East Valley Tribune: Group rallies to protest pastor’s message
The gist of this is that there’s a pastor in Tempe who is praying that Obama dies and goes to hell and is being very vocal about it. One of his parishioners is the person who showed up at an Obama rally in Arizona last month with an assault rifle on his back. This is also apparently the pastor who got tasered after he refused to let Border Patrol agents search his car.
This man disgusts me. I will readily admit that I wanted to see Bush 2.0 leave office during his presidency and would have loved to see him impeached but… I NEVER PRAYED FOR HIM TO DIE OR GO TO HELL!!!!! Hello? This guy is serious breaching the commandment against killing and he’s also completely forgetting Romans 13:1 which states that “everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”
The amount of seriously malicious hate that has cropped up since Obama’s inauguration is just scaring me. There was serious polarization during Bush 2.0’s terms but his detractors were all liberals and believed in self-control and gun laws. You would NEVER have seen parents keeping their kids home from school or the heads of the state Democratic parties decrying Bush 2.0 addressing kids on the first day of school. We’ve either seriously deteriorated as a society in terms of reason and civility or the media is just showing the right-wing nut jobs. In the case of the latter, I wish they’d stop giving them so much press.
I am totally with you on how disgusting (and non-biblically-based) this is. People’s violent reactions are frightening.
However, while I would say that overt violence on an individual basis tends to come from the extreme right, I disagree that liberals wouldn’t do a lot of the same were the situation reversed. For one thing, I heard several people wish death upon Bush 2.0 at various times in his administration. For another, Bush 1.0 addressed schoolchildren in 1991, resulting in similar protests as to the propriety of such an address. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/03/arne-duncan/barack-obama-not-first-president-address-school-ch/
I just wish people would CHILL out. Kids should be aware of their president and what he has to say to them. Protesting it, on either side, is asinine.
I’ve heard other cases of preachers calling for “imprecatory” prayers against Obama, which I find disturbing on the whole. Since when has cursing others become a Christian virtue? I think I might have even heard some call for his death (or at least imply it). But this is the first time I’ve heard someone call for him to go to Hell. Really? I mean, really? Some Christians have become so poisoned by their political fervor that they’re willing to not only wish eternal damnation upon those who disagree with them, but actually pray for it?
Have these people have no conscience at all?