Over at Spiritual Politics, Mark Silk notes that there was no great clamoring for McCain to reject John Hagee’s endorsement, especially after Catholic League president Bill Donohue forgave him for his long record of anti-Catholic remarks:

One of the odd things about the Hagee affair is that it did not end in the usual way. Usually, there’s some particular religious group–Catholics, say, or Muslims, or Mormons–who take offense at some remarks, and thus the candidate must disavow. Thus it was the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue who blew the anti-Catholicism whistle when Pastor Hagee surfaced in the present campaign, first inviting Mike Huckabee to his church and then giving his thumbs up to McCain. But there has been no outpouring of outrage from the organized Jewish community in reaction to the revelation that Hagee had, in a sermon perhaps a decade ago, allowed as how God had permitted the Holocaust in order to hustle the Jews off to the Holy Land. So far as I can see, only the leader of Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, spoke out publicly, in the form of a letter of inquiry on behalf of his constituents to Pastor Hagee. Yoffie has in recent weeks stood out as a prominent critic of Hagee’s, in the face of his warm embrace as a friend of Israel by the likes of Aipac and Abe Foxman…

The same is true of McCain’s rejection yesterday of Rev. Rod Parsley. (The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a press release calling on the presumptive Republican nominee to “unequivocally distance himself” from Parsley, but that landed in God-o-Meter’s inbox after the deed had already been done.)
Will McCain’s proactive disavowal of Hagee and Parsley, in the absence of calls to do so from the groups who were most likely offended by their remarks, make the Christian Right even angrier at him than it already is? Will the movement see this as McCain’s latest concession to the liberal mainstream media?

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