John Cook at Gawker:
There’s a hilarious new meme in the wingnut sectors of the internet: someone’s coined a bumper sticker slogan encouraging people to pray for Barack Obama. But here’s the funny part: it’s really a secret Christian code for “Kill the President!’
Posters to various message boards tell stories of seeing bumper stickers with the message “Pray for Obama—Psalm 109:8” on the highway, only to look up the verse and find, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” People — like the commenter “Panama” on INGunOwners.com, to pick one guy completely at random — think this is “too funny.” The next verse in Psalms is, “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”
Anyway, now it’s a real thing: CafePress is selling T-shirts and bumper stickers, the Christian Science Monitor is wondering whether it’s “funny or sinister” to pray for Obama’s death, and Rachel Maddow referenced it last night on her show.
UPDATE: CafePress appears to have halted sales of all the Psalm 109:8-related merchandise.
Psalm 109 is known as “A Cry for Vengeance,” which is one of the foundational values of Christianity, along with small-business tax cuts. It’s actually quite a little psalm, as psalms go, and the opening lines sound really familiar:
Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise;
for the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me:they have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause.Then it gets into the part where you pray for God to smite Barack Obama and condemn Malia and Sasha to poverty for the rest of their lives, a fate they deserve because they sprang from the loins of the sinful:
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield at Belief.net:
Any time the citizens of a state, particularly a democracy, invoke their faith to pray for the demise of those they oppose politically, we should be concerned. When the call for such prayers becomes one of the most popular Google searches in the country, we should shake, especially those of us who believe in God, prayer and the Bible. Psalm 109, verse 8, went viral this morning in just that way.
Among the world’s top Google searches today are phrases that contain the words “Psalms 109 8”, and “Psalm 109 8 prayer for Obama”. For those of you who may not know that particular verse, it reads “May his days be few, may another take over his position.” And before anyone excuses this toxic use of scripture as nothing more than the wish that President Obama not be re-elected to a second term of office, the next verse in the psalm reads, “May his children be orphans and his wife a widow”.
In fact, the entire chapter is about the prayed for death of an evil person. Not to mention that anyone who knows enough Bible to have thought about this verse in particular, surely knows the entire chapter and appreciates its message. Pretty scary stuff.
All this is especially upsetting in light of the last weeks’ events at Fort Hood. Exactly how long is it going to take us to figure out the danger of linking faith claims and violent fantasies? How is it that the very same people who would have wanted to curtail access, and rightly so, to the hate-filled, violence-inducing, sermons to which Major Hasan listened, do not cry out against these prayers and those praying them?
Diana Butler Bass at Belief.net:
It was, most likely, intended as a joke. But it isn’t really very funny. Especially since the next verse reads, “May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.” The passage goes on the same way–asking God to pulverize this poor fellow–that he lose all his worldly goods, that his orphans be abandoned, that his father be remembered as a sinner, and finally, that “his memory be cut off from the earth.”
Thus, the “Prayer for Obama,” does more than anticipate that he leaves office; it entreats God to destroy the president.
Psalm 109 belongs to a special category of the psalms known as “imprecatory” prayers–it is a lament in the form of petition to destroy one’s enemies. It is the personal prayer of an individual, someone who has been dealt an injustice by another–and usually more powerful–person. The words of Psalm 109 are those of deep agony, the longings of a victim for retribution and justice. This psalm is considered one of the most difficult of all the psalms–full of violent images of vengeance and death. Many a biblical critic has struggled with its words–and not a few–including Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians–recommend that it not be used in public worship, much less as a bumper-sticker political slogan.
A few too many on the right have begun taking this very seriously, putting “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8” — prayers, in other words, for something awful to happen to the president — onto t-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, and even teddy bears. It’s a bit of a dog whistle — the typical person who sees it might think it’s simply a prayer in support of the president, but a closer look makes the malicious intent clear.
Frank Schaeffer told Rachel Maddow this week that the right-wing activists embracing this lurid nonsense are dangerous, threatening, and “genuinely frightening.”
The more people in faith communities speak out against this nauseating hatred, the better.
Peter De Conceicao at The Examiner:
Supporters of the President are up in arms, and declaring that the t-shirt is an exhortation on the part of Christian Conservatives to cause grievous harm to the President. While the actual passage in Psalm 109:8 reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office” the rest of the psalm is an entreaty to God to ruin the supplicant’s enemy, to “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow” (the next line.) Clearly, it could be interpreted that some who buy and wear the t-shirt want President Obama deeply incapacitated, to put it mildly. However, other commentators have countered that it’s taking Psalm 109 out of context; all 109:8 declares, they say, is that those who are opposed to the President wish him to not be re-elected. That’s all. There’s no murderous intent, nor are they praying for lethal divine wrath to be visited upon Obama or his family.
Now, the actual psalm itself, read as a whole, is a lament against an oppressive and wicked time; it is also a call by David to bring down righteous vengeance upon his transgressor. But not just to smite down; the oppressor’s familial lineage must also be exterminated, and his deeds stricken from the public records. Taken in literal form, this was part of the no-holds-barred approach in the dog eat dog world that was the ancient Holy Land. It’s tribalism in the purest form, and utter destruction of an enemy was paramount if you wanted to survive. Which brings us back to the t-shirt’s original intent. Is the t-shirt, the fridge magnet, and the bumper sticker (all of which list “109:8”) code for “we hate Barack Obama and hope God or someone does grievous injury to him?” Or was it simply quoting that single line, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office” as a simple statement of political dissatisfaction? Which, by the way, is free speech protected by the First Amendment. When it’s a provable exhortation to violence, then it becomes hate speech.
The only person who could truthfully address the intent is the designer of the offending apparel and the other brickabrack. And if his or her purpose was to maliciously incite the more homicidally inclined amongst the Christian community, then that’s a matter to be settled between the t-shirt designer and God. And the Secret Service. Apparently, they take a dim view of threats (implied or otherwise) against the President of the United States.
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