We need a moral president!

Instead of the United States exerting full diplomatic and political pressure on all parties to end hostilities, the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to noncombatant casualties in Lebanon and has blamed others for violence it is unwilling to stop.

The president’s own behavior discloses a frightening moral disengagement. A week ago, he walked up behind German Chancellor Angela Merkel and gave her a massage below the neck—odd and unacceptable behavior.

A few days later, smacking on a buttered roll, he uttered profanity in a conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, blaming Syria for the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel and disclosing a lack of verbal articulation about the crisis. When shown the transcript of what he said, his press secretary reported the president rolled his eyes and laughed.

On Thursday, he vetoed a Senate-passed bill that would have allowed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, saying that the bill “crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect." He showed more concern for frozen embryos that will inevitably be discarded as medical waste than he did for fully human children in Beirut. Killing Lebanese noncombatants apparently is not a moral boundary for Bush.

That position found substantive voice in U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who said there is no moral equivalence between civilian casualties from Israeli attacks against Lebanon and civilian casualties from Hezbollah’s attacks against Israel—what he terms “malicious terrorist acts.”

Bolton’s flawed moral thinking holds that when Israel kills Lebanese civilians it’s OK, but when Hezbollah kills Israel civilians it’s malicious murder. Such a dichotomy is morally unsustainable. It is an immoral smoke screen behind which he justifies Lebanese noncombatant deaths.

excerpt from editorial by Robert Parham, excutive director of Baptist Center for Ethics