Opinion: In today’s pages: Obama’s gospel mistake
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Blogger David Ehrenstein performs last rites for Barack Obama’s ‘relevance to gay and lesbian African Americans’:
Now a gospel star may have driven a wedge between Obama and his gay supporters and roiled others as well. For, by putting McClurkin in the spotlight, Obama has broken black America’s 11th Commandment: ‘Don’t talk about it in front of the white people!’
Environmentalist Andrea Kavanagh finds a National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition very fishy, and Rollins College professor Paolo Spadoni advises the While House that if it wants to free Cuba, it ‘should stop pandering to a shrinking group of Cuban American hard-liners and start listening to that world he claims to represent.’ Sharon Browne, Linda Chavez and Ward Connerly condemn a Caltrans plan to ‘use race, ethnicity and gender when awarding contracts under the federal highway program. What are the agency and the governor up to?’
The editorial board shakes its scandalized head at the news that State Department officials, apparently acting without authority, promised Blackwater USA contractors immunity; and plays down the significance of class-action attorney William S. Lerach’s guilty plea. In the wake of a new report on healthcare in South L.A., the board states its case on King-Harbor Hospital:
To be clear: We do not trust the county to run this hospital, and we will oppose, as anyone should, any recommendation that would involve the county in its future management. But we will insist, and others should as well, that the county find alternative ways to care for a population whose needs are so profound.
Readers react to Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky’s Op-Ed on dividing Jerusalem. ‘In reality,’ writes George Epstein, ‘giving up a part of Jerusalem will not solve the problem, nor will removing settlements from the West Bank.’ George Saade reframes the idea: ‘It’s not about ‘dividing’ Jerusalem; it’s about sharing it.’