Obama Driven from Church

Barack Obama's having to leave his church is a bad sign for religious freedom in the US. People should be free to attend the church of their choice. Obama is a special case because he is running for president, but not that special. Admittedly, the US is not like the old Soviet Union where people were persecuted for going to church, or like a country that has an established religion connected to the government, like the situation that drove the Pilgrims and the Puritans to the US centuries ago, or like the Nazi persecution of the Jews, although that was more racial than religious.

What Obama's experience shows is that you have to be a member of a pretty bland, mainstream, widely accepted church if you don't want to be persecuted for your religion. While Obama's pastor may have been controversial, the United Church of Christ is not. And most recently, Obama was criticized because of what a visiting Roman Catholic priest said in his church. America says, "Don't you dare try to listen to other points of views. Don't you dare try to understand other religions. We'll crucify you."

It's hard to tell how much this religious hatred emanated from the Clinton campaign, how much from Republicans and their proxies like Fox News, how much from the evangelical right, and how much from news media that just wanted a story. But the end result was that Obama was not free to attend the church of his choice, and that's sad for America.

Israel Rejects Bush's Advice

The NYT rightly points out that Israel rejected Bush's advice directed at Obama not to negotiate with regimes you don't like, although it gave him time to get out of the country before Israel's talks with Syria became public. It just makes Bush and the neocons look like idiots. And they endanger the US in the process.

American-Israeli Pundits

In his blog, Patrick Lang takes on David Brooks' column in the NYT. I always liked Col. Lang's commentary on PBS, and I was happy to find his blog. Brooks is one of the more intelligent conservative columnists; so, it's disturbing when a reasonable moderate like Lang finds: "David Brooks is not an editorial columnist. He is a propagandist for the hard right in this country and in Israel." If this is Brooks, then what about a wild man like Charles Krauthammer. There's a more reasonable piece in the WP by James Rubin, but must the entire commentariat be Jewish? I definitely suspect their loyalty to the US, in that I believe they are more concerned about Israel's security than about America's. But it's arguable that that is a legitimate perspective for a 100% American. It's just not my perspective. I think the "I" by Sen. Joe Lieberman's party affiliation means "Israeli" not "Independent."

Just for the record, I am outraged at Bush's comments in Israel about an appeasement Senator (read Obama) who is the current day Neville Chamberlain. Bush should not have taken domestic politics overseas, although Republicans probably view Israel as a 51st state; maybe Democrats do, too. I don't, and so I thought his comments were extremely inappropriate. But it shows how much Jews control American foreign policy, and tilt it toward Israel. Bush probably raked in millions for the RNC and McCain by his comments.

MSNBC had a stupid but telling segment on Hardball, where Chris Matthews asked some apologist for Bush what Chamberlain did that was so bad. The apologist didn't know, but wouldn't admit that he didn't know. Matthews finally said that it was that Chamberlain agreed to Hitler's military occupation of Czechoslovakia, not that Chamberlain advocated talking to Hitler. McCain prostituted himself by buying into Bush's comments, but he will get lots of Jew money for doing so, and he needs money. But that's what prostitutes are: people who sell themselves for money.

HIV and American Visas

Andrew Sullivan's op-ed in the Washington Post reminds me of an experience at the State Department in the early 1990s. I was the deputy director of an office called OES/EHC, which stood for Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science/Office of Environment, Health, and Conservation. Under the health responsibility I had an M.D. who in theory worked for me, although as a doctor, he made far more than I did. He wanted to take on the Jesse Helms visa ban on HIV-positive foreigners, and I went along to give him bureaucratic support. He took me to meet with HIV medical specialists in HHS and other agencies, and they convinced me that the Helms proposal was improper. At that time, the only basis for denying a visa to someone coming to the US was that they had a highly infectious disease. Jesse claimed that HIV was highly infectious, but the medical people said it was not. The only disease that was categorized as truly highly infectious was tuberculosis. They said that you couldn't catch HIV by sitting next to someone on a bus, for example.

So, my M.D. and I wrote a memo to the Secretary of State, then Jim Baker, saying that the Jesse Helms proposal should be rejected. Both my boss, the Assistant Secretary for OES, and the Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, who was responsible for visas, signed off on it. We sent it on its way to Baker, but it had to go through the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, who was then Bob Zoellick, who is now President of the World Bank. Zoellick never passed the memo on to Baker; he kept it buried in his in-basket. I somewhat respected that decision, because the memo asked for a decision from Baker that put him in a no-win situation. Clearly the right legal, scientific thing to do was to reject the Helms proposal, because it had no legal or scientific justification. However, Jesse Helms was a great, powerful enemy of the State Department in the Senate. If Baker made Helms mad, there would be hell to pay on many other issues, probably ranging from the State Department budget to major issues of war and peace. So, Zoellick protected Baker from ever having to put his fingerprints on our memo.

It was bad law; it was unfair to HIV-positive people, but politically it was probably the best thing for the State Department. My colleagues and I periodically tried to press Zoellick to release the memo, but he never did. Neither of the Assistant Secretaries, much less people at our level, had the clout to bypass Zoellick.

I didn't know until I read Sullivan's column that Congress had subsequently passed a specific law banning HIV-positive people. A law has a better legal justification than Helms' regulation, although neither has scientific or humane justification, as Sullivan points out.

If you ask me, the fear of HIV is a sign of the same cowardice as the fear of terrorists. This generation of political leaders who grew up during Vietnam is, with a few exceptions, a generation of draft dodgers. They were either too afraid or too selfish to go to fight in Vietnam, and now they are afraid of HIV and terrorists, so afraid that they resort to torture of terrorists, and other extra legal means of dealing with both terrorists and HIV-positive people. It's a sad commentary on America.