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  Prayer and Consequences

  Posted Friday, December 19, 2008 4:32 PM | By E.J. Graff
  Rachael, I am so glad to be on this blog with you. You do make me examine myself for intellectual double standards. Remember, though, that we're critiquing the same politician—Barack Obama—for his ministerial choices, albeit different choices in different circumstances.  

  And, in response to your specific points, I do find those circumstances to be different in important ways. I found Wright's views to be appalling, but I found the Republican flogging of his views to be race-baiting. I suspected—no evidence, just a hunch—that he went to that church for political reasons, small-p political, socializing with the people who could help in Chicago politics and all that. So when Obama disavowed those views and quit the church, I shrugged off his attendance. I expect certain kinds of small compromises and hypocrisy from politicians, I suppose, and that one didn't seem especially large.  

  But like Dahlia, I find it to be a quite different thing to give a minister a national podium—essentially, to ask him to give the nation's prayer, to ask that minister to invoke his (can anyone remember a female in that spot?) divinity's blessing on our highest national office. How would you feel if it were Wright giving that prayer? What kind of racialized uproar would we be seeing?

  And yet take a white extremist—someone who espouses what most of us see as unacceptable misogyny, someone who believes in evangelizing all people to his own religion, someone who gives voice to relatively extreme antigay sentiments (as Sara pointed out)—and give him a podium, and the mainstream nods at how inclusive Obama is.
  

  I see a double standard here, but not the same one that you see.

  Filed under: Barack Obama, inauguration, Rick Warren, Rev. Jeremiah Wright

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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