Stop Religious and Political Hate Speech Against the President

***update***

Read Thomas Friedman’s piece in today’s New York Times about the parallels between this time in America with President Obama and the time before Rabin was assassinated in Israel in 1995.

As Progressive Revival readers know, I am worried about the level of violent language that is being leveled at our President. This article from Religious Dispatches has brought me close to the edge of panic as I really am beginning to fear for our President’s life. I missed this story when it first came out but someone recently brought it to my attention. Reading that a christian “pastor” is leading his congregation by praying for our President’s death is repulsive and terrifying.

But it is not only religious leaders – recently a sitting member of congress – Rep Trent Franks recently called the President an “enemy of humanity.” He said this at a so-called Values Conference!!! Rep. Franks was specifically talking about President Obama’s pro-choice position, but this is hardly an excuse. The consequences of the rhetoric of death towards anyone who disagrees with the pro-life movement has been clearly demonstrated in the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

Pastors and politicians should realize that their words are being listened to carefully. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, domestic terrorist groups such as the Patriots who carried out the Oklahoma bombings are reforming. All decent religious people should call upon their leaders to stop religious hate speech against the President. If you hear it, confront it.

See the article about the pastor praying for Obama’s death

Chris Broughton, 28, made national news when he showed up to protest a speech by President Barack Obama in Phoenix, Arizona with an AR-15 automatic rifle slung over his shoulder and a handgun. While Broughton claims that his (apparently legal) actions were not meant to threaten the president, there was more to the story than a single citizen’s dubious actions and pronouncements. Local print and television coverage in Phoenix, and bloggers all over the country, have led the way on an interesting and important story of religion and politics that has been almost entirely ignored by the traditional media.
Here is what they missed.

The night before Broughton’s fifteen minutes of fame, he attended a fiery Sunday sermon by his pastor, Rev. Steven L. Anderson, at Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Rev. Anderson, also 28, explained not only “Why I Hate Barack Obama,” but also why he and God both want the president dead. “When I go to bed tonight,” Broughton’s pastor declared, “Steven L. Anderson is going to pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell.” He even goes so far as to claim that:
God appointed [Obama] to destroy this country for the wickedness of the United States of America. God appointed him because that’s what our country has turned into. That’s who we deserve as a president.

And yet, even though we may deserve Obama, Anderson urges his congregation to pray for the president’s death, issuing imprecatory prayers and repeatedly asking God to kill the president. Most dramatically, and in an interesting shift to the passive voice, he said Obama “ought to be aborted” because the president is pro-choice, and therefore a “murderer.” Despite all this Anderson has insisted to reporters that he was not calling for vigilante violence. Ditto for Broughton, who told a reporter for the Phoenix New Times: “I don’t care how God does it, I’m not going into further detail than that,” said Broughton. “It would be better now than later.”

“However it happens, I’m going be happy that it happens,” he continued. “I’m gonna be a happy man… I would rejoice.”

Read the entire story about religious hatred of the president here

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