Obama’s Divisive Strategy : Prez hopeful takes a page from the GOP’s racist playbook.

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Obama is the candidate of the same liberal elites who supported Howard Dean, ecstatic about the opportunity to challenge the old guard represented by Hillary Clinton. He’s promising to end the cynicism embodied by Clinton, the sort that “triangulates,” as he put it in a thinly veiled attack several weeks ago. He is also hungry, however, for black southern voters, many of whom are social conservatives on the subjects of homosexuality and the separation of church and state. So Obama decided to sign Donnie McClurkin, a Grammy-winning, African-American, “ex-gay” singer, onto his campaign as part of a Gospel tour of the important primary state of South Carolina.

McClurkin denies being homophobic (explaining away his views with the usual “Christian” apologetics, loving the sinner but hating the sin), yet his message about gay people is exceptionally egregious. He states that he was drawn into homosexuality by the rape and abuse he suffered as a child. Homosexuality, he says, is an affliction that its victims can overcome.


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WOULD ANY MAJOR presidential candidate associate with a black pastor who spoke of Jews or black people in the denigrating way that McClurkin talks about gays? It’s inconceivable. But gays are the one minority group that it’s still acceptable to ridicule, and Obama—despite his preachy talk of “hope”—is perpetuating this phenomenon. The Obama campaign’s continued advertising of its endorsement by McClurkin once again signifies that the Democrats are perfectly willing to use homophobia for their electoral advantage.

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During the 2004 presidential election, gay activists were rightly angry that President Bush and the GOP would use homosexuality as a wedge issue to whip up fear and win close elections across the country. Singling out a class of Americans as a basis for that fear—as Nixon did 1968—is reprehensible and destroyed Bush’s pledge to be a “uniter, not a divider.” For many years, the Human Rights Campaign and the Democratic presidential candidates have promised to offer us something different.
But the events of the past week have shown that even the most platitudinous of liberals is not immune from utilizing the cynical election tactics concocted by the right.

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