…just watching this:

I don’t know for sure how much of this post is true, but I know a lot of it is. I didn’t write it, but I think it’s good enough that you should read it.

In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.

In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.) The man did so well in corpsman school that he was the valedictorian and became a cardiopulmonary technician. Not surprisingly, he was assigned to the Navy’s premier medical facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital, as a member of the commander in chief’s medical team, and helped care for President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery.

For his service on the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded him three letters of commendation. What is even more remarkable is that this man entered the Marines and Navy not many years after the two branches began to become integrated.

While this young man was serving six years on active duty, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was born the same year as the Marine/sailor, received five deferments, four for being an undergraduate and graduate student and one for being a prospective father. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both five years younger than the African-American youth, used their student deferments to stay in
college until 1968. Both then avoided going on active duty through family connections.

Who is the real patriot? The young man who interrupted his studies to serve his country for six years or our three political leaders who beat the system? Are the patriots the people who actually sacrifice something or those who merely talk about their love of country? After leaving the service of his country, the young African-American finished his final year of college, entered the seminary, was ordained as a minister, and eventually became pastor of a large church in one of America’s biggest cities.

This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retiring pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago.

As usual, there’s more to the story than the fluff the media covers on the surface. If we must judge, let’s weigh the facts and judge by the whole story for a change!!

You won’t see THIS story told on Fox about Rev. Wright. They won’t tell this truth, that the guy voluntarily left college at a time when many Americans (including several leaders from both parties) were staying in school as much as they could to avoid Vietnam. He left college and signed up for the Marines, and then did it again because he felt he had to live up to JFK’s challenge.

They won’t tell you that his sermon, where he said “God damn America” was in reference to America’s sin of slavery.

It’s easy for a white guy today to blow off slavery. I used to do it myself. I still think that some of the proposed solutions to the problems that it’s left us with are ridiculous; we’re not going to create a separate nation for black folks, we’re not going to set up some kind of payment system to settle it legally.

But think about this: Slavery was so ingrained in America that we wrote it into our Constitution- and we basically called black folks 3/5’s of a person. That’s utterly disgusting. If we’re going to look at things honestly, we MUST admit that slavery WAS horrible and that it DID already damn America.

Personally, I believe that the Civil War- which, by a death and wounded basis, is still by far our most costly war on a per-capita basis- was America’s penance for slavery. I think that since that turning point, we’ve been trying to do the right thing.

But when you think about how we treated slaves, and kept treating black people until just 30 or 40 years ago, it’s pretty obvious why some black people are SO pissed off. Hell, I’d be pissed off, too.

And despite all that, we see a guy like Barack Obama come along and hold out his hand in friendship and leadership and say “we gotta get past all this”.

That’s the mark of a true leader. He’s world-class, and if he doesn’t win the Presidency in 2008 it would be a tragedy for America.

So ignore the snippets and clips that show Wright as a horrible racist-sounding asshole, and take the entire man into consideration. And the next time you hear someone slagging on Obama for being associated with Wright, tell them the truth about Wright himself- not to argue, not to piss them off, but just ask them to really think about it.

Yeah, imagine my surprise.

One of my bigger disappointments when it comes to politics lately is just how craven both John McCain and Hillary Clinton have become in their quest for the Presidency. Clinton… well, that’s another post.

McCain, though, is just a big fat liar. He was super-pissed at George Bush and his people for the scummy smear job they pulled on him in the South Carolina primaries back in 2000, but he kissed and made up with W.

He voted against W’s tax cuts, but now favors making them permanent.

And he frequently has railed against the influence of the big lobbyist industry on politics, yet his campaign staff is full of… lobbyists.

The latest thing is this deal with his campaign’s jet use. There’s a rule that allows corporate jets to be used by candidates as long as they pay the price of a regular first-class ticket.

This is ridiculous, of course, because the difference between standard airline first class and a private bizjet is probably more than the difference between economy class and first class. Private bizjets are AWESOME, catering to your every whim and need, incredibly comfortable, tons of room, and of course… they’re private.

They want to close this loophole but thanks to Bush appointing some real bozos to the FEC, and the Democrats refusing to confirm them, they can’t close it for now. McCain supported closing the loophole and stopping the practice.

What’s more, McCain claimed that he wouldn’t use his wife’s considerable fortune to finance his campaign.

Now he’s managed to go back on both of those issues at the same time. He’s using his wife’s corporate bizjet, starting to do that right after being quoted saying that basically he wouldn’t do that kind of thing.

John Kerry got stuck with the “flip-flopper” label, somewhat undeservedly. He was a minor-leaguer flip-flopper compared with John McCain.

It’s one of the great ironies of our time. Religious right-winger types protest being kind to people and tolerance- in the name of God, they claim.

Locally, we have seen this happen. A local high school, Mt Si (which served as Twin Peaks High in that classic old TV show) has a student group called the “Gay Straight Alliance” that works for understanding and peace towards gay, lesbian, and transgendered people/students.

(More and more high schools have this kind of student group. A sign of the changing times; we would NEVER have had such a group in Enumclaw in the 80s, and Enumclaw is a lot like the Snoqualmie area where Mt Si is. Then again, to my knowlege, they still don’t have a GSA chapter at EHS, so maybe it hasn’t changed THAT much.)

Back in January, on Martin Luther King Junior Day, the school had invited a local pastor (and parent of a student) named Ken Hutcherson to speak at the school about tolerance and respecting others. This was a somewhat ironic choice, given that he is moderately infamous around here for being virulently anti-gay.

He’s also a blustering moron who bit off WAY more than he could chew by trying to challenge Microsoft a few years ago. Microsoft had initially taken a “no comment” stance on some gay rights/domestic partner legislation that was going through the Washington Legislature, but that proved to be a mistake for the company because A) their employees got pissed off and B) it made it harder for MS to recruit talented folks who happened to be gay.

Hutcherson decided that the way to defeat MS was first to threaten them in the media with a boycott or some such nonsense; he actually got a meeting with some mid-level Microsoft folks who told him that they were going to remain “no comment” on the legislation, and he came away claiming that they’d backed down to him. They said “um, no, we didn’t” and clarified what they said.

(Considering their 90%+ market penetration, good luck with that whole boycott thing anyway.) The company ultimately wound up ignoring Hutcherson and supporting the bill, which was later passed by the Legislature and signed into law. (And remarkably, the world didn’t end and God didn’t smite everyone in Washington with thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening, yikes.)

Then he later went on to bluster at a stockholder’s meeting, but in letters and emails to his flock he tried to make it sound like he’d had a one-on-one meeting with the heads of Microsoft. At the stockholder’s meeting…

At Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting in November, Hutcherson told the group that he was gathering evangelicals, Catholics, Jews and Muslims to challenge the company.

He told company leaders, “I could work with you, or I could be your worst nightmare, because I am a black man with a righteous cause, with a host of powerful white people behind me,” according to an e-mail update to his supporters. “I hope to hear from you and if not, you will hear from me.”

Does this guy have some skewed thinking or what? He suggests that his “righteous cause” alone isn’t powerful enough- that he needs those powerful white people behind him. Weird.

Anyway, the whole thing was because he doesn’t like gays. That’s what it comes down to. He doesn’t like a big company like Microsoft having an influence on public policy, he doesn’t like schools teaching kids that they should be kind to each other even if the other person is gay, and he’s just plain a bigot.

At that MLK Day gathering, he got basically heckled by two teachers who challenged his stance on tolerance in a racial arena by comparing it to his stance on gays. It’s a pretty fair comparison, really; he doesn’t want gays to have rights, and racists didn’t want black guys like him to have rights, either.

So fast forward to this past week. The school was having a “Day of Silence” to bring gay/lesbian rights to the minds of the students; people participating would go the day without speaking to get people to think about how gay folks, for so many years, had to remain silent from fear of retribution.

Hutcherson didn’t like that, so he decided to have a protest against it.

Basically, he’s protesting against tolerance, peace, and understanding. He’s unhappy that the school system has the nerve to tell kids “hey, just because someone’s gay doesn’t mean you should treat them badly.”

I have to wonder- if Jesus were alive today (Hutcherson’s church is a Christian one), would he have been on the side of the pastor, or the side of those who were simply saying “be nice to gay folks”?

The complaint of the protestors is always that they’re having some “agenda” forced down their throats. Well, they’re right. The agenda of the gay folks (and the gay-friendly types, like me- we’re such radicals) is simple.

Our agenda is that nobody should live in fear of being bullied because they’re gay. Our agenda is that gay folks should be able to get a job, own a house, and generally be treated like anyone else in society. Our agenda is that they should be treated the way WE would like to be treated. Our agenda is, in short, the Golden Rule.

You know that radical Jesus guy… saying stuff like:

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

I guess I’m still a little Christian after all.