McCain Reneges on Pledge To Never Seek anti-Catholic Support
Bruce Wilson printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Thu Mar 06, 2008 at 11:04:36 AM EST
[video inside] In the 2000 presidential primaries, John McCain called George W. Bush "anti-Catholic" for seeking political support from Christian fundamentalist leaders, such as Bob Jones, who called the pope the anti-Christ and the Catholic Church a satanic cult. Before the Michigan 2000 presidential primary McCain's presidential campaign sent out robo-calls advising Michigan voters that Bush had courted anti-Catholic support and, when McCain's campaign received media criticism for those calls, John McCain, in a Fox News appearance, saiod that if he were invited to Bob Jones University, as Bush was, he'd tell Bob Jones to "get out of the 16th Century and into the 21st Century. What you're doing is racist and cruel". In the Fox appearance McCain stated, in reference to Bush's courtship of Bob Jones, "I would never do that." ....Well, John McCain just did.


With his disavowal of hate speech during the 2000 primaries, John McCain seemed to have established a principled position but eight years later McCain has reneged on his 2000 pledge and both aggressively courted and also accepted support from Christian evangelical leaders, such as pastor John Hagee, whom McCain called, in the 2000 primary race, "agents of intolerance". John Hagee calls the Catholic Church a satanic cult and "the Whore of Babylon", but John Hagee's endorsement of the McCain candidacy carries a heavy baggage, of bigotry beyond Hagee's anti-Catholic views and John McCain's refusal to disavow Pastor Hagee's endorsement may prove an unfortunate milestone in the mainstreaming of hate speech in America. In his 2006 book "Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To War", Texas megachurch Pastor John Hagee charged that the Catholic Church conspired, along with Hitler and the Nazis, to carry out the Holocaust. Hagee and his fellow Christians United For Israel leaders have also repeatedly vilified Islam, and Muslims worldwide, by characterizing the religion, held by over one billion people around the world, to be-- like the Catholic Church --a satanic cult. Hagee and leaders of CUFI have also repeatedly claimed that the United States is at war with "Islamofascism" and Hagee has stated explicitly that this is a "religious war", between Christianity and islam.

In addition, Hagee, and various of his CUFI leaders, have repeatedly blamed gays and other Americans for natural disasters and key CUFI executive board member Jerry Falwell (now deceased) charged that gays, feminists, "abortionists", the ACLU and People For The American were partly responsible for the September 1, 2001 terrorist attacks.

John Hagee has repeatedly denied having any ulterior motives for supporting Israel but, in 2003 as John Hagee was voicing strong support for a possible US attack on Iraq, Hagee's San Antonio Cornerstone Church megachurch marketed a 3-videocassette series, of Hagee's church sermons, entitled "Iraq: The Final War" and which asserted that a US invasion of that country would inevitably destabilize the entire Middle East and cause a "vast army" of millions of Arabs and Muslims to join in "fanatical unity" in an attack on Israel.

John Hagee's lobbying group, Christians United For Israel, has symbolically encouraged terrorist attacks against the state of Israel, by choosing as a CUFI organizational logo a picture of Jerusalem's Temple Mount from which Islam's third holiest site had been airbrushed out.

But John Hagee is, if anything, an equal opportunity bigot. While Hagee publicly implies that a significant portion of Americans are in a "satanic cult" and his CUFI leaders noisily decry something they refer to as "Islamofascism" John Hagee has also has publicly discussed his expectation of a fate "worse than Auschwitz" for Jews and several of John Hagee's CUFI board members have stated their expectation of a coming Holocaust for Jews in Israel and even worldwide. CUFI founding executive board member Jerry Falwell once told a congregation that million of Jews will be slaughtered in the coming End-Time Hagee and his fellow CUFI leaders feel is now immanent. During a press conference at CUFI's 2007 Washington DC summit pastor Hagee, when confronted by journalist Max Blumenthal with actual text from one of Hagee's recent books, which seemed to suggest that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust, Hagee stated "I never wrote that".

Hagee, who has repeatedly denied having "eschatological" motives for supporting Israel, has sought to reassure critics by repeatedly stating that humans cannot alter "God's plan". But John Hagee has also appeared, in a 1999 joint sermon, broadcast throughout the United States, during which evangelist Kenneth Copeland, now under investigation for tax irregularities, appeared to claim that humans can become Gods or god-like and one of CUFI's regional directors, Billye Brim, has stated unequivocally that God needs humans to carry out his plan. Brim has also publicly fantasized about the