Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Posted: June 20, 2009 06:00 PM
Even by the nut case standard of the assorted pack of neo-Nazi unreconstructed Klan members, Aryan Nation haters, and the legion of loose screw religious cranks and loonies, the Reverend Wiley S. Drake's public prayer for the death of President Obama stretched far past the outer limit of credulity. The unrepentant Drake did not back away from the prayer when asked about it by Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio on June 2. He pleaded that he didn't understand why people were upset with his comments.
Drake is not just a garden variety religious crank. In 2006, he reigned as the second vice president of the nearly 20 million strong Southern Baptist Convention. The group is by far the nation's biggest evangelical denomination. He pastors a bonafide church, the First Southern Baptist Church in the middle-class bedroom city of Buena Park, California. Drake has his own popular radio show on the Crusade Radio Network. In April, Southern Baptist Convention spokesperson Richard Land even had kind words for Obama for his family values emphasis.
Convention officials, though, were far less forthright about Wiley's death prayer death for Obama. It issued a perfunctory statement saying that his views were his and his alone. It did not vigorously denounce those views, especially his Obama death prayer.
Wiley skirted the legal definition of what constitutes a threat to the president by attributing the death prayer to a phony, made up prayer from God. The operative term is willful in the federal statute that makes it an offense to threaten the president. It's punishable by up to five years in prison. Every year, the Secret Service investigates about 1500 reported or discovered threats to the president. Drake's God attribute threat didn't escape their attention.
But Drake doesn't just speak for Drake, and a handful of cranks, but says what more than a few ultra conservative, religious fundamentalists actually think and belief, and in their scariest and darkest moments the violence they actually wish for. With the murder of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, the Holocaust Museum shoot-up, the recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on a surge in hate groups, and the demand by a worried US Attorney General Eric Holder for a tougher hate law, death threats against public figures can't be shrugged off ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/a-little-talk-with-the-ma_b_218474.htmlDrake prayed for abortion doctor’s death; praying same for Obama
By Bob Allen, Associated Baptist Press
Published: June 05, 2009
BUENA PARK, Calif. (ABP)—A former Southern Baptist Convention officer called the murder of a controversial abortion provider in Kansas an answer to prayer, and he told a talk show host he also is praying for President Obama to die.
An SBC official insists most Southern Baptist are praying for the president's well-being—not his demise. And the denomination's chief ethicist decried the killing of the doctor.
“I am glad George Tiller is dead,” Wiley Drake, the SBC’s former second vice president, said on his Crusade Radio program. Tiller, one of only a few doctors in America who still performed a controversial late-term “partial-birth” abortion procedure, was gunned down in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan., just after the morning worship service began ...
http://www.baptiststandard.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9644&Itemid=53