Why I'm voting for Barack Obama, and why I hope you will too - Reason 3

By Brian D. McLaren

"When I come to an election, I don’t just ask, “Which candidate will do the most for me and my nuclear family?” I extend my concern.

I extend it to my extended family, which includes people with special needs and disabilities, people with chronic illnesses, gay people, poor people, people of advanced age, people with histories of addiction and crime and mental illness. How will they be treated in a McCain administration? How will they be treated in an Obama administration?

I extend my concern even farther. How about people who live less than an hour from my front door – in inner-city Washington DC, in impoverished sections of Baltimore – how will they fare? Which president will be most concerned about them? Or how about people in states like Ohio and Michigan … where hundreds of thousands of people are unemployed because too many American corporations shipped jobs overseas? Or people in Katrina-devastated areas of Mississippi and Louisiana? Or people in the coal country of Kentucky or East Tennessee and West Virginia, whose lives are being devastated by the “externalized costs” of “cheap coal?”

I don’t stop there either. I go beyond the US. I think about slums where I have walked, people I have met, shacks I have sat in and shanties I have eaten meals in … from Mexico to Chile to South Africa to Burundi. Which candidate will do the most for the least of the least of these?" Read more...>