ViperOverLord wrote:I'll ignore Woody's prototypical snipes and Bones prototypical mislabeling of matters and address your points Mets:
- We know that Obama reads speeches from a prompter so your assertion that it was paraphrasing is almost certainly incorrect. If you go back and look at the quote vs. the DOI you'll notice it is pretty much word for word except that he omitted 'The Creator' and qualifiers like 'that among these are' (likely because nobody talks like that anymore so he thought he'd just sound cooler to leave it out). He was referencing and not paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is when you quote off of the top of your head the general nature of something. This was almost certainly a prepared speech as all or most of the President's speeches tend to be prepared calculated speeches. You'll notice a couple weeks back when Obama said the Republicans treat him like a dog or whatever he said, he qualified that he was deviating from his speech (though he may have just planned that too). The default is prepared speeches so please don't tell us that he was paraphrasing, unless you have something that says otherwise.
As a character in one of my favorite movies said, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." Paraphrasing has a specific technical and literary meaning - directly referencing the material of another work, but without directly quoting (usually by rewording it or rearranging it). I did not mean to say that this was an off-the-cuff comment - I'm sure you are correct (as you say below) that whoever wrote this knew that the Declaration includes the word "Creator" and leaves it out. The reason why this is a non-issue is that Obama wasn't
quoting the text, he was referring to it.
- Again he was directly referencing to the DOI. Whether or not you want to call it 'quoting' it is just semantics. He consciously left 'the creator' out of it and you can bet that there was discussion behind the scenes as to whether or not that was a good idea. Come on man. PR is important to this guy. Don't pretend that he doesn't consider PR value in everything he does (as all presidents prudently do). And before anyone gets into it, I'm not saying that this was a PR move. I'm merely saying that he would have considered the consequences and so you can know it was almost certainly a conscious omission irregardless of whether he labeled it a good or bad PR maneuver.
I agree that most likely, whoever wrote this made the conscious choice to refer to the phrase as it was. However, I see it as a non-issue because of the context of the situation - Obama was telling us what a core American principle was, not telling us about whether God gave us the rights that we have. If we removed the bit about them being "endowed by our Creator," it would still make sense as a core principle for what America is all about.
- I am not going to say it's specifically a 'problem' that Obama did not use the term 'The Creator' in his speech. That's his prerogative if he doesn't want to use the term. My point is that it points to the larger trend from those in government and society that want to outlaw or discourage references to God or spirituality. As such, anyone bringing up these concerns should not be relegated to 'conspiracy theorist' status when it is a very real and ongoing issue.
I'm not going to defend whoever made the comment about conspiracy theories, but there's some validity to the message: specifically, you'd have to show that there's some intentional trend among politicians and public figures to disavow such references to religion, and that it is being done to achieve some larger goal. If it just so happens that a lot of politicians are choosing not to reference God in their arguments, then all you can show from that is that there are some not-very-religious people in government. But I don't think there's a sweeping trend to secularize government at the moment - most members of Congress consider themselves religious.
The fact is, religion
is polarizing in today's society. I don't think you can say that Obama is trying to push religion aside by neglecting to mention that part of the sentence; I think it makes sense as a tool to diffuse controversy that is unrelated to the topic at hand. There's a time and a place to discuss the place of religion in society and government, but the convention he was at certainly wasn't it. Now, I don't mean to say that every reference to a Creator is a way to spark a religious debate, I only mean that to pretend the issue of religion in government
isn't important would also be wrong.
