Gripping by Religious Conservatives on Obama’s Thanksgiving Proclamation
To his credit, Barack Obama puts a modestly enlightened spin on his Thanksgiving proclamations.
This year’s proclamation recalls that “the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony…enjoyed the fruits of their labor with the Wampanoag tribe—a people who had shared vital knowledge of the land in the difficult months before” and notes “the contributions that generations of Native Americans have made to our country.” He even celebrates community organizers, whose “actions reflect our age-old belief that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and they affirm once more that we are a people who draw our deepest strength not from might or wealth, but from our bonds to each other.”
For this, the newly re-elected president is dinged by conservative commentators who fret that Obama’s proclamations have not been sufficiently religious in tone. “God is lucky to get a mention or two,” gripes National Review editor Rich Lowry. “What God has lost in prominence in Obama’s statements has been gained by the American Indians, in a bow to multicultural pieties.” Oh those First Americans, always elbowing their way into our history!
Perhaps our conservative friends are worried that Obama’s modest “multicultural pieties” serve as a holiday manifestation of the demographic turning that handed the president an unexpectedly broad mandate on November 6. They needn’t worry. Obama is safely within the bounds of Thanksgiving promulgation. It has been the better part of seventy years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt finished one of his many Thanksgiving proclamations with a thoroughly multicultural call to “let every man of every creed go to his own version of the Scriptures for a renewed and strengthening contact with those eternal truths and majestic principles which have inspired such measure of true greatness as this nation has achieved.”
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