find its true expression?

In this sense, sincere Christian belief admonishes the pride of every non-Jewish people, for whom it represents the truth that they are not the people chosen by God to be the earthly forbears of the Son of Man. But just as it challenges their pride, so does it challenge the humility of the Jews. In their different ways both Jews and non-Jews are forced to confront the responsibility it implies. But inasmuch as it is easier to accept a recognized boundary than to constitute and accept it, the Jewish responsibility may be harder to understand and to forgive. Why did God choose them to epitomize the sacrifice He makes of Himself for the sake of our existence? Why would it be for them to bear the wound He takes upon Himself so that all may be made whole?

In its true consequence for the heart I imagine that the experience of the Holocaust would mean a sensitivity so attuned to human suffering and injustice that every such infliction upon anyone, anywhere would resonate within and break your heart anew. My Christian understanding sees this as the experience of Christ upon the cross, and therefore as a possibility made manifest first and especially in Jewish flesh and blood. But if Christ's crucifixion represents a Jewish experience, so too does his agony in the Garden, his moment of longing for a fate other than sacrifice, in which acceptance of that fate coexists in the instant with the will to push it aside, and by that rejection make for himself another fate devoid of suffering and death.

As there are some Christians who linger in the moment of crucifixion, so I think there are Jews who live in the moment of doubt about God's will, when we are apt to be transfixed by our own vision of peace, happiness and hope. However that may be, there are certainly similarities between the temptations of that moment, and the seductive allure of utopian ideologies that brush aside God's intention for human life in pursuit of a godlike perfection of human will and freedom. America appears to be in the midst of such temptation now, as it stands preoccupied with a man whose words promise hope and a better world, but whose deeds echo the stolid disregard for innocent life that characterized the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. The incongruity of this moment appears especially in this: that he could not have achieved his goal without the support of rich and influential people from the very community indelibly scarred by the twentieth century's inhuman ambitions. Lamentably, I believe that their reward for this support will be policies that usher in the destruction of Israel and greatly encourage and strengthen the deadly aims of those in the Islamic world whose lust for its destruction has led them to ingest and act upon some of the foulest ordure left by the Nazis' dysentery of hatred for the Jewish people.

For me the clear forewarning of this probable outcome has been and remains Obama's unswerving commitment to the instrumental destruction of nascent human life in and outside of the womb. People often speak of the way in which the Nazis and other purveyors of racist ideology play on aesthetic prejudice and sensibility to turn people against the intended victims of racist atrocity- dehumanizing them in order to prepare the perpetration of slaughter. Racism especially relies upon the denigration of biological origins to achieve this effect, as the Nazis did in their emphasis on the racial contamination supposedly represented by even one iota of Jewish or other "inferior" blood. What then of the ideology that denies the human nature of all the antecedents of humanity, treating the flourishing seed of human existence as nothing more than slime. "How can anything so unlike what we have become have anything to do with what we are?" it asks suggestively. I see in this the very ploy used to blind a Christian civilization to the truth of its spiritual origins amongst the seemingly alien Jews. I see in this the hateful sophistry used to blind supposedly freedom loving Americans to the crime involved in depriving alien seeming blacks of the rights the principles of liberty ascribe to all humanity. How can we hope that such things will 'never again' happen if we encourage to its final, anti-humanitarian extreme the mentality that judges by appearances what cannot be understood apart from the transcendent reality that constitutes their meaning? If we fail to respect the inner being of the cells of nascent life, what of the inner meaning of the perishable flesh and bone, the moistened organization of dust that, to all appearances, we never cease to be?

In this regard it is no accident that the embrace of scientific materialism (in whatever form) fed the outbreak of atrocity that characterized the twentieth century. Now, like the epilogue of a classic James Bond episode, comes the disguised henchman of that evil, to avenge the vanquished in what seems to be the aftermath of triumph over them. From the last remaining superpower we are suddenly transformed into a has-been power with little strength remaining except to appease our adversaries with the cold morsels that to revenge taste sweet. Among the most coveted, Israel, whose death will be the harbinger of our own.

Tragically, there are too many in the Jewish community as in others (including of course, the black American community, whose elites are still celebrating Obama's false claim of triumph in their name) who will not see the connection between the mentality of godless, prideful utopianism and the perpetration of atrocities like abortion in the name of human freedom, progress and perfection. Human beings can offer no boundless hope, except we break the bonds of frail humanity. That seems like justice only to those who are not among the shards. Ironic then, that Jews and Black Americans, two peoples made one by their familiarity with brokenness, should be the instruments though which a man is lifted up whose whole purpose seems to be to bring on for America the destruction associated with this godless, false utopian pride.

An Open Letter to Father Jenkins

President of the University of Notre Dame

I pray God that you, and the Trustees and Faculty of the University of Notre Dame will reconsider your decision to extend an Honorary Degree to Barack Obama, and that you will withdraw your invitation to him to speak at the University's Commencement exercises in May. As leaders in the American Catholic community do you not hold to the Church's teaching with regard to the inviolable sanctity of human life, and against the heinous practice of abortion?

The issue at stake in the fight against abortion is starkly simple: Are all human beings created equal, or not? It is the same issue that was at stake in the fight against slavery and racial discrimination.

As an American who subscribes to the self-evident truths our country was founded upon, I answer the question in favor of equality. As a descendant of enslaved Black Americans, I believe that any other answer would invalidate the struggle for justice to which so many Americans of all races gave their lives.

Given that the principle at stake is the same as that which demanded opposition to slavery, I have always had a simple test when dealing with any question involving abortion. I ask myself what I would do or say if slavery was the issue in question. I recommend this test for your consideration. Ask yourself whether you would invite as a Commencement speaker an individual who abused the authority of office to provide Federal funding for the purchase of slaves. Would you consider it honorable for the University to confer an honorary degree on an individual who issued executive orders allowing US funds to be used to support slave markets? Would you let the University be used to give stature to a politician who supported the position that ownership of slaves is a matter of individual choice?

I hope and assume that the answer to all of these questions is no. Since you have chosen to answer otherwise where abortion rather than slavery is at issue, you must see a moral difference between enslaving grown people and killing nascent ones. Or else you see a moral difference between the nascent child in the abortuary and the slave on the auction block. As a Black, Catholic, prolife American, I challenge you to explain the difference to me and to everyone like me. Perhaps you make a distinction because the child is more helpless, more imperatively incapable of voluntary wrongdoing, more explicitly acknowledged by Christ to be the subject of His special regard? (Matthew 18:6, Luke 17:2) Or perhaps it's because some refuse to recognize the nascent child's humanity?

Whenever someone raises the latter objection I remember a speech Frederick Douglass made in which he felt compelled to make arguments for the humanity of black Americans because, he said, "A respectable public journal, published in Richmond Virginia., bases its whole defence [sic] of the slave system upon a denial of the Negro's manhood." You see, people once raised a question about that, which supposedly Catholic Christians (including some no doubt from my home state of Maryland) probably used at that time to justify their commerce with slaveholders; their willingness to hold in honor those who practiced or defended slavery; or even their own willingness to hold slaves themselves.

When I read of slavery in my youth I could not understand why so many tolerated such evil for so long. I asked God to help me never in my life to be such as they were. Once I fully understood the nature of the abortion issue, I was moved to stand against abortion and the slaughter of innocent life as I would have wanted all people of conscience and goodwill to stand against slavery and the rape of my forbears' liberty. When people suggest that Barack Obama shares some heritage with me, I know better. For the truest test of that heritage is not the color of someone's skin, but the determination of their heart, never to stand silently by while God's fundamental law of justice is denied to persons whose only crime is the unjustly despised appearance of their humanity.

I know that the Catholic Church today is guilty of no such dereliction. The Holy Father, the clergy, and millions of the laity have joined together in prayer, and work and sacrifice to bear witness against the wrong of abortion, to bear witness against a false idea of choice that betrays God-given liberty. Your University bears the name of the Blessed Mother of Christ, who honored God's will for human life though it could have meant her own dishonor in the minds of her contemporaries. Even if, as you say, Obama's visit does worldly honor to you and your colleagues, what is more consistent with her example: to seek honor at the expense of God's truth, or to forego it if need be, in obedience to His loving will.

I realize that such a decision is not so much for thought as for prayer. So I ask that you give prayerful consideration to the plea that is on my heart, and on the hearts of millions like me. This may well be a teaching moment for Obama and other politicians like him. But sometimes one deed speaks more certainly of truth than many words could do. Thus spoke the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross. Are we not called to act as He did? Perhaps the best Commencement speech of all would be the testimony of silence, in which, perhaps for the first time, someone who needs to hear it will hear the voice of Rachel, weeping. (Matthew 2:18)

With Pleasing Hope for Life,

Alan Keyes

According to Eric Holder (Holder: US is nation of cowards on racial matters) "in things racial we [Americans] have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards." I find myself quite unexpectedly agreeing with him, but I couldn't help but see the profound irony of that remark, especially coming from someone in his position. He claims the title of Attorney General of the United States by appointment from a man whose victory in the last election was mainly due to that kind of cowardice; a man whose constitutional eligibility for the office of President remains under a debilitating cloud of suspicion, because of that kind of cowardice; a man whose whole career as a left-wing activist and politician has exploited that kind of cowardice. Though Holder purports to see this cowardice in other Americans, I wonder whether he sees, or would honestly admit, how much it has influenced and determined the outlook and activities of left-wing and liberal blacks like himself and his new boss.

Because it so well served their purposes of self-advancement, the liberal black elite became adept at exploiting the fear of perceived racism so prevalent since the Civil Rights movement's conquest of America's conscience in the 1960s. In the process they actually strengthened and perpetuated negative stereotypes, to such a degree that black Americans fell into the trap of seeing their ethnic identity in almost entirely negative terms. Years ago, in my essay Masters of the Dream, I described the tragically self-defeating nature of the liberal black establishment's negative pre-occupation with racism.

…the belief that the black identity has no positive content means that, in dealing with the problems of the black community, one neglects to think about policies based on the community's internal values, institutions and resources. Instead, one assumes that the solutions must come from without. The passive victims of history become the passive beneficiaries of philanthropy, the passive clients of bureaucracy, the passive subjects of the domineering welfare state. Despite all good intentions to the contrary, this type of liberalism pushes black Americans back toward a condition of endless childhood, servitude and subjection. Liberal hope becomes liberal slavery.

In reaction against racial prejudice the black elite unwittingly embraced race and racism as the defining preoccupation of the black American identity. This leads them to be blind to the development of a distinctly positive black American identity, rooted in the assumption that personal moral and spiritual worth persist despite all the demeaning assaults predicated on racial inferiority. The history of that moral identity reveals an incessant spiritual guerrilla war against the devaluation of their humanity that centered ultimately around a simple and unyielding faith in God as the true standard of human worth, and Christ as the one whose suffering, sacrifice and resurrection validated the Godly dignity of every human being willing to put their faith in Him.

Instead of embracing this moral identity the liberal black elite aped the snobby (and often atheistic) scientific materialism that became increasingly characteristic of the American liberal establishment in the course of the twentieth century. They jumped on the bandwagon of leftist social analyses that defined groups in terms of quantifiable characteristics. Apparently they do not realize how much this implicitly validates the dehumanizing practice of classifying beings by physical characteristics, to which practice all truly racist ideologies owe their repugnant pedigree.

In the introduction to the essay quoted above I allude to the deadly effects of this surrender of moral identity.

Already, generations of black children have grown up without any sense of their true heritage. Consciously or unconsciously, their minds are influenced by those who, for whatever reason, spread the doctrine that racists ripped black Americans from our African roots, stripped us of our values and institutions, and left us with no shred of our own culture or humanity. Leaders like Louis Farrakhan, who claim to be strong enemies of racism, have taken this demeaning doctrine as a major premise of their creed. Ironically, in order to prove the worst in others, it requires that we deny the best in ourselves.

The black American liberal elites celebrate the election of Barak Obama as some kind of breakthrough for black Americans. This is the ultimate and deeply self-abasing fruit of their moral surrender. Except for the physical characteristics derived from his biological heritage, I cannot see what connection Obama has with the positive, moral identity of Black Americans. Black Americans are in fact a physically motley ethnic group. But despite physical differences, a common spirit and heart were refined, forged and tempered in the historic experiences of slavery, "Jim Crow" segregation and the stifling environment of pervasive racial prejudice. Many of the deepest emotional struggles, and the strong spiritual resources arising from the reality of that heritage take root during childhood and adolescence, formative years during which Obama was being raised in contexts devoid of the need to confront and deal with it. Though Holder laments American cowardice with respect to racial matters, Obama is the ultimate concession to that cowardice. Defined in racial terms he is a man whites need not fear- with dark skin but devoid of the spiritual tension characteristic of black Americans- W.E.B. Dubois' "two souls in one body" that pull between resentment and affiliation: the smoldering despair that true justice will ever really be served battling with the undying faith that God's love will ultimately and truly transform the American heart, the human heart, to be open to the race we all have in common.

I agree with Holder that we need to get beyond this cowardice. It will require that we get beyond the idea that Obama's election is the historic breakthrough that carries America out of the shadow of racism. Maybe that's the larger meaning of the doubt as to his identity that hangs over his claim to the Presidency. Even if he ultimately shows proof that he is a natural born citizen, as the Constitution requires, that will still not be enough to prove that he is what he and so many others falsely proclaim him to be. For in the end the burden from racism in America isn't about physical appearances- it's about moral and spiritual realities. It's about trying to do what's right regardless of racial feelings and perceptions. From this perspective, Obama's rejection of the simple premise that all human beings are created equal (including our nascent offspring) means that his election rather reasserts than transcends the ruthless disregard for humanity that made race and racism such potent instruments of evil.

Unless they accept the degrading premise of racism (that physical traits alone are a valid basis for identifying human communities), I cannot understand why people would assume that I should take pride in the election of Barak Obama simply because we both have dark skin. Because he takes the position that it's right to slaughter innocent human beings by abortion, I believe he represents the antithesis of decent conscience. Like the southern slaveholders in the nineteenth century, he accepts the view that a human being's most basic rights may be disregarded simply because another human being considers his physical characteristics or stage of human development inferior. Of course people like Obama aim at a more violently immoral result than the southern slaveholders. Whether from moral sentiment or selfish interest, the advocates of slavery supported a system that at the very least regarded the death of a slave as a regrettable, though sometimes necessary, waste of capital Those who support the abortion industry work to perpetuate a system that builds capital by wasting the lives of innocent human beings in the uttermost condition of helplessness.

People who wrote handbooks on slave husbandry actually gave advice to slaveholders about keeping the slaves healthy and strong for work. The abortion industry thrives on the development of more convenient and reliable methods of extermination. Its advocates fight hard to make sure potential clients are not exposed to any information that might interfere with the decision to devote new victims to the slaughter.

Slaveholders had to develop all manner of human relationships with their slaves, some of which involved genuine emotional attachment on both sides. The abortion industry depends on the denial of the emotional bond that is the paradigm of loving human relations, that between a mother and her child; and it implies the denial and irrelevance of the scarcely less fundamental tie that ought to bind a father to his offspring.

People pretend to scoff and take umbrage at anyone who dares to mention Obama and Hitler in the same breath. Yet the "good liberals" who staff the surgical killing fields that masquerade as medical facilities suppress the personhood of innocents in the womb with the same officious ruthlessness that characterized the "good Germans" who suppressed the humanity of the Jews, gypsies and other groups they regarded as inferior and consigned to the death camps. And the "choice" honored by pro-abortion slogans has about as much to do with freedom as the "work" honored by the slogan that reigned over Auschwitz and Buchenwald, "Arbeit Macht Frei."

Far from any feeling of pride, I can feel only shame at the thought that someone now occupies the White House who in his rise to power consolidated the dedication of his most hard core devotees by boldly defending the murder of newborn children who survive intended slaughter, on the grounds that respecting their indisputable right to life would somehow interfere with their mothers' "right" to the dead, dismembered little carcass they pay the abortionist to deliver.

Far from any feeling of pride, I feel only revulsion, and I cringe at the thought that anyone would identify me with a man who promotes evil more hard hearted and spiritually corrupting than that which claimed the liberty and blighted the lives of my forbears. I know that God forgives those who repent of the sin of abortion, even as he takes to his bosom the intended victims of their mistake. But as for those who defend the sin; who lure others into believing it has the sanction of right; who make the piled remains of tiny human beings the landfill on which to construct their edifice of profit and political power; as for these workers of iniquity I know that Christ rejects them ("...depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity." Luke 13:37) and for them our father God reserves only annihilation, ("…destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity." Proverbs 21:15)

Yet I also feel terrible grief at the sight of so many who rejoice in the triumph of evil that Obama represents because they have been deceived and manipulated into believing that he somehow represents a vindication of all the years of suffering, sorrow and outcast oppression experienced by Americans whose heritage includes the bitter reality of slavery, abuse and unjust discrimination. How can the generations beaten, hounded and murdered on account of the rejection of God ordained human equality be vindicated by the elevation to power of a man who champions that rejection, not just for one group or another, but for all human beings too young and inarticulate to defend themselves? How can the generations denied opportunity and a just recompense for their talent and labor be vindicated by the adulation given to a man who promotes as lawful, and would impose by law, the ultimate denial of opportunity and all justice to the posterity which represents the renewal of mankind's hope in this and every generation?

As the children of those generations of bondage and tears lift up this golden calf of pride for the world's applause they reject, like the children of Israel, the will and heart of the very God of Justice who made provision for their deliverance from floggings and unrequited toil, from contumely and searing humiliation. I grieve because I fear that like the Israelites of old, this generation prepares for itself a trial of renewed oppression, a place by the rivers of Babylon where they will learn again from hardship to seek the mercy of God by the only path that finds him- the path marked out by the true Messiah who best exemplified respect for his righteousness and obedience to his will. His is the heart from which we know the truth their new, false prophet of unity and hope cast down by the wayside in his rise to notoriety: real love and hope would rather lose all to preserve respect for God's true gift of life than preside, by its destruction, over a nation departed from his knowledge and headed for calamity.

"For the LORD knows the way of the just: but the way of the unjust shall perish." (Psalms 1:6)