Eugene Robinson, no social conservative, is a columnist for the Washington Post. In his op-ed in today’s paper, he offers a thoughtful critique of President Obama’s National Day of Prayer comments about Christians, the Crusades, and slavery. Titled, “At the prayer breakfast, President Obama struck a patronizing tone,” here are some trenchant excerpts:
“ ... the abolitionist movement grew out of Christian belief and the Christian church. William Wilberforce, the great British activist who spurred the abolition of slavery throughout the empire — and greatly inspired abolitionists in the United States — was a born-again Christian. Long before the Civil War, the religious and moral argument had been won by the anti-slavery side … the civil rights movement never could have triumphed without the Christian churches, both in the South and the North, which served as organizational nodes. The institution led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference … to compare the depredations of the Islamic State with those of the Crusaders is patronizing in the extreme. Why? Because Muslims are not slow learners who can be held to only a medieval moral standard. Everyone in the world can be expected to know that it is wrong to burn a helpless human being alive, as Islamic State murderers did to a captive Jordanian pilot.”
