Pastors Edge

Confession and disclosure: I am somewhat of a political junkie. In fact politics hold a certain fascination to me. If I could choose another career I would love to be a constitutional lawyer. I happen to be one of those patriots who love my country but is absolutely convinced that much of what our government is doing today--regardless of whether it is good or bad, effective or ineffective--is simply unconstitutional. I also believe we have in effect reduced the Bill of Rights to nine from ten as the Tenth Amendment has been completely thrown into the waste bin of judicial irrelevance (if you don’t know what that amendment says, look it up).

All of which leads me to reflect on the most heated political debate I have seen in the last 25 years—the debate over health care. It is so intense that for the first time in history a congressman was reprimanded by the House of Representatives for calling the president a liar while he was addressing Congress in a joint session.

I am not going to venture my views personally on this issue as I will be the first to admit it is extremely complex. There are no easy answers, and I believe there are good people on all sides of the issue who are sincere and wanting the best for their countrymen. I do have my opinions on governmental intervention in general in domestic affairs (clue: my first presidential vote was for Ronald Reagan in 1980) but that is not the concern I want to address.

I want to weigh in on the issue of race in this debate. You may remember Jimmy Carter’s blanket statement that opposition to Barack Obama’s policies—specifically, health care—are motivated by racism. Still, my problem is summed up in the following statement by a college professor: Robert Watson, a history and political science professor at Hampton University in Virginia said this in defense of Carter’s statement: “He clearly knows the minds and attitudes of Southern leadership and Southern people.”

Therein lays my problem from both a common sense and a spiritual perspective. First of all Carter doesn’t possess supernaturally omniscient knowledge of the minds and attitudes of millions of Southerners—nor does anyone else. At the very least I can say this—Carter certainly doesn’t know mine and I am a born and bred Southerner who hates racism with every fiber of my being.

But my greater issue with Carter is spiritual and biblical. As that oft repeated verse of scripture reminds us: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” Carter just gave the classic illustration of what this passage prohibits—judging a person’s motives for any action that person takes.

To wit: was the congressman who called the President a liar doing so because the President is black and the congressman is a racist who hates black people or at least hates the thought of a black man being President? Perhaps. But the only being in the universe that knows that for sure is God. Even the congressman doesn’t know his own heart according to scripture. The moment a Jimmy Carter puts himself in the place of God and says in effect “I know why that person did what he did,” he is guilty of judging another person.

I absolutely believe that Congressman's actions were disrespectful, and I think that people who feel passionate about the President's policies should express those views civilly with dignity and decorum. But if you ask me whether or not I think that those who oppose the president’s policies or even disrespect him publicly are racist, I'd respond that I have no way of knowing that and I can’t judge them. Neither can Jimmy Carter. You can judge a person’s methods—you cannot judge a person’s motives.