Unfortunately, the creator of a syndicated political cartoon, which appeared in The Bolivar Commercial Sunday, really didn’t bother with the facts and consequently got them wrong.
The cartoon ridiculed Fox News commentator Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday. It showed a wild-eyed Beck jumping up in the air, waving flags in both hands and saying, “I have a scheme that one day, rich middle-aged white guys will rise up and steal the legacy of the civil rights movement and claim it as their own.”
The cartoonist also pictured a sign on a podium that said, “Free at last to preach to the ignorant and the uninformed,” and another sign that said, “Hi, I’m Glenn Beck. “God talks to me!!” Still another sign said, “Restoring racial tensions.”
The artist had a right to draw such a cartoon. We do have freedom of the press in this country and cartoonists and editorial writers have a right to express their opinion, and that’s an important privilege.
After all, Thomas Jefferson did say:
“The basis of government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
We believe, however, with the right to opine comes the responsibility to base our opinions on the facts. The cartoon, which was obviously prepared before the rally, was not based on facts, and we apologize for that.
First of all, the “Restoring Honor” event was not about race at all. Instead Beck said such things as the reason our country is in decline is that we’ve turned away from the Judeo-Christian heritage of our nation’s founders; that we don’t respect God any more, and that we no longer have a value system that promotes the general welfare of all Americans.
The closest it came to being a political rally was when former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin commented, “We don’t want to change America. We want to restore it.”
And that’s a theme the Tea Party uses to describe its opposition to President Barack Obama, who goes overseas and talks about how tarnished America is and who attempts to impose social legislation on the country, which polls often show that a majority of Americans don’t want.
By and large, the rally presented the positive side of the Tea Party, the side which shows not what it objects to, but what it stands for. And we definitely join Beck and many other of our countrymen who agree that “America needs God again.”
We firmly believe a significant number of Americans, as have many of our politicians, lost their moral compasses, and that does not bode well for the nation, especially for a divided country in the need of restoration.
We believe Beck’s rally, which brought approximately 300,000 Americans together at the Washington Mall on a Saturday in August, was a prescription for the healing of the nation.
As 2 Chronicles 7:14 says:
“If my people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”