Senator Purdue Quotes Psalm 109 verse 8 Against Obama?

It was a joke.

Is the media making too much of it?  They point to the very next verse (v.9) and say that this can be interpreted as a possible death wish on Obama.

But, Senator David Purdue (R-Ga) only quoted verse 8.  That’s all.

Actually, people do this all the time.  Pastors do this.  Quote a Bible verse, or a portion of a Bible verse, out of context—to be funny, to get a laugh.

For example, when I lived in the metropolitan Phoenix area of Arizona, a pastor humorously quoted Acts 27:12 to refer to all the “snow birds” coming down from the northern colder regions of our country to winter in Phoenix.  The congregation laughed.  It was a play on Biblical words, a joke.

And so was Senator Purdue’s pointed Biblical reference to verse 8 of Psalm 109.  It was a joke, nothing more and nothing less.  I can accept that.

Nevertheless, it is revealing.
Our extremely polarized political landscape leaves little room for humor these days.

Each side has so little respect for the people on the other side.  What we constantly hear is the distaste, even disgust, of the one side for the other.  We witness their anger, even hatred.  We see the ongoing ill-will that the one side has toward the other, such as when it is said that Obama is the devil or Hillary is evil incarnate.

In such a context there is little room for “innocent” jokes, for any joke will be harshly received and misinterpreted as a covert threat-message by the other side.  Defenses go up and nothing “innocent” is heard at all.

It is revealing in that it shows that the far right will not be happy unless they have total control over congress, the senate, the presidential office, and the Supreme Court—emphasis on TOTAL control.  The same could be said of the far left.  This is why congress gets so little done and why blockage, obstruction, and nay-saying, is the modus operandi of the day.

The American people want change but are not getting real change because we are not electing people, on either side, who are able or willing to work together with the other side, to make productive change.  What we seem to be doing is choosing extremists sides and electing officials to fight with that kind of mindset, with total control goals as their agenda.  In short, we’re electing representative officials that seem to carry only extreme positions.  The real problem therefore seems to lie within our primary electoral process.

The question is this: Can we change that process?  Are we willing to do so?  Is it possible to give more power to the balanced middle voice, which perhaps is the majority of Americans, so that they have a more effective presence in the political process?  Or shall we continue to allow extremists to rule the political process?