We’re experts at euphemizing/demonizing

18th June 2012   ·   0 Comments

By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist

Heavenly Father, we come fastcash-advance.com before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know your Word says,

‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.

We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.

We have killed our unborn and called it choice.

We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.

We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building
self-esteem.

We have abused power and called it politics.

We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition.

We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; try us and see if there be some wicked way in us; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!’

Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas, and who have been ordained by you to govern this great state.

Grant them your wisdom to rule, and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will. I ask it in the name of your Son, spring cash advance program the living Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Ascribed by some to the Rev. Billy Graham, this “Prayer For Our Nation” was later attributed to radio newsman Paul Harvey. However, neither of these wrote or delivered it. The Rev. Joe Wright, senior pastor of the 2,500-member Central Christian Church in Wichita, delivered it on January 23, 1996 at a session of the Kansas House of Representatives.

Delivered as a “Prayer of Repentance,” the invocation was a version of a prayer written in 1995 by Bob Russell who had offered it at the Kentucky Governor’s Prayer Breakfast in Frankfort, Kentucky. One representative stormed out in protest while three others gave speeches protesting Rev. Wright’s prayer and his “message of intolerance.”

Even as Minority Leader Tom Sawyer asserted that the prayer “reflects the extreme, radical views that continue to dominate” the conservative wing of the House, the prayer was escaping to the outside where it went viral, in a short time traveling from city to city, to all the states and even into many foreign countries.

Appearing on dozens of radio shows, Rev. Wright and his prayer were the hottest topics on numerous television and newspaper reports. The pastor explained, “I thought I might get a call from an angry congressman or two, but I was talking to God, not them. The whole point was to say that we all have sins, that we need to repent – all of us. The problem, payday loans good or bad I guess, is that you’re not supposed to get too specific when you’re talking about sin.”

Syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly probably ex­plained it best, “The easy answer is that he read a prayer about sin. The complicated answer is that Wright jumped into America’s tense debate about whether some things are always right and some things are always wrong.”

Such feedback is a classic example of how we euphemize whatever we want to justify. Everything will be all right if we can just find the right words, the right labels. In thinking and living thus, we reduce all substance to mere semantics and wordplay.

On the flip side, we demonize whatever we want to condemn, just as we demonize the people who disagree with our core beliefs and our crusades. We also demonize their core be­liefs and their personal crusades in life. If we can just put together the right words, the right formula, we will put those dastardly offenders and pretenders in their place.

Of course, the ultimate question and criterion is, “How much in line with the timeless teachings of Jesus are out thoughts, our words and our actions?” And how honest are we in pursuing the unvarnished truth instead of blind bias and ideologies?

This article was originally published in the June 18, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper