From Reuters: Lieberman praises pastor repudiated by McCain:
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Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who frequently campaigns with McCain, said pastor John Hagee's support for Israel outweighed the remarks that led McCain to reject his endorsement.
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Hagee has written that events in the Middle East point to an imminent apocalypse Christians should welcome, and in several books envisions a climactic battle in Israel leading to the second coming of Jesus.
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2 comments:
This is scary to me. In most liberal/modern countries the far out religious nutcases are marginalized or withdrawing from the surrounding society altogether . Contemporary USA is the only such place I know of where they have part control of the levers of power and able to push for more.
Janne:
The United States is by far the least secular nation in the non-Islam world. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, not to mention Great Britain, which share similar cultural roots, do not display this usually harmless, sometimes useful, but on occasion destructive characteristic. America is a belief-system nation. In this regard, I hope that you’ll find this interview interesting. It doesn’t address the issue at hand, but I think that it provides very useful background beyond the U.S. question. I’ll add that religious practice in America appears to be a heady mixture of transcendence (which I think is Mr. Carse’s definition of the essence of religion), belief systems (Armageddon or bust!), and superstition (God helped us win the Super Bowl).
I had something else in mind, though, when I pointed to Senator Lieberman’s acceptance of support from this John Hagee character. In the United States, an overtly multiethnic society of immigrants, public officials may replace the national interest with that of another to please their constituencies. This is most evident in U.S. policy towards the Israel-Palestine conflict and to a lesser extent Cuba. But Senator Lieberman is not pandering here; he himself is the constituency.
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