A Little Talk with the Man who prayed For Obama's Death

[struggle4progress]

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Posted: June 20, 2009 06:00 PM

Even by the nut case standard of the assorted pack of neo-Nazi unreconstructed Klan members, Aryan Nation haters, and the legion of loose screw religious cranks and loonies, the Reverend Wiley S. Drake's public prayer for the death of President Obama stretched far past the outer limit of credulity. The unrepentant Drake did not back away from the prayer when asked about it by Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio on June 2. He pleaded that he didn't understand why people were upset with his comments.

Drake is not just a garden variety religious crank. In 2006, he reigned as the second vice president of the nearly 20 million strong Southern Baptist Convention. The group is by far the nation's biggest evangelical denomination. He pastors a bonafide church, the First Southern Baptist Church in the middle-class bedroom city of Buena Park, California. Drake has his own popular radio show on the Crusade Radio Network. In April, Southern Baptist Convention spokesperson Richard Land even had kind words for Obama for his family values emphasis.

Convention officials, though, were far less forthright about Wiley's death prayer death for Obama. It issued a perfunctory statement saying that his views were his and his alone. It did not vigorously denounce those views, especially his Obama death prayer.

Wiley skirted the legal definition of what constitutes a threat to the president by attributing the death prayer to a phony, made up prayer from God. The operative term is willful in the federal statute that makes it an offense to threaten the president. It's punishable by up to five years in prison. Every year, the Secret Service investigates about 1500 reported or discovered threats to the president. Drake's God attribute threat didn't escape their attention.

But Drake doesn't just speak for Drake, and a handful of cranks, but says what more than a few ultra conservative, religious fundamentalists actually think and belief, and in their scariest and darkest moments the violence they actually wish for. With the murder of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, the Holocaust Museum shoot-up, the recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on a surge in hate groups, and the demand by a worried US Attorney General Eric Holder for a tougher hate law, death threats against public figures can't be shrugged off ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/a-little-talk-with-the-ma_b_218474.html



Drake prayed for abortion doctor’s death; praying same for Obama
By Bob Allen, Associated Baptist Press
Published: June 05, 2009

BUENA PARK, Calif. (ABP)—A former Southern Baptist Convention officer called the murder of a controversial abortion provider in Kansas an answer to prayer, and he told a talk show host he also is praying for President Obama to die.

An SBC official insists most Southern Baptist are praying for the president's well-being—not his demise. And the denomination's chief ethicist decried the killing of the doctor.

“I am glad George Tiller is dead,” Wiley Drake, the SBC’s former second vice president, said on his Crusade Radio program. Tiller, one of only a few doctors in America who still performed a controversial late-term “partial-birth” abortion procedure, was gunned down in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan., just after the morning worship service began ... http://www.baptiststandard.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9644&Itemid=53

[jgraz]

1. I'm momentarily renouncing atheism to test the power of prayer

If Wiley Drake is suddenly hit by an Acme anvil with 1000lbs written on it in big, bold letters ... that was me, y'all.

[struggle4progress]

3. He's a rightwing wacko who's trying to claim death threats are protected as exercise of religion

[murielm99]

2. Incredible.

I think there used to be more Baptists like Jimmy Carter. I read an interview with him a magazine a few years ago. He said that the Baptists used to hold up the separation of church and state as a theological point of pride. If you read his "Our Endangered Values," you will see what I mean.

In the first job I had out of college, I worked for a woman who was a devout Baptist. She had been educated at a Baptist college, and continued her education from there. Her husband, a PhD, taught at a Baptist seminary.

She and her husband were liberal Democrats, like Jimmy Carter. She had gay friends. She and her husband had their own personal ways to help the poor in the community and the rest of the world. They were modest about their generosity. They raised three daughters who were liberal Democrats and compassionate Christians. I still keep in touch with the youngest. Her girls know that their mother was my role model as a woman, librarian and educator. Her theological beliefs were too conservative for me, but since they produced her and her wonderful family, I respected them.

OTOH, don't they still believe in smiting? Maybe we need a good old-fashioned smiting for this death wishing dude.

[safeinOhio]

4. What did that lady from Texas say?

Something like-the only problem with the Baptists is they didn't hold them under water long enough.

[dmallind]

6. Such people have been systematically chased out of the SBC for a couple decades at least

The point is a lot of people remember when even evangelical denominations had decent, politically diverse followers. Some still pretend that this is true, but it is nby now barely plausible that any liberal Democratic SBC adherents dare admit to being so, or would be allowed to remain in the congregation if they did. Sure you'll get a few anonymous claims of it on DU etc but check out any surveys that break down denomination and political views and you'll find they are a tiny minority. Step into an SBC church and you'll find they are a tiny minority who is never allowed to speak up, let alone speak for the larger group.

The article makes an unwitting error. He IS a garden variety religious loon, and he does speak for the majority of the SBC whether they admit it or not.

[struggle4progress]

7. In a very public move, Carter left the SBC several years ago:

Jimmy Carter Renounces Southern Baptist Convention
Ex-president says the policies of the nation's largest Protestant group 'violate the basic premises of my Christian faith'
... "I have finally decided that, after 65 years, I can no longer be associated with the Southern Baptist Convention," the 76-year-old former president said in a letter mailed to 75,000 Baptists nationwide on Thursday by a group of moderate Texas Baptists. Carter said the Southern Baptist Convention, which has almost 16 million members, has adopted policies "that violate the basic premises of my Christian faith," including a denominational statement that prohibits women from being pastors and tells wives to be submissive to their husbands. He said the "most disturbing" reason he and his wife decided to disassociate themselves from the Southern Baptist Convention was the elimination of language in June that identifies Jesus Christ as "the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted" ...
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/Protestant/2000/10/Jimmy-Carter-Renounces-Southern-Baptist-Convention.aspx

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

5. Ya know, what goes around comes around

Instant Karma for Drake might be coming his way soon.