Every President Has A Library

Every President has a library.  Jimmy Carter has one in Georgia; Bill Clinton has one in Arkansas.  It's part of the whole presidential thing.  Presidential libraries also have historic value--sometimes events become clearer as time passes.  Well, some of the United Methodists are having serious problems with the fact that George W. Bush is planning a library at Southern Methodist University.

Front Page Magazine reports:

"I hope that a bullhorn will not become the symbol for the entry of the United States into an unjustified war and that a pistol of Saddam Hussein's is not seen as some strange symbol of victory in that horrendous misjudgment," harrumphed anti-Bush United Methodist theologian Tex Sample to The New York Times. "That these should be the symbols of the values and commitments of the Bush administration and should now become the face of Southern Methodist University is cause for alarm."

I guess Mr. Sample has forgotten how devastated many of us felt after the events of September 11.  The people working at the World Trade Center site were digging in ruins where their friends and colleagues had been killed and in many cases buried alive.  The inspiration provided by the bullhorn in question was needed and appropriate.

The article further reports:

""It's the approach they've taken all along; it fits their worldview," explained leading Bush library critic and SMU professor emeritus William K. McElvaney, who is an ordained United Methodist whom The New York Times also quoted.  "It's a tragedy for SMU to hitch its star to this."  Evidently McElvaney has promised there will be demonstrations at the library's groundbreaking this month.  With the Rev. Sample and other left-leaning United Methodists, he unsuccessfully tried to persuade SMU's board and the denomination's bishops to halt the library. More temperate minds understood that whatever controversies surrounded the Bush years, the library's archives would be a boon to SMU scholarship.  George W. Bush, who's wife Laura attended SMU and sits on SMU's board, is himself a United Methodist.  The pastor of his Dallas church also sits on the SMU board and has outspokenly defended the library."

Good grief.  What a sad commentary on the politicization of everything in some circles in America that a presidential library cannot be built without someone getting their dander up.  I am sorry that those opposing this library are so against the military.  Have they not figured out yet that the military is what defends their right to practice their religion?