[continued from page Obama home]

In a field of candidates consisting of a woman, a Mormon and a Hispanic, Obama is, by the way, African-American, a man of African and European mixed-racial heritage, having a Black father and a White mother.
 
Obama’s enigmatic aspect is profound. Obama looks like, talks like and shows up like no other candidate America has seen since JFK. Both men, well schooled, politically astute and intelligent, project a vision of fairness and strength (not platitudes) for America. Personal debt, health care costs and corporate outsourcing of jobs have placed the middle class under economic siege. The Iraq invasion has snuffed the lives of over 3,200 young soldiers fighting a mission-impossible for freedom in a land where people, apparently, do not want the US brand of freedom. Even Ray Charles could see that.
 
After nearly eight years of half-truths, spin truths and spin-spin, the American voter needs to exhale. And the White House should be re-named the Spin House because of the numbing number of shifting justifications and explanations for the war. Whatever the truth, it is a moving target, a cheap sideshow at a traveling carnival that comes to town. Pro-war or pro-peace, the invasion of Iraq has stained the integrity of the Presidency. America might just be ready for Obama. But don’t tell your Momma yet.
 
The myth of America
 
More than an election for President, the 2008 election will determine whether America begins to exercise enlightened policies of authentic cooperation in a shrinking world, a world where developing nations are the majority, or will America continue waging imperialist wars, the type of wars the American public cannot stomach? Like Kennedy offered the nation a New Frontier after the uninspiring reign of President Eisenhower and his Vice President Nixon, Obama offers America and the world a fresh start – one that contrasts remarkably bright against the backdrop of public opinion that feels disjointed from the President and conservative leadership at the top in general.
 
In the myth of America, two sensibilities are sacred (shopping might be third). The first sensibility is that the police can be trusted, which is suspect, particularly in light of the recent arrest of a 7 year old in Baltimore, Maryland. The second sensibility is that the President can be trusted. Most agree that the invasion of Iraq has cracked public trust in the White (Spin) House and has eroded public confidence in the President to low levels. Does anyone yearn for something a tad bit harmless, like, say, a Monica Lewinsky?
 
How do you spell K A T R I N A?
 
The Obama meteor sails across the American mindspace during very interesting times, times when politicians have (suddenly) rediscovered the existence of poor people and (stunningly) the cash-strapped middle class. As of February 2007, the US Department of Labor reports that over 7 million Americans are unemployed. Hurricane Katrina undoubtedly brought the plight of the American poor into central focus. Just behind slick urban expressways and high-priced downtown development, poverty in America festers like a runny sore despite the enlightened war on poverty initiatives of the Johnson administration during the mid 1960s.  [continues on page Obama 3]

Address of Senator John F. Kennedy to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Rice Hotel, Houston, Texas September 12, 1960
 
Reverend Meza, Reverend Reck, I'm grateful for your generous invitation to speak my views.
 
While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida--the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power--the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills, the families forced to give up their farms--an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.
 
These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues--for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.
 
But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured--perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again--not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me--but what kind of America I believe in.
 
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
 
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
 
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
 
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
 
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.
 
I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so--and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test--even by indirection--for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.
 
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none--who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him--and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.
 
This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died."
 
And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers died--when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches--when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom--and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo.
 
For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey--but no one knows whether they were Catholic or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo. I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition--to judge me on the basis of my record of 14 years in Congress--on my declared stands against an Ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools (which I have attended myself)--instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and publications we all have seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries, and always omitting, of course, the statement of the American Bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed church-state separation, and which more nearly reflects the views of almost every American Catholic. [continues Kennedy page Obama 3]

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