Obama for America

An email is circulating already within the Obama campaign community, but thought I'd mention the issue. It seems some inattentive racist (confusing Senator Obama with Rep. Ellis) is circulating the news that Barack Obama "insisted on taking his oath of office on a Koran". Right wing bloggers are distributing this story and putting out the idea that Obama is not loyal to the United States. This issue needs to be dealt with in the broadest possible spotlight, at the right moment, when all the other candidates can be shamed into admitting that this particular criticism is far out of bounds for a committed public servant like Obama and that the First Amendment protects all positions on individual faith.

The same people who now launch these ridiculous and infantile smears are those who saw no problem in Rush Limbaugh first arguing that drug users should get the death penalty for supporting narco-terrorism, then getting caught using his maid to support a shockingly compulsive illegal drug habit. Rush Republicans have no problem with arguing that the ACLU is a subversive group, despite its doing more to defend the Constitution than any other organization in our nation's history, then taking their support when they argued in his favor before a court of law. And so, they see no contradiction in saying Obama should explain things that never even happened, while George W. sould be allowed to refues to answer whether he was a drug user or even a long-term narcotics addict, at a younger age.

This campaign is about hope, about the American dream, about real devotion to real Constitutional liberties. We need to start drawing the clear line: this campaign seeks to unite Americans, but there is no room for hatred, intolerance or the sinister 'swift-boating' tactics of fearmongers and would-be kleptocrats. We need to start making the case, visibly and in a very consistent way, that these attacks on human dignity are an attack on the American system itself, that only people who are genuinely opposed to our Constitutional system can stand up and assault people for their race or for their reading. We need to remind people that a true America is one where people are judged by the "content of their character", not by racial stereotypes, not by political caricatures, not by cynics' facile hate speech.