In the matter of John McCain and his alliances with unsavory pastors, John Hagee has been getting most of the attention lately. But there's another one that bears a closer look, too: the founder and senior pastor of an Ohio-based megachurch, a televangelist named Rod Parsley. Parsley believes, among other things, that one of the founding principles of the United States was, and is, to destroy Islam.
David Corn of Mother Jones has published an article that outlines Parsley's history and John McCain's ties to him, and there's a video to go along with it. Here's that video:
People who like McCain tend to dismiss the significance of Parsley, saying that, as with Hagee, this is not McCain's long-time pastor. There's something to that, but I am still troubled that McCain would actively seek out the endorsement of people like this. Even if it's only crass politics -- McCain seeking to shore up the support from the wingnut contingent of the Republican Party -- it's still thoroughly distasteful. We have only to look at the last eight years to see what an attitude of "you're either with us or you're against us" has wrought, especially when it's based on a twisted version of Christianity.
I don't expect the MSM to run the above video wall-to-wall, but I do hope they spend at least a little time looking into Parsley over the next six months.
Further reading: another article by Corn on Parsley, published in March, and the Wikipedia entry for Parsley.
[added] Andrew Sullivan weighs in. I should have remembered.
One more from Andrew. Money quote:
... when McCain keeps no distance and even embraces the religious far right, he has to be held accountable. If the religious left is now part of the politics of association, so too must the religious right.
And the truth is: the GOP is far, far more influenced by its religious fanatics than the Democrats by theirs'. And yet the right-wing extremist ranters are given a pass, as mainstream Republicans like McCain feel obliged to suck up to them. After what the right has done with Wright, they don't get a pass any more. The GOP needs to be held accountable for every religious extremist it panders to, especially when their sectarian rhetoric could impact the work of American foreign policy:
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