Yeah, OK, let’s label this more accurately as “Obama’s speechwriter’s Easter Breakfast remarks” — and observe that he seemed to have farmed out the job to two speechwriters, and pasted it together.
The text is at the White House website. And, you know, he actually starts out pretty strong:
For me, the celebration of Easter puts our earthly concerns into perspective. With humility and with awe, we give thanks to the extraordinary sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Savior. We reflect on the brutal pain that He suffered, the scorn that He absorbed, the sins that He bore, this extraordinary gift of salvation that He gave to us. And we try, as best we can, to comprehend the darkness that He endured so that we might receive God’s light.
And yet, even as we grapple with the sheer enormity of Jesus’s sacrifice, on Easter we can’t lose sight of the fact that the story didn’t end on Friday. The story keeps on going. On Sunday comes the glorious Resurrection of our Savior.
Which is actually remarkably orthodox. The keywords are there: “salvation” and “resurrection.”
But then comes the second speechwriter.
Easter is our affirmation that there are better days ahead — and also a reminder that it is on us, the living, to make them so.
And from there he moves into a generic exhortation to fight against injustice, and adds an “impromptu” (was it really so?) criticism of “less than loving expressions by Christians.” And this last is what’s getting all the attention — though, oddly, Time reports this as a “measured approach” intentionally softened from his statements at the National Prayer Breakfast in February.
But — yes, it’s a small thing, really, but can he not set politics aside for one day?
UPDATE: finally watched the remarks — or at least a snippet of them, here, to confirm that this was, as with everything else, a telepromptered speech, rather than some off-the-cuff remarks.
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