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Guess who threw out the race card?

Posted by: K.D. Hastings on June 23, 2008   Hot Issues •

There is hardly nothing more vexing than when one person asserts that another person is a bigot, unless of course it is true.

How do you defend against such an accusation that you discriminate—if only in your mind—against others because of their race or ethnicity? There is no card you can carry that attests to the fact you are a fair-minded person or that a decision you made was not based on another person’s skin color.

That’s what makes Senator Barack Obama’s recent comments so insidious.

““We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’” Obama said June 20 at a fundraiser in Jacksonville.

He has preemptively interjected the race card into this year’s presidential contest. At least for those who support him, this will be lens through which they will view all criticisms of their candidate.

Unfortunately it is common in politics for extraneous issues to cloud the decision-making process. Some individuals are keen on throwing up smoke screens to confuse and delude voters, seeking to make things an issue that shouldn’t be an issue and to take attention off matters that should be an issue.

A candidate’s race, ethnicity, sex, age, religion or socioeconomic status should not be a basis for disparaging the candidate. It is important for a voter to consider the whole of candidate. If, for a example, a candidate is an elderly Asian woman who owns a multinational corporation and attends a Lutheran church, it doesn’t mean that the candidate’s positions are not to be evaluated vis-a-vis God’s Word, even if you are not an older American or Asian or Lutheran or a woman or a person of means.

We should hope for a high standard of decorum among voters and among the candidates.

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