Link Banana

Related to Barack Obama’s speech, Christopher Hayes makes an interesting — if controversial — point that deserves wider airing:

Imagine for a moment that you are pro-life. You believe that each abortion represents the murder of an innocent child. And as it stands despite protests and lawsuits and bills passed in the state legislatures, and organizing and marching and lobbying and petitioning, abortion in America remains legal and each year over 1 million innocent children are murdered. Yet America continues to stand idly by and allow this mass slaughter. If you were religious, you might think that God judged America harshly for this crime, for the nation’s continuing indifference, and you might even think that God damns America for its tolerance of a holocaust.

It’s hard to imagine, though, that if a Republican presidential candidate were running for president and had a preacher with the views spelled out above, that it would cause much of a stir, or even register a blip in the brain-dead oscillations of the twenty-four-hour, scandal-cycle EKG. And yet here we are, five or six news cycles into an ongoing firestorm over a few seconds of two different sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Barack Obama’s (and Oprah Winfrey’s) Chicago church, and a man who Obama says “brought me to Jesus.” Just five minutes watching cable news coverage of the “scandal” and it’s hard not to conclude the episode represents just about everything repellent and degraded about the nation’s public discourse on religion, politics and race.

(via Ross Douthat)