( L - R ) Obama, King Jr

Despite the ease with which Dr Martin Luther King Jr's name is invoked in recent times as an apostle of peace and a man divinely inspired to lead a campaign for much-needed change in American race relations, he did not enjoy universal acclaim among people (including his own blacks) at the height of the civil rights movement.

His detractors included those who thought he was a usurper or a Johnny-come-lately, hogging the spotlight, where others had laboured long and hard before his arrival on the scene. There were others, too, who contended that he was too soft when he needed to be more radical. Among the critics, also, were quite a few middle-class blacks, pastors and priests who criticised him and his colleagues after they had journeyed into different states demanding an end to Jim Crow laws. As far as they were concerned they had been enjoying a workable accommo-dation in which everyone knew his or her place and they did not need King's help to fix anything. That was, of course, until they looked out their windows and, from their storefronts and saw the 'good white folks' clubbing or turning their large jet hoses at full blast on little black children.

Not authentically black

It should come as no surprise then, that people today feel compelled to point out that Barack Obama is not authentically black, not American enough, and, most certainly, not Christian enough. His more nuanced thinking and approach to addressing the hot button issues in American public discourse - the use of science in education and the extent to which the distribution of condoms instead of teaching sexual abstinence should be predominant in the fight against HIV/ AIDS, whether a woman has any say beyond being affirmative in carrying a foetus to term even if she had been raped and whether same-sex couples should enjoy any form of legal protection, marks him as a moral reprobate and, most likely, the incarnation of the beast of the book of Revelations.

Clearly, neither Obama nor his policy proposals are beyond criticism, but a critique enveloped in narrow moralising is inadequate at best and amounts to little more than petty carping at worst.

The acclaim being afforded Obama by some black people is no different to the adulation some religious conservatives gave and continue to accord George W. Bush for no other reason than that he claimed to be a born-again Christian - never mind the contradictions in his actions and what he professed.

Secular, pluralistic society

Yet among the many challenges that Obama must wrestle with, as other presidents before him did, is the simple concept - how does one govern in a secular and pluralistic society? For inasmuch as many people would like to argue that the United States is principally a Christian society, it is still not a theocracy and there is no prevailing universal ethic to which all its citizens subscribe. People of rural Mississippi, downtown Tuscon, Arizona, San Diego, California and Seattle, Washington have shared, as well as different, values. In whose interest should Obama govern and to what end?

Yet in the long road to achieving a greater space for civil liberties, today's generation stands on the shoulders of a vast army of campaigners - men and women of different perspectives, different lifestyles and different religious persuasions. As much as we may be disturbed by what some of them stood for in their private lives, their specific contributions to society cannot be circumscribed to a short list of moral values examined through misty binary spectacles.

The people of the United States have been served in their Senate and House of Representatives by church-going, overt racists, out-of-the-closet homosexuals, former members of the Ku Klux Klan and quite a few serial adulterers. The guardians of public morality have a lot of work to do to set the wider society on a path of right living and that project is bigger than Barack Hussein Obama.

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