On two separate occasions in the past month, I condemned John McCain for being honored to receive endorsements from Rev. John Hagee and Rev. Rod Parsley. This condemnation was on the basis of statements I read in articles about them, statements I freely admit I do not know the full context of. Additionally, I don’t know if those statements represent the bulk of those men’s religious philosophy or whether they were small matters. For that matter, I have no idea if those ideas had ever been later retracted by the men in question.
In short, I based my comments solely on a couple of hit pieces from John McCain’s political enemies. Because I don’t support McCain’s candidacy (or care much for McCain the man), and because I’m not overly fond of the religious philosophies of a lot of conservative Christian churches, I was pretty eager to jump on and gleefully condemn. This was a philosophic error. It may be that Parsley and Hagee are worthy of condemnation, but I honestly don’t have enough information to make that judgment.
Even worse was my immediate denunciation of McCain’s association with these men, when I’m fairly sure that McCain does not agree with the specific comments that I highlighted in those two posts. Frankly, I should know better.
I also freely admit that I’m only now coming to this retraction because of the association of my own favored candidate and his pastor. I myself was not particularly happy to hear the portions of Rev. Wright’s speeches that have been playing on a constant loop on Fox, and had serious questions about Obama’s association with that church and pastor. My questions about those issues were satisfied both by Sen. Obama his speech yesterday, as well as reading more of Rev. Wright’s sermons in full (especially this one, which this non-Christian found pretty moving), which satisfied me that there was more to the man than the few snippets I was privy to.
On account of that, I will again state that I retract my condemnation of McCain’s association with Hagee and Parsley, because as of this moment I simply lack enough information necessary to form any judgment about it one way or the other. And lacking that information, I’ll give McCain the full benefit of the doubt.
