This Dobson Accuses Obama of ‘Distorting’ Bible set of headlines is really one of the sickest flailings yet to emerge from the McCain side of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
In a nutshell, James Dobson, a right wing evangelist who has a huge following and a radio show called Focus on the Family, has said of Obama: “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson went on to say: “He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”
So what did Obama do? He simply raised the very important question about how to interpret the Bible, asking what do we want to take literally and what don’t we. Obama preached tolerance and acceptance of our emerging diversity. He said, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s?”
Obama pointed to passages such as the Sermon on the Mount, and sections of Leviticus that refer to Jewish dietary law and asked questions such as whether we accept the slave-owning laws along with the more relevant laws. It was this attempt by Obama to refer to these different sections that most offended Dobson. Dobson essentially said how dare Obama equate these Old and New Testament portions — hence his “gutter” comment.