In the aftermath of an election in which President Obama received 93 per cent of the black vote, radio show host and author Michael Brown, a self-proclaimed white evangelical, wrote an “open letter to black evangelicals” accusing them of voting to reelect the president out of “blind allegiance to the Democratic party.” He goes on to insinuate that African American evangelicals compromised their Christian convictions out of racial solidarity.
“Was there no moral compromise involved in voting for him? Are there no issues that could disqualify him in your eyes?” he asks.
I try not to get upset about anything I read online. But to me Brown’s question is incredibly insensitive, ignorant and offensive. In fact, I think there is a good case to be made for replacing “him” with “Romney” in that question and asking it of white evangelicals.
Yes, President Obama took ungodly stands on abortion and same-sex marriage. But far more emphasis is placed in Scripture on issues such as greed, honesty, care for the poor, not to mention worshiping and proselytizing for a false god.
Think about how Gov. Romney is perceived among African-Americans on these important biblical issues.
Gov. Romney is someone whose stated policies would gut programs that help the poor in order to lower taxes on the wealthy, because he considers them the “job producers.” By his own policy pronouncements, a Romney administration would inevitably subject the poor to even greater misery than they now suffer.
With more than 30 million poor people in this country sometimes literally dying because they can’t get insurance and cannot pay for the health care they need, Gov. Romney promised that his first priority would be to take back the access to medical care that was given them by ObamaCare, leaving them in a condition where quite literally Gov. Romney’s dog has better medical care than these people would. Yet, before he ran as a “severely conservative” Republican, Gov. Romney fathered ObamaCare (RomneyCare), and even in this campaign, couldn’t refrain from expressing his pride in that accomplishment.
In other words, Gov. Romney had no problem condemning millions of his fellow citizens to lives filled with stress, anxiety, pain, suffering and early death, by removing their access to medical care, just to enhance his political prospects.
This is the Romney African Americans know.
He ran what many in the press call the most dishonest campaign in memory. He started by running ads that took a statement President Obama had made about Sen. McCain in the 2008 race, and made it seem that the president was talking about himself. He continued by falsely accusing President Obama of removing the work requirement from welfare, being fully aware that “welfare” functions as a code word to stir up negative images of black people among many in the Republican base. He topped it off with a final lie about Jeep sending jobs to China.
When Newt Gingrich, who became a Romney surrogate, called President Obama a welfare/food stamp president, and when another surrogate, John Sununu, said the president needed to learn how to be an American, Romney made no protest. He also had no problems campaigning with birther Donald Trump, whose comments about the president were overtly racist.
This is the Romney African Americans know.
“Was there no moral compromise involved in voting for (a bishop of an ungodly religion that aggressively seeks to convert people to its unbiblical belief system)? Are there no issues that could disqualify (Gov. Romney) in your eyes?”
Michael Brown should pose that question to himself.
Ron Franklin
Photo credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza (public domain)