Clarkson on Obama and Wallis

Fred Clarkson has posted the most incisive analysis on the internet of Barak Obama's recent speech to "Call to Renewal."

He also correctly points out that Obama is parroting Wallis' straw man arguments about "secularists."

The influence of Wallis on Bill Clinton in 1996 (when he encouraged him to support John Ashcroft's "Charitable Choice" legislation) and on the Democratic Party since the 2004 Presidential election, has made Wallis the left's premier willing dupe for the Religious Right.

Nothing Wallis has done politically since 1996 has served to alleviate poverty in this country. Conditions for the bulk of the poor have deteriorated year after year since "Charitable Choice" began.

Wallis has written a shelf full of books as the plight of the poor has become more and more desperate. All he has accomplished is to lay a foundation for religious conflicts to move more openly and fully into the political sphere.

History amply demonstrates that these conflicts often lead to the kind of violence that increases poverty and makes it more severe and widespread.

At a conference at Baylor University in April of 1996, Wallis was fully informed and repeatedly warned that his disdain for the First Amendment would serve the purposes of the Dominionist Right and would only make it easier for them to turn the poor out into the streets. James Dunn, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, Derek Davis, Director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, Phil Lineberger, Director of the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Foy Valentine, retired Director of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a host of other ardent church-state separationists might as well have been talking to a brick wall. Like many Dominionists, Wallis seems to think the end (for Wallis -- helping the poor; for Dominionists -- building a theocracy) justifies the means -- gutting the First Amendment and its prohibition of discrimination against religious minorities.

The reason why Wallis always speaks generically about "secularists," never naming them, is because he well knows that naming all the moderate, mainstream Baptist leaders who have opposed him face-to-face on church-state issues would only serve to negate his position.