McCain under scrutiny: Hagee endorsement and gaffe in Texas
By J.R. | February 29, 2008
Filed Under Campaigns and Elections, President |
Evangelist John Hagee endorsed Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain Wednesday. Should anyone care? Well, the Catholic League does. And so do many others.
McCain gladly received the endorsement of the preacher who once called the Catholic Church “The Great Whore”, but now calls McCain, a “man of principle.”
Personally, I find Hagee to be repugnant with his statements. His comments are inflammatory and completely unnecessary. McCain should distance himself from such “supporters”, as Obama has done with Uncle Louie.
However, an endorsement, and the acceptance such an endorsement, still does not make the person on the receiving end the same in beliefs, thoughts and ideas as the person giving it. In other words, the sins of the father are not passed onto the son.
Bottom-line, McCain has shown no anti-Catholicism in his public statements or policies. This is, as usual, much ado about nothing.
McCain also had a bit of a slip-up in Texas calling himself a “conservative liberal Republican”:
(h/t: Tongues of Fire)
Hey — he could have meant that he was liberal in the economic sense of the word, right? Kind of funny, but just a gaffe. He was likely thinking of what he was getting ready to say about his Democratic rivals.
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I guess McCain would need to denounce just about every religious leader who is not Catholic because many have made theological statements like this in the past. I think Evangelicals and Catholics have somewhat made up because they agree on the family issues like abortion and gay marriage.
Many if not most fundamentalist-evangelical churches, especially in the South, used to refer to the Catholic Church as the “great whore.” McCain or any other Republican would have to denounce support from just about every Southern Baptist leader who supports them. Since Hagee is considered mainstream within the evangelical community, a GOP canidate that rejected support from a conservative evangalical leader would probably lose support from most of that community. That would include Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, and probably most of the Southern Baptist Conventions conservative leadership as well as other penecostal demominations conservative leadership. That would be the death blow to the Republican Party, especially in the south.
John Hagee is considered mainstream and he is also very popular among evangelicals. Believe me, this is a huge endorsement for McCain in Texas. This will help McCain big time.
He looks tired, he’s not had to campaign like this for a while. I’m sure he’s sleep deprived.
As for Hagee’s endorsement, he’s safe accepting it because a good chunk of his base is confortable with it, and many of the non-evangelical voters have pretty much come to expect such rhetoric from many of the movements figureheads. While Hagee himself may not be a general household name in much of the US, his counterparts of Dobson, Robertson, and others are, and much of non-evangelical America has gotten desensitized to their pontification of the week. This differs from Farrakhan’s endorsement of Obama. Farrakhan is in many ways a single and more unique figure, with less of a stage than the collective evangelical leaders. As such, his verbal depravity is not as familiar to the general Amercian public, and still has the ability to produce outrage instead of head-shaking wonderment.