Or that you shouldn't criticize the President of the United States?

LT Horton, who blogs regularly at Look! A black Catholic!, has a post up over at Ignitum Today where she tackles the tyranny of nice:

Recently I posted this. Well, following its publication, I engaged in a conversation with someone very close to me, who did not think it very “Christian” of me to dislike our current POTUS. The following is a letter I wrote to this individual. My intent was never to post this but after much thought and prayer, I realized what I said needed to be heard. I’ve edited the letter to remove this person’s name and any identifiers.

Dear Friend,

I know we disagree on politics. We don’t have to agree on political issues, but since you chose to reprimand me by stating that as a Christian I should not say the things I say about Obama, I must firmly disagree. Respectfully, I must prove that you are wrong in your assertion that being a Christian means you must like everyone.

I once read:

St. Paul writes to Timothy (2 Tim 4:2-4), Proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths….

At no place in the Sacred Scriptures does it say: Be nice! However, popular portrayals of Christianity would lead us to think that the first and greatest commandment is niceness.

I was originally going to focus on three things in this letter.

1. Abortion

2. Same-sex marriage

3. Religious freedom

However, I realized that each of these issues is very detailed and therefore to ensure that I can fully relay as much information as possible, I decided to center on one issue; and to be quite honest, all I need is one, to make my point.

...

So, THIS is one of the reasons why as a Christian I MUST speak out against our current president. To sit silently would make me an accomplice. I’m not a lawyer, a politician, or a minister, so my power only comes from my words. Therefore I can only write and speak the Truth; and the Truth is, “Proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths…”

Clearly, there's more and yes, it's worthy.

And enlightening.

But not for the faint hearted or the easily offended... especially those of you so easily put off by people who aren't... "nice".

Wimps.

You know who you are.

At least not as strongly.

Back in 2008, this blog covered the writings of a site called Clergy for Obama, a site that has now gone private (which is revealing in and of itself).  It was chock filled with one religious leftist post after another singing the praises of then Senator Obama and the hope and change he promised to bring the country.

Many of those voices, or certainly voices like those who posted, are apparently not quite as enamored with The Won today.

In 2008, Barack Obama took aim at the “pew gap,” the overwhelming Republican edge among voters who regularly attend church.

The Democratic presidential nominee came nowhere near closing it, but he didn’t have to. He just needed an extra percentage point or two among traditional GOP constituents, and he got it.

The Democratic National Committee is promising a repeat performance in 2012. But some religious leaders and scholars who backed Obama in 2008 are skeptical. They say the Democrats have, through neglect and lack of focus, squandered the substantial gains they made with religious moderates and worry it will hurt Obama in a tight race against Republican Mitt Romney.

The DNC’s faith outreach director, the Rev. Derrick Harkins, said the party has strong relationships with religious groups. But as evidence of their concerns, critics point to the public debate that followed Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage, a decision the president said was based in part on his Christian faith.

No prominent clergyperson was sent out as a surrogate by the administration to explain the religious argument in favor of same-sex relationships. Instead, the main religious voices connected to Obama in the public sphere were the ministers who serve as his personal spiritual advisers and generally oppose gay marriage. Those ministers who were willing to comment — many weren’t — said they were struggling with Obama’s decision.

“I think there is a viable religious left who can be persuaded by a carefully articulated religious argument, but no one is making it,” said Valerie Cooper, a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia and Obama supporter. “I’m concerned that the administration has not followed through on the promise of 2008.”

Cooper recently attended a White House briefing for academics on the work of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. She and other religious scholars say they understand that pressing issues such as the economy had to be the priority. Still, they argued more could have been done to broaden the party’s tent.

“I get frustrated when I talk to evangelical friends or students and they ask, ‘How can you be a Christian and a Democrat?’” Cooper said.

David Kim, a Connecticut College religious studies professor, helped advise the 2008 campaign when videos of incendiary sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former Chicago pastor, threatened to derail the nominee. Kim, who attended the briefing with Cooper, described the administration’s faith-based work as “ad hoc” and “with no long-term strategy.”

“I didn’t really get a clear sense of what the mission is,” Kim said.

In 2008, the Obama campaign sought ways to cooperate with religious moderates and conservatives and make them feel more welcome among Democrats. Many political veterans dismissed the idea as quixotic. For the past decade or so, exit polls have found that the more often a voter attends church, the more likely he was to back a conservative candidate, earning the GOP the nickname “God’s Own Party.”

The Obama campaign built grassroots support among religious voters by organizing “faith house parties,” sending Roman Catholic and evangelical surrogates on the campaign trail, and holding faith caucus meetings at the party’s national convention. Cooper remembers a conference call the campaign organized with Democrats who opposed abortion rights and a position paper the campaign circulated from a Catholic theologian about reducing the need for abortion.

According to exit polls, the effort paid off. Obama made gains over the 2004 nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, with voters who attend religious services more than once a week, 43 percent to 35 percent. Obama also won 26 percent of the evangelical vote, compared with 21 percent for Kerry.

“It wasn’t huge, but it was statistically significant,” said John Green, director of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute for Applied Politics. Religious Democrats began to talk of a new era for the party.

But from 2008 to 2010, when control of Congress was at stake, the DNC cut its faith outreach staffing from more than six people to one part-timer, according to The Washington Post.

The big question is whether or not Religious Leftists will once again fulfill the role of useful idiot.

I suspect many of them will.

This administration is all about fooling the gullible and sadly, religious leftists have proven to be some of the most easily led.

Webster Bull is on his 21st day on the Camino de Santiago and he's posted a pearl:

At breakfast I sat with three English-speaking adults: Greg from Portland (OR), whom I met at the albergue in El Burgo Ranero; Marie, a mother of two and grandmother of five from Dieppe, New Brunswick; and "Rick," a very successful Harvard MBA now based in San Francisco who has called Boston and Zurich home and originally hails from Brooklyn. 

Then the morning passed and I took a seat at the same café facing the cathedral. Greg and Marie passed by without stopping, while Rick finally, almost apologetically, asked if he could sit with me again. We passed a companionable hour, he writing in his journal, I drawing a ridiculously amateurish cathedral in mine, one that nevertheless retains a certain mysterious integrity. 

And I told Rick that he had said something at breakfast that stuck with me, as it still does now. 

We were talking about the remarkable coincidences of the Camino, the things that happen that make you think, like my uncanny meeting with Nacho yesterday. At breakfast, Rick had said that these were mysteries, pure and simple, and that it was not necessary to understand mysteries or attribute them to anything. I heard in this statement something quite common here on the Camino: a desire to leave God or anything higher out of the equation. Life is a mystery. What else do I need to know? 

But all morning I wondered: What is a mystery novel without a solution? It is an unthinkable tease. What is a question without an answer? A torment. What is a code without a key? Gibberish. And the world, to my eye and to my heart, is neither tease nor torment, and it certainly isn't gibberish. This world must mean something. 

The mystery must have a solution, the question an answer, the code a key. And not to seek these answers is to be less than human. The heart desires an answer, and yet we sit silently by, allowing the code to remain uncracked. 

That's the condition of so many people today, and it is the reason I choose to believe in God.

If you're not following Mr. Bull as he travels The Way, you're missing out.

Honestly, you are.

... from a young man with cerebral palsy who teaches us all a thing or two.

Yea, grab a tissue before watching: