One More Time
Posted on May 4th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Fine, one more post on the endless Wright controversy. On several occasions, I have argued that there is a double standard being applied in the treatment of Hagee and Wright, but it isn’t the double standard that is being routinely trotted out in recent days. Frank Rich sums up this view:
But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.
Of course, one of the reasons why the Wright business provokes many conservatives is the resentment of a double standard when it comes to racial attitudes, whether perceived or real, that is deployed against whites and conservatives in particular. If Joe Biden so much as makes a bad joke, it’s treated as if it were a three-alarm fire, Geraldine Ferraro’s basically innocent remark “has no place in our politics” (as Obama likes to put it) and we heard a cacophony about what Obama called the “quiet violence” of Don Imus (and those are just some of the most prominent episodes in the last year or so), but all Obama needs to do to satisfy most journalists is to disavow his pastor. Heaven help an actual conservative who utters some poorly chosen words, because no one else will save him. So if there is a double standard on racial matters, it is one that is indisputably working to Obama’s advantage, at least as far as the media are concerned, while the white Democratic voters who are moving away from him are probably doing so at least in part because they know full well that they would be ostracised or fired if they were to utter anything even 1/100th as incendiary or provocative as the things that Wright says on a daily basis. I suspect that this grates on some people. As I have been trying to say before, what we should want to see is an end to this mindless policing of thought, speech and association, but as long as we do have it let’s be clear about who usually benefits from the double standard.
Of course, it is absolutely legitimate to take a candidate’s associates into account when you vote, but then it seems to me that those who have closely associated themselves with Mr. Bush have a great deal of explaining to do–will they disavow him, his errors and his crimes? (Of course, we know they won’t.) After all, ironically enough, McCain owes Bush for some significant part of his political success in a couple of ways: in a very direct way, many from Bush’s campaign backed McCain early on and made him the heir apparent, which, despite the failures of 2007, helped to carry him on to win the nomination, and in a negative way Bush provided McCain with the perfect foil against which he could cast himself as the reformer and independent-minded McCain of myth. McCain owes his current position to Mr. Bush much more than Obama owes his to Wright, yet there is no expectation that he will meaningfully repudiate Mr. Bush more than he has, which isn’t very much.
There is absolutely a double standard being applied to Wright and Hagee that lets Hagee (and, by extension, McCain) off the hook, and it is pretty obvious why. Hagee is the head of an influential lobby that supports Israel and takes the hardest imaginable line on policy in the Near East, so the combination of a “pro-Israel” position and a reflexively pro-war view secures Hagee and anyone who associates with him from any serious criticism. In other words, he has taken what is somehow considered a “respectable” and “mainstream” view on these policies, and this inoculates him to other criticism that he has awful views of Catholics. Meanwhile, Wright’s policy views with respect to Israel and the Near East are diametrically opposed to Hagee’s (and, for that matter, to most of Obama’s views), and it is as much for this (and the “anti-Americanism” charge) that the media focus on him with so much more intensity, and it is for this reason that Obama had to throw in that fairly blatant pandering line on Israel in his Philadelphia speech that otherwise had nothing to do with foreign policy. Wright has said offensive, untrue and stupid things; Hagee has actively promoted dangerous, destructive and stupid policies and gloried in the bombardment of civilian populations. The latter is treated as a “legitimate” policy view that should not be stigmatised or challenged, while the former must be vigorously policed and punished. Lieberman calls Hagee a “man of God,” while Wright is deemed by pundits left and right to be a crackpot. Would that we could work up as much indignation for the terrible policies that Hagee regularly endorses and promotes as we have for words that are basically irrelevant to the business of government.
Besides, there is a general double standard that is going to define the entire campaign: McCain was a media darling before most people knew who Obama was. Not just any white politician, much less a Republican, could normally get away with being tied to Hagee as easily as he has, but McCain is basically untouchable by the media because the media refuse to question his judgement, which most of them have already decided is sound and reliable. When he panders, his admirers in the press corps make excuses for him (”he doesn’t really believe that!”); when he gets things amazingly wrong, they cover for him (”he has tremendous experience and knowledge on national security!”); when he tells what are obviously lies, the bold teller of truths is given a pass because the journalists know, deep down, that at least McCain feels really bad about lying. McCain could associate with known criminals and terrorists, and the media would find a way to put it in a good light (”he was gathering intel on their operations!”).
Filed under: foreign policy, politics, religion
Lieberman calls Hagee a “man of God,†while Wright is deemed by pundits left and right to be a crackpot.>
Ah, clarity in its most pure form.
This is absolutely right. If a Republican – well, perhaps not John McCain, but any other Republican – had frequented the church of a right-wing, racialist pastor who blamed the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., he’d have been run off the scene well before he was given the chance to “reject and denounce” (or is it “disown”?). But so long as your unsavory associations are with figures who support American militarism and put “patriotism” over principle, you have nothing to fear. If I had to choose a pastor between Hagee and Wright, I hope I’d have the nerve to go with the latter, though of course that isn’t saying much.
I agree with everything you said except the first paragraph–that I disagree with strongly. I find your “thought police” rhetoric to badly misunderstand why people of oppressed groups–sexual, gender, and racial–object to discourse that marginalizes them.
It is still the case that blacks, women, and gays receive far more oppression for their identities then do white, heterosexual, males and that this oppression is maintained and perpetuated through rhetoric. Minorities adduce that one way to end such oppression is to oppose the type of discourse that leads to their marginalization (eg Gays successfully removing homosexuality from the DSM).
Furthermore, this “thought policing” (ie boundaries of acceptable discourse) is by no means a one way street. There is a plethora of rhetoric and behavior that is not acceptable of gays, blacks, and women that will result in censure, punishment, and sometimes violence.
Speaking as a gay man, I must police my words to ensure that I not be fired from my job (I have a room mate, not a partner, while everyone else has a husband or a wife). I also need to ensure that if I hold my partner’s hand or give him a kiss in public that I do so in a safe place, otherwise I risk being physically assaulted.
With that said, I completely agree with you that “thought policing” is universally a bad idea. I’d rather live in a community in which someone can damn me to hell and call me the F-word then one in which people cannot freely share their thoughts and emotions. Thought policing is anti-thetical to free speech and toxic to a democracy.
However, that doesn’t mean that people don’t have legitimate reasons for wanting people to talk and argue differently. Phrenology after all wasn’t just an erroneous scientific theory.
[...] Double standards May 4, 2008, 5:22 pm Filed under: elections, politics, religion, war | Tags: anti-Catholicism, Barack Obama, Daniel Larison, Israel Lebanon, Jeremiah Wright, Joe Lieberman, John Hagee, John McCain, Middle East, militarism, Rod Dreher, Zionism Daniel Larison thinks there is a double standard – several of them, in fact – at work in the way the public and the punditry have responded to the Obama-Wright and McCain-Hagee relationships. I agree. Rod Dreher does not: McCain isn’t being held responsible for Hagee because McCain didn’t spend 20 years sitting in the pews at Hagee’s church, and didn’t claim Hagee as his spiritual mentor. Everybody knows that McCain is not a particularly religious man, and doesn’t care for the religious right. Fault McCain for cynicism or weakness by making nice with them, and you’re on solid ground. But most people perfectly well understand that John Hagee’s theology has had little or no influence on John McCain’s thinking. [...]
I also agree with almost everything you said, though I think the first paragraph was spot on in terms of describing the limits that are set racial discourse in the U.S. . African-Americans, along with homosexuals and women, may be limited in how they can behave and what they are allowed to say in certain circumstances, but they are also considered protected classes under numerous federal and state laws, not to mention the pressure their lobbies can (and often do) bring on anyone deemed to be doing them an injustice. The “thought policing” that is referred to in the post on the other hand is carried out by the state (with support from academia and a vast network of think tanks and social organizations) rather than by small groups of bigoted citizens. Anyone who takes freedom of speech and association seriously should be concerned.
But my main point had to do with Hagee. I’m not denying that McCain usually gets a free pass from the media, but is Hagee really considered to be that mainstream? I assumed people let McCain off the hook over that endorsement not because they saw Hagee as mainstream, but because they simply didn’t care that much. Enough to be angry for a little while at least, but not enough to keep at it like those who were offended by Wright seem to have done. The biggest issue with Hagee was his anti-Catholicism, and Republicans don’t seem to let that bother than too much. Their candidates can give speeches at Liberty University without too much of a fuss for example. Perhaps I misjudged the amount of anger over these events, but I thought it was more a case of apathy over the cause of the controversy. In my opinion “anti-patriotic” and anti-white sentiment seem to just get people angrier than anti-Catholicism does.
You’re assuming the relationship between Hagee and McCain is the same as that between Obama and Wright. That seems to me obviously wrong. Hagee is not the pastor at McCain’s church and McCain has never considered him a close friend and advisor/confidant. Moreover, McCain has not listened to Hagee’s sermons for more than a decade…
Not at all. I consider the relationship between Hagee and McCain to be much worse because it is less personal and therefore more based on policy agreement, as I have said time and again. You’re right that they’re not comparable–McCain’s ties to Hagee ought to be taken much more seriously than Obama’s ties to Wright have been, because they are indicative of much more dangerous ideas.
Re: anti-Catholicism, it is true that most people, outside of Catholic circles, tend not to worry about it, and it has become one of the last fashionable prejudices around. At one level, the media don’t care about Protestants bashing Catholics, because they assume that this is just par for the course with religious folks, and some of them will be hard pressed to generate much outrage at claims that the Catholic Church is responsible for modern anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, since many of them already believe something very much like that. For them, Hagee is a sort of evangelical Goldhagen, and they all seem to share a common antipathy to Catholicism that makes Hagee’s outbursts less troubling. Even so, the larger problem with Hagee isn’t that he loathes Catholicism, as he evidently does, but that he cheers on warmongering and engages in warmongering himself. The controversy over Hagee hasn’t been that he exulted in the bombing of Lebanon in a fairly un-Christian way, but that he has said unpleasant things about Catholics, so even within the limited scrutiny Hagee has received we see the same bizarre division between horrible actions that receive little attention and awful statements that receive the lion’s share of criticism. Frankly, I would rather have someone who thinks Catholics and Orthodox are idolaters and what-have-you, but who does not celebrate their bombardment as God’s work, than have someone who “respects” a faith and then cheers on the destruction of actual living members of that faith. With Hagee you get the worst of both.
“Not at all. I consider the relationship between Hagee and McCain to be much worse because it is less personal and therefore more based on policy agreement, as I have said time and again.”
That’s the thing… very few observers assume, as do you, that there was any real policy agreement… They think McCain was just being cynical because there was no extensive relationship.
To my mind, and it looks like most peoples, it seems more reasonable to believe that listening to sermons on a regular basis means either agreement or infection…
I don’t assume that there is policy agreement–there *is* policy agreement, and there has been such agreement for years. They come to those positions for different reasons, but they have been in agreement on Israel and the Near East for some time.
Policy agreement was a poor choice of words on my part.
It’s clear that the two agree on some issues, the question is how many and how strongly…
To me, it simply appears that the majortiy of observers have come to the decision that McCain and Hagee agree on things that are an acceptable part of the the national politacal dialogue and do not agree on the more outlandish and unacceptable things…
Such as (from Rich):
The woman is “the Great Whore,†Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.†That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,†which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.
[...] One More Time 9 Benny One Six, Daniel Larison, Benny One Six [...] [...]