My friend Shari pointed me to an interview with young Frank Shaeffer about T-shirts being sold that say Pray for Obama (Ps. 109:8). Now in the King James Version, this is rude, but not intimidating. It says, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office." Said this way, it could simply refer to someone's term ending, although the next verse is "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." Of course those who are of a conservative bent see this as nothing more serious than the Countdown Clocks which were sold when Bush was in office.
But let me give this verse in The Message, which cuts through the old language and says what the verse actually means in English: "Give him a short life. Give his job to somebody else." Give him a short life. Moves it out of the category of rude and into menacing.
There's a lot being said one way and another about this. It certainly is more threatening than a simple countdown clock until someone's term is over. What worries me is that someone who is more unbalanced or more filled with hate will take this as a call to action.
I also realize that those of us of a more liberal bent politically can condemn this 'til the cows come home and it means nothing. It simply becomes liberal against conservative - or that's the way conservatives see it according to many of the comments I've read on the Web. What we need are conservative Christians - the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists stepping forward and calling this the hate speech that it is.
The other thing that troubles me about this is that it is just another way that Christians turn to the Bible to find hateful things to say. Even if you consider Obama an enemy, what happened to Jesus' command to love our enemies? Why are we being more swayed by conservative talk show hosts and news networks than the words of Christ? If we call ourselves by his name, shouldn't we be following his teachings?
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