{"id":16137,"date":"2015-02-08T15:18:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-08T22:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=16137"},"modified":"2015-02-08T15:27:20","modified_gmt":"2015-02-08T22:27:20","slug":"mau-mau-mike-and-southern-baptist-bigotry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=16137","title":{"rendered":"Mau Mau Mike and Southern Baptist Bigotry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Huckabee once\u00a0said this<\/a> about Barack Obama:<\/p>\n

\"mau<\/p>\n

Which prompted the following response<\/a> by Stephen Colbert:<\/p>\n

The important thing isn’t where the Mau Mau Revolution happened. The important thing is for people to start associating Barack Obama with the words “Mau Mau.” After all, wherever not in the United States the President grew up, he had a different childhood.
\n[ … ]
\nAnd you know what? You know what, sir? You know what, if it makes you a little more comfortable, feel free to throw in a Kenya here, a Kenya there, here a Kenya, there a Kenya, everywhere a Mau Mau.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

President Obama, during his recent National Prayer Breakfast address<\/a>, said this: “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” As commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in an article about the outcry over Obama’s remarks<\/a>, “There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification.”<\/p>\n

I was raised in the Southern Baptist church, a church that in 1845 split with the Baptists over the issue of slavery<\/a> (you can guess which side the Southern Baptists were on). Until I was twelve or so, I went to\u00a0church every week. By then\u00a0I had learned to associate bigotry with Christianity, and specifically with the Southern Baptist church.<\/p>\n

I know, I know: my feelings about\u00a0Southern Baptists\u00a0won’t stand up in court. There’s bigotry in every faith. Rick (“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money”) Santorum is a practicing Catholic. So is Mel (\u201cYou look like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault”) Gibson.<\/p>\n

But I grew up with Southern Baptists. When I heard words like “nigger” and “nigger lover” being spat out, it was Southern Baptists spitting them.<\/p>\n

Southern Baptists preach that only born-again Christians, people who make up the congregations of conservative evangelical Protestant churches,\u00a0can go to heaven. For people of other faiths, including fellow Christians who are Catholic or who belong to non-conservative Protestant\u00a0denominations\u00a0(never mind Jews, Muslims, etc), the\u00a0default destination is hell. Period.\u00a0If the\u00a0basic tenet of your religious faith is intolerant bigotry, other forms of intolerance and bigotry are bound to follow.<\/p>\n

I don’t apologize for my\u00a0antipathy toward Southern Baptists. It’s one of the few\u00a0childhood\u00a0prejudices I haven’t\u00a0been able to overcome … and I admit I haven’t tried very hard. Southern Baptists, regardless of whatever good they do, regardless of how they say they’ve changed, are\u00a0close to the heart of intolerance\u00a0and bigotry in this country.<\/p>\n

I started this rant with the statement that\u00a0turned me into a lifelong enemy of\u00a0Mike Huckabee. For some reason the media still seems to think of Mike Huckabee\u00a0(a Southern Baptist, by the way) as a nice guy. Maybe that’s because he smiles as he utters his hate-filled lies. He’s the Ronald McDonald\u00a0of bigotry. And a most dangerous man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Huckabee once\u00a0said this about Barack Obama: Which prompted the following response by Stephen Colbert: The important thing isn’t where the Mau Mau Revolution happened. The important thing is for people to start associating Barack Obama with the words “Mau Mau.” After all, wherever not in the United States the President grew up, he had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,2],"tags":[1801,829,83,904,69,1800],"class_list":["post-16137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-personal","tag-bigotry","tag-intolerance","tag-mau-mau","tag-mike-huckabee","tag-racism","tag-southern-baptists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16137"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16149,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137\/revisions\/16149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}