Jimmy Carter And The Confession Of Sins
(MENAFN- Asia Times)
Former US President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at 100, was famous for his 1976 confession in a playboy interview that he had sinned when he“looked on many women with lust” and, thus,“committed adultery many times in my heart.”
Having, like him, grown up immersed in the sin-soaked theology of the Southern Baptists – as a teenager, earnestly vowing in my prayers to abstain from that very sin – I understand where he was coming from. It would be hard not to respect his ambition (he was a hugely ambitious man) to be a good person, in the eyes of God and man, and to be frank about his shortcomings.
But an accurate account of history requires noting that Carter, as a grown man in the era of the sexual revolution, was talking about the sin that Pope Gregory in 580 CE had authoritatively ranked as the least serious of the“seven deadly sins .”
However, regarding what I for one consider a couple of much more serious sins that Carter committed in the course of his political career (neither of them, admittedly, on the traditional theologians' lists; they're sins by my defiinition), he offered little in the way of public acknowledgment – much less confession.
One such sin, unknown to most people alive today, was the uncharacteristically racist campaign that he ran in 1970 to become governor of Georgia.
The other was his stubborn attempt for three years as presidential candidate and White House occupant to remove US troops from South Korea – despite near universal opposition from knowledgeable advisors, who told him truthfully that it could mean handing over the South to North Korea's Kim Il Sung.
Georgia politics
I know about the first case because of my own youthful involvement in Georgia politics. While studying at Emory Law School, I was introduced to Carter in the fall of 1964 at a meeting of a few Democrats in suburban Atlanta's Dekalb County. We were campaigning on behalf of a young lawyer who was running what would prove a losing first race for the Georgia House of Representatives.
Former naval officer Carter, who had returned to hometown Plains to take over the family peanut farm and gone on to become a pro-Kennedy, pro-civil rights state senator, was preparing to run for the governorship in 1966. He was busy building support by offering encouragement to other candidates such as ours.
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