Reconciliation, or Division?

Before I took my current job three years ago, I had Sundays free. I attended Colorado Community Church in Aurora, Colorado. I loved it. It is interracial, led by a wonderful pastor named Robert Gelinas. Robert is an adoption advocate and an advocate of reconciliation. He has a blog in which he refers to himself as a Jazz Theologian. You can read his blog here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jazztheologian/. As you can imagine, the music at his church is outstanding, but so is his preaching, and many other things about the church.

However, Robert currently is linking to a post written by someone named Lisa Sharon-Harper entitled Why Do African-Americans Vote for Democrats? The article is snarky and sarcastic, as well as misleading and incomplete historically. She is answering Herman Cain. You can read it here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jazztheologian/2011/09/why-do-african-americans-vote-for-democrats.html

As an old guy, I remember history differently than the above author. The first President I remember who sought to do something about civil rights in my lifetime was Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fact, he mobilized troops to integrate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, despite the opposition from Arkansas's Democrat Governor, Orville Faubus. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have never passed without the leadership of Republican Senator Everett Dirkson of Illinois, who made sure members of his party supported it with their votes, while many Democrats voted against it. Of course, there would never had been the civil rights progress without leaders such as Martin Luther King, who mobilized so many people to protest discrimination peacefully, that politicians of both parties could no longer ignore the issue. All King wanted was for his children to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

In this present century I watched President George W. Bush appoint the first African-American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and then Bush appointed the second, Condi Rice, to succeed Powell. I saw Bush decry "the soft bigotry of low expectations," and push for No Child Left Behind, education reforms opposed by teachers unions, who are a key element of the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party tries to appeal to us as members of hyphenated groups or unions. The Republican Party appeals to individuals to follow the American Dream of equal opportunity, and if people follow that dream, they realize the dignity that comes from individual effort and character content, not the dependency that comes from government handouts to favored groups.

True, the Democrats nominated for President a man whose father was black and mother was white, and he campaigned successfully for the Presidency using the catchy slogan of "Hope and Change." Unfortunately, he has turned out not to be a reconciler, but a divider, presently campaigning for re-election by pitting Americans against one another, using tactics he learned as a community organizer in Chicago, while sitting 20 years in a church led by the America-hating preacher "Reverend" Wright.