I've been working day and night (an exaggeration, of course) what with my circulation of California Initiative Petitions and gathering the firewood from the California Department of Forestry's thinning of the brush and trees of the undeveloped chaparral just east of my house in the approach zone for the nearby light aircraft field on the west side of Redding.
First, I'd like to mention a couple of positives for John McCain's candidacy for President. He was not on my long or short list of candidates, but then there were problems for me with the entire pack. But McCain is a candidate who has taken a bold and clear stand against torture as an instrument in the war against the Islamofascists. He stated the obvious reality that controlled drowning, euphemistically called "water boarding," is torture, something that the U. S. Attorney General has not been able to bring himself to do, probably because of legal implications of the CIA's having used it.
In addition, I expect that McCain will try to find some reasonable and humane solution to the problem of America's eagerly using and sometimes exploiting Mexican immigrant labor in agriculture, industry and domestic service while not giving them any legal status. From a Biblical perspective, we must treat with care these aliens that we have invited by our willingness to pay them for their labor lest we violate the principle set forth in Yahweh's command to Israel about the aliens among them. He said, "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt" (Ex. 22:21, cf. Ex. 23:9; Lev. 24:22; Deut. 24:17). And Deuteronomy 27:19 pronounces a curse on anyone who withholds justice from the alien.
On the other hand, McCain, at a minimum, must accommodate us prolifers by maintaining the Bush Administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. This move is essential to the success of his candidacy and can hardly hurt him given the recent scientific breakthroughs that have made pluripotent stem cells available by ethical means.
To ensure that I have offended someone, I'll conclude with a comment I posted elsewhere:
Reverend Wright was right when he said that the United States got what it was asking for on 9/11, that is, if he meant a small taste of God's judgment for our national sins such as our putting money before God and legally aborting 50,000,000 of our offspring, black, white, brown and red.
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2 comments:
Glad to see you are back in the blogsphere. I was starting to wonder...
So was that an endorsement of McCain or a desperate effort to find something heartening about him due to the total incompatibility of the alternatives?
That was a pretty strong but conditional endorsement. McCain stands out from the pack in his clear denunciation of torture. And his willingness to work something out to provide a solution to the vexed problem of how to handle millions of Latino aliens is a good thing even if his deal with Kennedy was unacceptable.
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