Cal Thomas Goes After Dean's Religion

Dean's religious accent

Skipping over the gratuitous shot at Clinton and Monica (oh, yeah), we move on to this incredible paragraph:

In the Globe interview, he said Southerners understand religious talk better than his fellow New Englanders. Yes, that "vast Unitarian wasteland of the Northeast," as Charles Colson has jokingly called it, is the latest target of Dean's regional stereotyping.

Dean is guilty of regional stereotyping, but Colson is just joking. Colson's remark is actually a lot more offensive, isn't it? I guess you can't call this hypocrisy on Cal's part - it's more like ignorance.

The first "victim" of Dean's "regional stereotyping" was the South. "That's the land of Confederate battle flags and pickup trucks that Dean so recently disparaged," says Cal. But actually, it's Cal that's making this remark apply to a region. Dean's remark was about a segment of voters. There certainly is a demographic that Dean wished to appeal to, and so disparagement is the last thing to take out of that remark. Cal wants Dean to be offensive, and so he contributes to the meme of Dean's disparagement. Crude, Cal, very crude.

He goes on to coldly knock an entire Christian demonination, because they hold doctrines like the priesthood of the believer to be important. Next, Cal knocks an entire religion (Judaism). And then Cal proposes to discern Dean's entire view of Christology from a single soundbite.

"Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised," he told the Globe, "people who were left behind." Dean makes it sound as if Jesus might have been a Democrat.

"He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything," the candidate continued. "He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it."

Jesus a Democrat? Well, that would mean his kingdom was of this world, wouldn't it? Cal seems to believe that Jesus would have been a Republican. In fact, from what I see in the Christian scriptures, Jesus told every political faction in Israel to go hang. Jesus wasn't concerned with it.

But you'd better believe that a prophet who exalted the poor and railed against institutional hypocrisy would have no love for the Republicans In Charge.

To be fair, Cal firmly dislikes what he views as religious pandering, and will take on Republican and Democrat alike when he sees it happening. I just wish that he would have approached this critique of Dean a little less politically. Don't judge in a way that condemns yourself, Cal. Jesus had a little to say on that as well.