Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics

Here's a great article from Mother Jones discussing Hillary Clinton's surprising religious position. A very good read.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html
-----------------

"It was an elegant example of the Clinton style, a rhetorical maneuver subtle, bold, and banal all at once. During a Democratic candidate forum in June, hosted by the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, Hillary Clinton fielded a softball query about Bill's infidelity: How had her faith gotten her through the Lewinsky scandal?

After a glancing shot at Republican "pharisees," Clinton explained that, of course, her "very serious" grounding in faith had helped her weather the affair. But she had also relied on the "extended faith family" that came to her aid, "people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me."

Such references to spiritual warfare—prayer as battle against Satan, evil, and sin—might seem like heavy evangelical rhetoric for the senator from New York, but they went over well with the Sojourners audience, as did her call to "inject faith into policy." It was language that recalled Clinton's Jesus moment a year earlier, when she'd summoned the Bible to decry a Republican anti-immigrant initiative that she said would "criminalize the good Samaritan...and even Jesus himself." Liberal Christians crowed ("Hillary Clinton Shows the Way Democrats Can Use the Bible," declared a blogger at TPMCafe) while conservative pundits cried foul, accusing Clinton of scoring points with a faith not really her own."

How lovely.....:eyes:

Good for the goose, good for the gander.

McClurkin,
Cuomo,
Rangel,
Jackson, etc.

(I gave examples on both sides intentionally to be fair)

I found it insightful in ways that will make a lot of Hillary supporters around here pretty uncomfortable.

"Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons' approach to faith-based initiatives "set the stage for Bush." Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.

Liberal rabbi Michael Lerner, whose "politics of meaning" Clinton made famous in a speech early in her White House tenure, sees the senator's ambivalence as both more and less than calculated opportunism. He believes she has genuine sympathy for liberal causes—rights for women, gays, immigrants—but often will not follow through. "There is something in her that pushes her toward caring about others, as long as there's no price to pay. But in politics, there is a price to pay."

http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer-3.html


I had no idea she was willing to cross the church state barrier as Bush has done.

From this country... Pure unadulterated PANDER! :nuke:

Sounds like a right-wing talking point of late. I didn't realize Democrats were in favor of exiling people for their television habits - when did this happen?