| As he abandoned Hillary to enlist with Obama, Lewis claimed a road-to-Damascus conversion: “Something’s happening in America, something some of us did not see coming… Barack Obama has tapped into something that is extraordinary… It’s a movement. It’s a spiritual event… It’s amazing what’s happening.” During Obama’s streak of a dozen straight primary victories, the late Geraldine Ferraro, a feminist icon since her nomination in 1984 as first woman to run for vice president on a major party ticket, expressed frustration at what was happening to Hillary: “If Obama was a white man he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman [of any color] he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up with the concept.” Ferraro did not say race was the sole reason Obama was succeeding. She said that being black was as indispensable to Obama’s success as being a woman had been to hers. Said Ferraro, “Had my name been Gerald rather than Geraldine, I would not have been on that ’84 ticket.” Subjected to a forty-eight-hour barrage of allegations of racism by Obama’s political and media allies, Ferraro resigned from the Clinton campaign. Yet what she said was transparently true. Was the fact that Obama was black irrelevant to the Democratic Party’s decision to give the Chicago state senator the keynote address to the 2004 Democratic national convention? Did his being black have nothing to do |
have … a fatwa.” In November 2010, the Conservative News Service created a cultural storm with an arresting story about a staid old Washington museum: The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, is currently showing an exhibition that features images of an ant-covered Jesus, male genitalia, naked brothers kissing, men in chains, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, and a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show’s catalog as “homoerotic.” The film of ants crawling on the figure of a crucified Christ was from “A Fire in My Belly” (1987), a video by David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. His video was created to express his rage and anguish at the death of a lover, Peter Hujar, who died of complications from AIDS the year the video was created. The Christmas season exhibit came to the attention of the Catholic League, which called the image of Jesus covered by ants “hate speech” and demanded its removal. The rest of the four-minute video, wrote Penny Starr, of CNS News, portrays “the bloody mouth of a man being sewn shut … a man undressing a man’s genitals, a bowl of blood and mummified humans.” The Washington Post rose to the defense of the exhibit, denouncing as censors any who would demand the removal of such art. But the National Portrait Gallery, hearing rumbles from the new Republican House about budget cuts, pulled the video. It was then acquired by the Museum of Modern Art |
