Whoa.

The comments to that are killing me. All of the people complaining about him “pandering” to the GLBT community with the speech- yeah, because if you want to pander to the gay community, the place to do it is a black church in the deep South, where you call out those in your audience for falling short of the church’s leader’s ideals.

–d

He’s a magnificient orator, and this will likely go down as his “Sister Souljah” speech.

Sadly, he had to make it because an event earlier this year featured a fundamentalist christian preacher and singer who’s one of those “ex-gay” organization people.

He’s a magnificent orator, and will make a wonderful rallying point. I just don’t think he’s got the policy or experience to actually get things done. Plus, his praise of Reagan in the last week and his effort to out-do the Clintons on “reaching out to the other side” scares me silly.

Personally, I’m tired of trying to compromise with people so far to the right that even if we could get them to compromise fairly (and we can’t) the positions we’d end up in would be actively counter to our long term goals.

Obama would make a great vice president. But I’m for showing people what Democratic leadership, and partisanship, really means. Edwards for President, Dodd for Majority Leader, Obey for Speaker.

Zenrage:

So to you, there’s no difference between using a well-know religious story to frame a point and using a religious text to claim absolute, objective authority with no room for debate?

Must suck that Dennis is such a huge fan of the Sermon on the Mount…

I didn’t say Dennis was perfect, but he’s the best of the lot and he sure as shit wont kowtow to the religious wrong.

And no, there is no difference between using spiritual conjecture to frame a point or to claim objective morality. Since religious faith can neither be quantified nor qualified, the mainstream theist only serves to enable the religious extremist by accepting, establishing, maintaining and spreading the social dependency on religious faith and all things faithful to religion.

Religion doesn’t promote ethical behavior. If anything, the automatic pseudo-validation of “my god said so” only encourages that unethical behavior be done in the name of whatever religion’s invisible sky genie.