Lip Service

Good Morning America was still talking about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright this morning. Must have been a slow news day yesterday.

Anyway, I was wondering why no-one else had encountered this sort of issue. But it occurred to me that someone has. Well, sort of, anyway. When Senator John Kerry was running for president, he was dogged by a persistent question:

"Can Kerry be a good Catholic and yet take positions as a lawmaker that contradict the teachings of the church on 'life issues,' especially abortion and embryonic stem-cell research?"
"John Kerry's Catholic Problem" Terry Eastland - The Daily Standard

Kerry's problem wasn't that people felt that his choice of church meant that he wasn't committed to his politics - it was that people felt that his politics showed that we wasn't committed to his church.

Somehow, I suspect that Senator Hillary Clinton would have the same problem, if someone cared to look. I don't know where she goes to church, outside of having encountered a David Horsey comic in which he ribs her about trying to appeal to Evangelicals by touting her Methodist upbringing. Now, I've never been to a Methodist church before, but I suspect that their doctrine is no more pro-choice than Roman Catholicism. But no-one has accused her of being a closet pro-lifer, despite that fact.

So in the end, it seems that Obama's problem is only partially his former pastor. It's also the fact, that unlike pretty much every other candidate, he's expected to take his pastor seriously.