Bill Press: Talking about God not appropriate for “sacred” spotShare51posted at 3:45 pm on August 30, 2010 by Ed Morrisseyprinter-friendly Greg Hengler captures the moment in which “incoherence” is defined, during CNN’s “Reliable Sources” yesterday. Howard Kurtz notes that libtalker Bill Press had spent the last several weeks crusading against Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally, but that Beck kept partisan politics out of the speeches Saturday to focus mainly on religious themes. Press continued his objection, noting that the Lincoln Memorial and its “sacred” location was no place to talk about either God or politics. Er, it’s too “sacred” for God? Maybe Bill should check his thesaurus:Note that Press manages to assert twice that God isn’t an appropriate topic for sacred ground, a rather novel assertion under any circumstances, but especially so for the Lincoln Memorial. The Great Emancipator certainly didn’t have any trouble speaking about God and faith during his lifetime; in fact, to the right of the massive statue, one can read Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in which Lincoln repeatedly mentions and invokes the Almighty. Shall we get the sandblasters to remove the speech from the wall?Perhaps Press refers to Martin Luther King’s address from the same spot as that which makes the real estate “sacred.” If so, then Press might have a problem with King, too, who mentioned God and politics in the very speech King gave in 1963. Its most famous passage explicitly references God in his plea for equality:And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:Free at last! Free at last!Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!So what does make Press claim that Beck was committing sacrilege by holding a rally about faith in the American life? Perhaps the fact that Press couldn’t comprehend the subject matter.Update: The rally was on Saturday, not yesterday. I’ve corrected it above.
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