[Vision2020] McCain Rejects Rev. Ron Parsley as well

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings: 
 
Thank you, Keely, for your testimony.  The members of Christ Church are also 
good people, and although they are not misled by premillennial fantasies, they 
are nonetheless subjected to equally questionable postmillennial dreams. 
 
It is now official that McCain has renounced the despicable Ron Parsley. If 
McCain can get away with saying that he did not know about these men's views, 
then we can also accept Obama's claim that he did not know about Wright's 
outrageous remarks. The most important point, however, is that Obama did not ask 
for Wright's political endorsement. 
 
May 23, 2008, The New York Times 
McCain Cuts Ties to Pastors Whose Talks Drew Fire 
By NEELA BANERJEE and MICHAEL LUO 
 
Senator John McCain on Thursday rejected the endorsements of two prominent 
evangelical ministers whose backing he had sought to shore up his credentials 
with religious conservatives. 
 
Mr. McCain repudiated the Rev. John C. Hagee, a televangelist, after a watchdog 
group released a recording of a sermon in which Mr. Hagee said Hitler and the 
Holocaust had been part of God’s plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive 
them to Palestine. 
 
Later in the day, he also rejected the endorsement of the Rev. Rod Parsley of 
the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio, whose anti-Muslim sermons were 
broadcast on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday. 
 
Controversy has dogged the Hagee endorsement since Mr. McCain announced it at a 
February news conference, and just last week Mr. Hagee issued a letter 
expressing regret for “any comments that Catholics have found hurtful.” 
 
In a statement Thursday about the sermon on the Holocaust, Mr. McCain said: 
“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible. I 
did not know of them before Reverend Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must 
reject his endorsement as well.” 
 
Audio of the sermon, from the late 1990s, was first posted last week by the Web 
site Talk to Action, which scrutinizes the Christian right, and then reported by 
The Huffington Post. 
 
In the sermon, which is also available on the church’s Web site, Mr. Hagee said 
the Bible prophesied Hitler’s brutality. “How is God going to bring them back to 
the land? The answer is fishers and hunters,” Mr. Hagee said, referring to how 
Jews ended up in the modern state of Israel. “A hunter is someone who comes with 
a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter.” 
 
Mr. Hagee continued: “That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, 
be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is 
the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it 
happen? Because God said, ‘My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them 
to come back to the land of Israel.’ ” 
 
Asked at a news conference in Stockton, Calif., on Thursday why these particular 
remarks led him to act, Mr. McCain said, “I just think the statement is crazy 
and unacceptable.” He added, “We reached a point where that kind of statement, 
simply, I would reject the endorsement of the expression of those kinds of 
views.” 
 
Some have compared Mr. Hagee’s remarks with those of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright 
Jr., the former pastor of the Democratic presidential front-runner, Senator 
Barack Obama. But Mr. McCain said his relationship with Mr. Hagee was different. 
 
“I have said I do not believe Senator Obama shares Reverend Wright’s extreme 
views,” Mr. McCain said in his statement. “But let me also be clear, Reverend 
Hagee was not and is not my pastor or spiritual adviser, and I did not attend 
his church for 20 years.” 
 
Mr. McCain has been courting Christian conservatives after attacking them eight 
years ago as “agents of intolerance.” At a speech last year before Mr. Hagee’s 
Christians United for Israel, he thanked Mr. Hagee for his “spiritual guidance 
to politicians like me” and said, “It’s hard to do the Lord’s work in the city 
of Satan.” 
 
The latest Hagee remarks to surface may strike at the heart of Mr. McCain’s 
efforts to reach a critical group of voters, Jews, some of whom have viewed Mr. 
Obama with suspicion. 
 
At roughly the same time the McCain campaign issued its statement on Thursday, 
Mr. Hagee issued his own statement withdrawing his endorsement of Mr. McCain. 
 
“I am tired of these baseless attacks and fear that they have become a 
distraction in what should be a national debate about important issues,” the 
Hagee statement said. “I have therefore decided to withdraw my endorsement of 
Senator McCain for president effective today, and to remove myself from any 
active role in the 2008 campaign.” 
 
Religious and political leaders critical of the sermon welcomed the news that 
Mr. McCain had rejected Mr. Hagee’s endorsement. 
 
“This is a perfect example of when politicians and religious leaders try to use 
each other, both of them end up getting hurt,” said the Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy, 
president of the Interfaith Alliance, a liberal religious group. “The reason 
that many of us talk about separating religion and politics is that they are two 
different parts of life, and they operate with different values and methods.” 
 
Mr. Hagee said that his sermon had been "mischaracterized” and that he had 
always spoken harshly about Hitler and the Holocaust. 
 
Mr. Hagee, 68, is not as well known as other evangelical leaders, but he is 
powerful among strongly conservative evangelical Christians, thanks to a vast 
media reach. 
 
His prominence is partly explained by his activism on behalf of Israel. Mr. 
Hagee has given about $30 million to Israeli causes. 
 
Mr. Hagee’s views flow out of his adherence to what is known in evangelical 
circles as premillennial dispensationalism, a literalistic approach to biblical 
prophecy that places a special emphasis on the role of the nation of Israel in 
the end of history. 
 
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the country’s 
largest branch of Judaism, said that while he did not consider Mr. Hagee an 
anti-Semite, he found a reading of the Bible that would include a prophecy of 
Hitler to be “obscene.” 
 
“This is a man who has some profound ambivalence about Jews,” Rabbi Yoffie said. 
“On the one hand, he has a love for Israel. But on the other, that was a sermon 
and he said Jews were punished by God for not going to Israel, that the divine 
plan that brought Israel into being included the Holocaust and Hitler was God’s 
instrument.” 
 
In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, Mr. McCain rejected the 
backing of the second pastor, Mr. Parsley. 
 
On Thursday, ABC News broadcast a segment about Mr. Parsley, noting that he has 
called Islam an “anti-Christ religion” and preached that “America was founded in 
part to see this false religion destroyed.” 
 
“I believe that even though he endorsed me, and I didn’t endorse him, the fact 
is that I repudiate such talk, and I reject his endorsement,” Mr. McCain said.