Topic category:  Elections - Politics, Polling, etc.

It's fine that Mitt Romney wants to run a positive campaign.

It's understandable that since he's running for President of the United States (a secular office), he wants to focus on economic issues and to try to make the presidential election a referendum on President Obama's poor performance.

But everyone knows that Romney's a Mormon, the Obama Administration (not the Mormon religion) has been out to limit religious liberty, it is more important than ever to scrutinize President Obama and, like Obama's relationship with ACORN/Project Vote, Obama's relationship with his mentor, Rev. Jeremiah A. ("God damn America) Wright is not generally known yet tells us plenty about Obama's character and intentions.

Character counts and after the liberal media establishment made Romney's high school antics an issue, Romney should realize that Herman Cain is right about Obama and Rev. Wright.

Cain “I think it is fair if someone wants to highlight the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Barack Obama because, quite frankly, it wasn’t highlighted enough in 2008 when he was running for president the first time.

Cain stressed that he believes the relationship should not be “off limits” in the election and rejected criticism of the proposal to highlight it as racist.

“The reason that the liberals are going to call it racist is because President Obama is black and Jeremiah Wright is black. . . . It is not racist,” Cain said. “They hide behind the race card any time that someone wants to attack the president on grounds that he would freely and liberally attack somebody else.”

The Obama-Wright relationship is pertinent and should not be avoided because Team Obama will say that the Mormon religion has a racist history and a Mormon is going to be the 2012 Republican presidential candidate.

What matters precisely are the characters of Romney and Obama, not the history of either Mormonism or Black Liberation Theology.

Obama largely escaped scutiny in 2008. The New York Times even covered up for him, by spiking an Obama/ACORN expose.

Romney may be willing to give Obama a pass on Rev. Wright because religion is involved, but that would be a mistake.

It is the Obama Administration that is out to limit religious liberty and examining the Obama-Wright relationship is perfectly fair.

Even Obama used to agree. He pointly discussed Rev. Wright at length in his first book, Dreams From My Father, creating the impression he wanted to create, and later took the title of his presidential campaign book--The Audacity of Hope--from one of Rev. Wright's sermons.

In March 2007 Sean Hannity interviewed Rev. Wright on the subject of whether Wright's church was a black separatist congregation.

Hannity and Wright largely talked past each other and Hannity did not yet have the explosive excerpts from Wright sermons that became big news in 2008, but the interview is noteworthy because it inspired an article that describes itself as not "so much about religion as it is about the politics of political revolution as fomented in all Liberation Theology churches" (http://faultlineusa.blogspot.com/2007/03/obamas-marxist-liberation-theology.html).

That article puts Obama's promise to "fundamentally transform" America in an ominous light. Excerpts follow.

Obama’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, continued to evade Hannity while he hammered away asking again and again if Hannity had ever read James H. Cone, one of the primary authors of Black Liberation Theology.

Oddly enough, I just happen to have several of Cone’s works on hand. Here’s just a little from Cone’s classic book A Black Theology of Liberation (Twentieth Anniversary Edition):

Emphasis added by me:

The definition of Jesus as black is crucial for christology if we truly believer in his continued presence today. Taking our clue from the historical Jesus who is pictured in the New Testament as the Oppressed One, what else, except blackness, could adequately tell us the meaning of his presence today? Any statement about Jesus today that fails to consider blackness as the decisive factor about his person is a denial of the New Testament message. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reveal that he is the man for others, disclosing to them what is necessary for their liberation from oppression. If this is true, then Jesus Christ must be black so that blacks can know that their liberation is his liberation. . .

The black Christ is he who threatens the structure of evil as seen in white society, rebelling against it, thereby becoming the embodiment of what the black community knows that it must become. . .

To be a disciple of the black Christ is to become black with him. Looting, burning, or the destruction of white property are not primary concerns. Such matters can only be decided by the oppressed themselves who are seeking to develop their images of the black Christ. . .

Whites do not recognize what is happening, and they are thus unable to deal with it. For most whites in power, the black community is a nuisance –something to be considered only when the natives get restless. But what white America fails to realize is the explosive nature of the kingdom. Although its beginning is small, it will have far-reaching effects not only on the black community but on the white community as well. Now is the time to make decisions about loyalties, because soon it will be too late. Shall we or shall we not join the black revolutionary kingdom?

An excellent overview of the grave dangers of Liberation Theology was written in 1984 by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI).

Here are some of the important points Ratzinger makes about Liberation Theology:

1. Liberation Theology has it center of power in Latin America and in African Theology, but is found in many Christian denominations throughout the Third World.

2. Liberation Theology is a new interpretation of Christian reality.

3. Liberation Theology is radically Marxist. “ . . .the world must be interpreted in terms of the class struggle and that the only choice is between capitalism and Marxism.”

4. Liberation Theology thrives on perpetuating class struggle. The only people of the Church are those who participate in class struggle.

5. Liberation Theology is a theology of bloody political revolution. All of Christian reality is reduced to politico-social liberation praxis (action).

6. Liberation Theology rejects traditional scriptural interpretations. “The experience of the "community" determines the understanding and the interpretation of Scripture. . . Ultimately, what is normative for interpretation is not historical research but the hermeneutic of history experienced in the community or the political group.”

7. Liberation Theology makes the Bible subject to a Marxist view of history. “The "historicality" of the Bible must justify its absolute dominance and thus legitimize the' transition to materialist-marxist philosophy, in which history has taken over the role of God. . . historical criticism has loosed Scripture from the traditional interpretation, which now appears to be unscientific.

8. Liberation Theology is a threat to the faith of the Christian Church.

Here Ratzinger analyzes some of the central concepts of LiberationTheology:

Faith: Jesus' experience of God is radically historical. "His faith is transformed into fidelity." Thus faith is fundamentally replaced by "fidelity to history". . .

Hope is interpreted as "confidence in the future" and as working for the future and thus is subordinated once more to the history of class conflict. . .

Love consists in the "option for the poor"; i.e., it coincides with opting for the class struggle. . .

Kingdom of God: “ . .the Kingdom must not be understood in a spiritualist or universalist manner, not in the sense of an abstract eschatological eventuality. It must be understood in partisan terms and with a view to praxis. The meaning of the Kingdom can only be defined by reference to the praxis of Jesus, not theoretically: it means working at the historical reality that surrounds us in order to transform it into the Kingdom.”

Overcoming Dualism “Here we must mention another basic idea of a particular post­conciliar theology which has led in this direction. People said that after the Council every dualism must be overcome: the dualism of body and soul, of natural and supernatural, of this world and the world beyond, of then and now. Once these supposed dualisms had been eliminated, it only remained to work for a kingdom to be realized in present history and in politico­economic reality. This meant, however, that one had ceased to work for the benefit of people in this present time and had begun to destroy the present in the interests of a supposed future: thus the real dualism had broken loose.”

Note: The above explanation of overcoming dualism certainly gives us some insight into the suicidal nature of leftist thought!

Death and Resurrection: “ . . . Man has taken over God's gesture — this manifests the whole transformation of the biblical message in an almost tragic way . . .”

Eucharist is interpreted as a celebration of liberation in the sense of politico-messianic hope and praxis.

The word redemption is largely replaced by liberation, which is seen, against the background of history and the class struggle, as a process of progressive liberation.

Action is truth “. . . The only true orthodoxy is therefore orthopraxy.”

Ratzinger’s Summary

In trying to arrive at an overall evaluation it must be said that, if one accepts the fundamental assumptions which underlie liberation theology, it cannot be denied that the whole edifice has an almost irresistible logic. By adopting the position of biblical criticism and of a hermeneutics that grows through experience, on the one hand, and of the marxist analysis of history, on the other, liberation theologians have succeeded in creating a total picture of the Christian reality, and this total view seems to respond fully both to the claims of science and to the moral challenges of our time, urging people to make Christianity an instrument of concrete world transformation; it seems to have united Christianity, in this way, with all the "progressive forces" of our era. One can understand, therefore, that this new interpretation of Christianity should have exercised an increasing fascination over theologians, priests and religious, particularly against the background of Third World problems. To say "no" to it must seem to them to be a flight from reality as well as a denial of reason and morality. On the other hand, if one considers how radical this reinterpretation of Christianity is, it is all the more pressing to find the right answer to the challenge which it presents. We shall only survive this crisis if we succeed in making the logic of faith visible in an equally compelling manner and in presenting it as a logic of reality, i.e., manifesting the concrete force of a better answer attested in lived experience. Since it is so, since thought and experience, interpretation and realization, are equally called for, it is a task for the whole Church. Theology alone is insufficient, Church authority alone is insufficient. Since the phenomenon of liberation theology indicates a lack of conversion in the Church, a lack of radical faith, only an increase in conversion and faith can arouse and elicit those theological insights and those decisions on the part of the shepherds which will give an answer to the magnitude of the question.

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.