McCain booed after trying to calm anti-Obama crowd

I posted this to a message board on October 11, 2008:

Campbell Brown from CNN did a special called "Race in the Race: The Great Unknown." Someone else on the show wanted reviewers to respond to whether there has been an undercurrent of hateful speech in the McCain campaign. I sent this message to CNN:

It is outrageous to suggest such a thing! McCain is a true hero and has been very civil in this campaign. He was defending Obama in the incident! An independent analysis found that McCain has done 25% fewer attack ads than Obama. It is Obama's close associates that have been spewing hatred. The conservative base is upset that nobody will talk about his friends. If Obama were white, he probably wouldn't have joined the same political and religious circles and Hillary would have easily beaten him in the primary. He is all style and no substance and his race has been a huge boost to his campaign, probably both from excitement and liberal guilt.

Someone responded to me with this:

While it is outrageous to suggest that McCain is promoting any racist sentiment, or that he would countenance it, unfortunately, racist incidents like a McCain supporter calling a black network sound guy "n*gger" (and telling him to "Sit down, boy") ain't helping.

I wrote:

I had not heard about that and it is very sad.  However it seems like the hatred in the Obama camp and especially with his close associates is far more apparent and destructive, but we are not allowed to talk about it.

Lutherans

I posted this to a message board on October 11 and 12, 2008:

Are there any Lutherans on here? I recently started attending a Lutheran church and I enjoy it. The people are really friendly to me. I like the pastor and he offers an open communion. It is a small church with only about 30 or 40 people and I would guess that most of them are over 50. There is a woman from Germany. There is a man who is an orchid expert and he fought in World War II.  This church belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a merger of three Lutheran churches in the late 1980s.

I was actually raised Mormon, but haven't been involved with it. The casual atmosphere of the Lutheran church has been a comfortable fit for me. I was briefly talking with the pastor about the interaction of science and faith and he said he reads about those topics as well which I find refreshing.

The pastor is a part-time music teacher and he plays the guitar during some of the hymns; I like it.  They pass out a pamphlet (?) which includes the verses, hymns and prayers. We just get together in the basement after the service for coffee (which I don't drink) and a snack. I was talking to my cousin's wife and she said her step-grandmother's Lutheran church has a lot more members and they basically have a feast every week.

The pastor told that one of the members came from a different church (I believe the Missouri Synod) and they were very strict and the pastor gave him a firm speech about asking too many questions. This pastor says he tries to be open to peoples questions and tries not to force a specific approach.

I found one of the responses on the message board interesting:

ELCA churches are likely to be a good fit for folks who want a common-sense sort of church, light on the moralizing but sticking to the Gospels, rather than ignoring them as do most evangelical denominations.

They do vary quite a bit, from ones which focus on a more traditional liturgy to ones that embrace guitars and the like.

Congregations are generally pretty friendly, and functions are also friendly. Here in Minnesota, you can't go wrong with church basement potlucks. Food's hearty and plentiful, and strangers are always welcome.

Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod Lutheran churches are, or can be, pretty legalistic, compared to the ELCA ones. They stick a lot closer to the irascible, hemorrhoid-suffering Luther, rather than the Santa Claus-style Luther of the ELCA.

Given my choice of which church to visit on Potluck day, I'll go with an ELCA Lutheran church every time, followed by a nice Methodist church. Up here, a guy could easily have a meal every week at one of these. In fact, in my poverty-stricken youth, I made a regular thing of visiting churches, serially, for the church basement suppers. Very nice.