Today and Obama

From The New York Times comes news on how Obama speech on race inspired some sermons today: Obama’s Talk Fuels Easter Sermons.

At Mount Ararat Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, the Rev. William H. Curtis said: “At the end of the day, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ makes it possible for even an African-American and a female to articulate the hopes and dreams of America, and do so with the hope of becoming president. Isn’t that wonderful?

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The Rev. Kent Millard of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Indianapolis said he felt Mr. Obama had explained the reality of the relationship between a pastor and his congregants.

“Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is member of our congregation, and I would hope he would never be held accountable for everything I have said in the last 15 years,” said Dr. Millard, who is white. “Why is there any assumption that a person in church is expected to agree with everything a pastor says?”

The London Times has an op/ed piece from American Andrew Sullivan on the race speech: Barack Obama dares to speak the truth about race.

So we are suspended between the old racial politics and a new form: between Hillary Clinton who believes in her heart that America is not ready, and may never be ready, for this leap and should therefore adopt a politics that assumes the ineradicability of this racial and cultural gulf and the need to disguise it and play cynical defence – and an Obama who offers the chance to see that sometimes authentic identity requires an element of contradiction, a bridging of the resentful, angry past and a more complex, integrated future.

The New York Times Magazine has Mixed Messenger. A very interesting essay on being biracial in America. I suggest reading it all.
More than anything, though, Hapas remind us that, while racism is real, “race” is a shifting construct. Consider: Would Obama still be seen as “black enough” if the wife by his side were white? And don’t get my husband started on why Tiger Woods — whose mother is three-quarters Asian and whose father was one-quarter Chinese and half African-American — is rarely hailed as the first Asian-American golf superstar.

Scotland's Sunday Herald publishes a column on our election. Today's headline is McCain wins when his rivals avoid the facts. I thought it worth reading if for no other reason than how it punctures some of our electoral and media pieties on our elections. Then there some hard truths for us:

Or living - for this might be actual effect - beneath the authentically heroic (but mad) John McCain.

Yes, the other ones. My money is still on the red party lunatic to win America's presidential election. Old, white and inclined to kill entire populations: what's to hate? The next president of the US will be the gibbering Vietnam vet. After all it's either that or a party that cannot choose between an N person or one who fails to keep her organs of reproduction on the outside.

McCain can't tell his Shia from his Sunni and cheerfully admits he knows nothing about economics. He may meantime have concocted a belief that a war - any war, who cares? - can continue forever (and ever). Pay attention, America. Offered this, a woman, or a tinted type, against whom would you assert that second amendment right to pop a cap?

Can anyone now seriously consider McCain?

As Bill Richardson said this week: time to stop fighting amongst ourselves.