Lies about Obama even go to his religion

A gnarled hand grasped my wrist as I was leaving a Bill Clinton speech in Pahrump, Nev., and pressed into my hand a picture of Sen. Barack Obama with fellow candidates.

"They say Obama refuses to salute the flag," said the lady, a Puget Sounder transplanted to the high desert.

Back in Las Vegas, I checked out the picture. The refuse-to-salute claim was a fraud. True, Obama was standing with his hands clasped at an Iowa meeting, while Bill Richardson put his hand over his heart. But the photo was taken during the singing of the national anthem.

"We pick a presidential candidate, and then we pick on him," Adlai Stevenson, another eloquent candidate from Illinois, once observed.

Obama has started getting the hits that come with being a White House hopeful.

Howard Wolfson, the Frank Nitti of the Clinton campaign, has likened Obama to Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Someone allegedly in Clinton's campaign leaked to the Drudge Report a picture of Obama, in Kenya, clad in an ill-fitting turban.

Wolfson has sought to fan flames of Obama's relationship to indicted political fundraiser Tony Rezko -- "What is the nature of the relationship?" -- while ignoring a picture of Hillary Clinton beaming as she shook hands with the Chicago real estate developer.

Attacks on Obama have grown more sinister, however, and centered on his religion.

Crude right-wing smears started it. "Who is Barak (sic) Obama?" asked one broadside. It reported that Obama as a boy "attended a MUSLIM" school in Indonesia, and stated: "Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim."

The Fox News Channel picked up and reported the "Muslim school" rumor. A CNN reporter went to the school and found it to be secular, with students of diverse faith traditions.

Obama is, in his own words, a "deeply religious Christian ... who cares deeply about my faith."

Raised in an agnostic household, he came to the faith while working as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. As related in his book "The Audacity of Hope," he walked down the aisle and gave his life to Christ.

He belongs to the big Trinity United Church of Christ, a congregation self-defined as "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian." Ebony magazine has named his soon-to-retire pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as one of America's top 15 black preachers.

Yet, the smearing goes on, and has lately gotten into the mainstream.

A right-wing Cincinnati radio talk show host, Bill Cunningham, serving as warm-up man at a John McCain rally, rained down resentment against Obama and repeatedly emphasized his middle name, Barack HUSSEIN Obama. (McCain quickly denounced the remarks.)

Lou Dobbs on CNN has fanned the fires. Dobbs pooh-poohed Cunningham's intro, but then took up questions from a Democratic candidates' debate when Obama was asked about an endorsement by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and suspicions that Obama's church is "black nationalist." Dobbs complained that Wright won't come on his show, and he depicted the Christian pastor as a Farrakhan sympathizer.

And there was NBC's "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert, peppering Obama with questions about Farrakhan. Not content with Obama's description of Farrakhan's words -- "reprehensible and inappropriate" -- Russert quoted Wright's long-ago praise of Farrakhan.

Have we established a new standard for judging candidates? I am my pastor's keeper.

Did Catholics in Western Washington agree when Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen called the Hood Canal Trident submarine base "the Auschwitz of Puget Sound," or withheld the Pentagon's portion of his income tax. No, but Hunthausen was revered as a priest.

"God gave us a brain to use and I intend to use it," Obama says on the campaign trail.

He does, and has challenged believers and nonbelievers. He has called on conservative African-American ministers to be accepting of gays and lesbians. He has argued that religion makes vital contributions to public life, but should be offered consistently with America's traditions of democracy and pluralism.

Obama used a Sojourners/Call to Renewal Conference in 2006 to put it to those secular "progressives" who demand that references to religion be purged from our national life.

"If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice," Obama argued.

"Imagine Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address without references to 'the judgments of the Lord,' or King's 'I Have a Dream' speech without references to 'all of God's children.'

"Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny."

Such are words of a thoughtful, reflective man of faith.

Jim Wallis, the evangelical theologian and best-selling author, gets the last word.

"Like his politics or not, support his candidacy or not -- but don't disparage Barack Obama's faith, his church, his minister or his credibility as an articulate Christian layman who feels a vocation in politics," Wallis wrote in a blog last week.

"Those falsehoods are simply vicious lies and should be denounced by people of faith from across the political spectrum."