Will Colorado media that questioned Obama-Wright ties question McCain's links with controversial pastors when he visits Denver?

Summary: Editorials in The Denver Post and The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction suggested that Sen. Barack Obama is not "fit to be president" or "a good judge of character" because of his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When Sen. John McCain visits Denver on May 2, will the newspapers similarly question his judgment due to his connections with televangelist John Hagee and Pastor Rod Parsley?

In May 1 editorials, The Denver Post and The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction questioned whether Sen. Barack Obama is "fit to be president" or "is a good judge of character" because of Obama's association with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. With Sen. John McCain planning a May 2 appearance in Denver, will the Post and the Daily Sentinel raise similar questions about McCain's judgment following his solicitation and acceptance of an endorsement from controversial televangelist John Hagee?

Colorado Media Matters previously pointed out that several Colorado media outlets have omitted information about McCain's connections with Hagee and with pastor Rod Parsley, who has written of Islam: "The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed."

Additionally, Media Matters for America has noted that despite Hagee's controversial remarks about Islam, women, and homosexuality, McCain acknowledged on the April 20 edition of ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos that he solicited Hagee's endorsement. While McCain answered, "Oh, probably. Sure" when asked whether it was "a mistake to solicit and accept" Hagee's endorsement, he went on to say of Hagee: "I'm glad to have his endorsement." Media Matters also repeatedly has noted the disparity in national reporting on controversial statements made by Wright versus those made by McCain endorsers Hagee and Parsley.

McCain was scheduled to hold a "town hall" meeting on health care May 2 in Denver.

From The Denver Post's May 1 editorial "The company Obama keeps":

Just six weeks ago, Sen. Barack Obama said he could no more disown his former pastor than he could disown his own white grandmother.

Until, of course, he did.

Obama finally (and firmly) disavowed the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright this week. But the moment came only after sensing his presidential bid could be undone by the simmering controversy.

In March, in his eloquent speech on race in America, Obama defended his pastor as a man of otherwise good deeds. While poignant, his original defense of a man he's known for two decades made Tuesday's political stiff-arm reek of desperation politics.

Obama's handling of this mess not only calls into question his judgment, but eventually could strike at the core of whether he's fit to be president.

As late as Monday, after Wright again suggested the U.S. government invented AIDS to eliminate minorities and defended the bigotry of Louis Farrakhan, Obama seemed to shrug it off. But by Tuesday, after video of Wright's new rants played in what seemed like an endless loop on 24-hour news channels, Obama the politician finally emerged.

"The insensitivity and the outrageousness of the statements shocked me and surprised me," Obama said. Wright's rants, he continued, contradict "everything that I'm about and who I am. ... The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."

Does Obama really expect Americans to believe that it was Wright, and not the prevailing political winds, that changed overnight?

He could have diffused the situation had he been more straightforward at the very beginning. Instead, the senator has struggled to explain away his relationship with Wright for months, and it's only raised more questions for voters about who Obama surrounds himself with and who might have his ear as president.

From The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction's May 1 editorial, "Obama's Rev. Wrong":

Barack Obama finally, unequivocally, repudiated his racist, America-hating pastor on Tuesday.

We don't think it was too little. To the contrary, there's not much more he could have said about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama denounced Wright's absurd claim that the U.S. government was involved in creation of the AIDs virus and his suggestion that Louis Farrakhan is one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st centuries, along with other Wright statements. Obama said. "They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans."

But he should have done it earlier.

He could have done it weeks ago, when the country first learned of Wright's America-hating rhetoric. It still would have been a political move, but it would have been better to have done it then than now, after Wright has refused to let the controversy die.

Better yet, Obama could have denounced the racist pastor when he realized that Wright was not a man of God, but rather a simple demagogue, preaching hate and destruction. If Barack Obama is a good judge of character -- and that's certainly a quality we want in a president -- he would have realized what kind of man was leading his church decades, ago.

Media Matters has documented some of Hagee's more controversial statements:

• On the September 18, 2006, edition of National Public Radio's Fresh Air, host Terry Gross said to Hagee, "You said after Hurricane Katrina that it was an act of God, and you said 'when you violate God's will long enough, the judgment of God comes to you. Katrina is an act of God for a society that is becoming Sodom and Gomorrah reborn.' " She then asked, "Do you still think that Katrina is punishment from God for a society that's becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah?" Hagee responded:

HAGEE: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are -- were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

• Hagee recently reiterated his views on the hurricane, asserting on the April 22 edition of Salem Radio Network's The Dennis Prager Show: "What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God, in time if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city it can become it may in time be called a blessing. But at this time it's called a curse." Boston Globe deputy national political editor Foon Rhee noted in an April 25 blog post that Hagee released an April 25 statement stating, "As a believing Christian, I see the hand of God in everything that happens here on earth, both the blessings and the curses ... But ultimately neither I nor any other person can know the mind of God concerning Hurricane Katrina. I should not have suggested otherwise. No matter what the cause of the storm, my heart goes out to all who suffered in this terrible tragedy. There but for the grace of God go any one of us."
• A March 7, 1996, article (accessed via the Nexis database) in the San Antonio Express-News reported that Hagee was going to "meet with black religious leaders privately at an unspecified future date to discuss comments he made in his newsletter about a 'slave sale,' an East Side minister said Wednesday." The Express-News further reported:

Hagee, pastor of the 16,000-member Cornerstone Church, last week had announced a "slave sale" to raise funds for high school seniors in his church bulletin, "The Cluster."

The item was introduced with the sentence "Slavery in America is returning to Cornerstone" and ended with "Make plans to come and go home with a slave."

• Journalist Sarah Posner noted in God's Profits: Faith, Fraud and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters (PoliPointPress, January 2008) that in his book, What Every Man Wants in a Woman (Charisma House, 2005), Hagee wrote, "Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick. Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist" (Page 14).
• In What Every Man Wants in a Woman, Hagee wrote: "As I write this book, the issue of same-sex marriage rages on the front pages of America's newspapers and is seen on national telecasts each evening," and noted that "Massachusetts has just agreed to recognize same-sex marriages." Hagee added: "For a fact, Sodom and Gomorrah are being reborn in America." Several paragraphs later, he asserted that if the United States Congress failed to pass an amendment "recognizing only the marriage between a man and a woman," then "the gates of hell will be opened." He continued: "It will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah." He also wrote: "It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality. There is no justification or acceptance of homosexuality," and "Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce."

—E.B.