There is apparently a Facebook group praying for the death of President Obama. The group’s page says:

DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN

Now there is a Facebook petition calling on Facebook to ban the above group. I became aware of the group that wants the ban, and hence the group doing the praying, because three of my Facebook friends had joined the petition to ban the group, and Facebook likes to tell me when people I know do something on Facebook. I don’t know why Facebook likes to do this, but it does.

One of my Facebook friends on the petition is someone I know is liberal. One is someone I assume is liberal, or somewhat. And one is someone I know is conservative and blogs as a conservative.

What these people seem to agree on is that political discourse shouldn’t include praying for the death of the President. The petition group has over 93,000 members as of this writing. The group is calling for Facebook members to stage a log-off for Saturday, like a sit-in without the sitting or the showing up anywhere or the doing of anything. They want people to go 12 hours without logging onto Facebook to make the strength of their feelings known and get Facebook to remove the group that is praying for Obama’s death.

I have some thoughts on this:

1. Praying for someone to die is not likely to cause them to die, unless God owes you a really big favor. I am not in the habit of worrying about what people pray for.
2. The quote from the group reads like a joke. Not a particularly good one. But it is structured like one. I can’t take it very seriously. (It could be a hoax, put up by an Obama supporter. I have no evidence that it is and probably it isn’t, but I do think this helps Obama more than it harms him and is precisely what you would do if you wanted to make Obama’s opponents look bad.) More likely some Obama opponent is just trying to be clever. The person who wrote the all-caps prayer is probably pretty proud of it.
3. Praying for the death of the President in a huge public forum like Facebook — even if in jest — is not likely to help independent and moderate voters to be persuaded that they should vote against him in the next election. It is more likely to turn them off and prevent them from listening to arguments against his policies.
4. With significant public sentiment against Obama and his policies, it isn’t smart for Obama’s opponents to give people a reason to rally behind him.
5. This sort of thing provides canvas and a brush to those who want to paint the Tea Party and the administration’s opponents as militia-terrorist types and racists. It’s dumb politics.
6. Is Patrick Swayze really anyone’s favorite actor? Farrah Fawcett anyone’s favorite actress?
7. Whether the quote from the group is in all-caps because the group chose that, or whether the all-caps are there because the petition site chose that, someone needs to be smacked.
8. If Obama did die, Joe Biden would be President. Be careful what you pray for.

Update: As Colin Cohen notes in the comments below, the group praying for Obama’s death has taken its language from a similar “prayer” by teachers for the death of New Jersey Governor Christie. So my thought that it might be a hoax wasn’t that far off. If not quite a hoax, it seems to be mocking or criticizing the threat to Christie. We could ask how many of the thousands of people outraged by the Obama prayer — who joined a Facebook petition page and couldn’t believe the low level of political discourse in the United States — had a problem with the original, or even heard about it.

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