God’s on Grams’ side

I spent two hours yesterday morning doing some research at the Duluth Public Library. My time was well spent because I learned of a new way to access old newspaper articles. This research is all in preparation for making TV ads next Monday. Tonight as I was reading through one of the articles I discoverd a very interesting tidbit.

In the Star Tribune of February 13th. 1999, just after Rod Grams voted to remove President Clinton from office, Grams explained his vote to a Strib reporter.

Of the Senate’s decision not to remove the President Grams said: “…I hoped that the decision we made here was the right decision. Someone mentioned that Abraham Lincoln used to say durig the Civil War that both sides prayed to the same God and one side had to be right.”

Rod Grams butchered Lincoln’s sentiment. Rod doesn’t actually claim to have voted as God would have wanted but clearly he thought one side was right and God was rooting them on. I presume he can’t imagine that God disapproved of his vote. But thinking that one side or the other during the Civil War had God’s favor was not what Lincoln meant at all. Such was Lincoln’s humility that he simply hoped that he was on God’s side. As he told one of his supporters who took it for granted that the Union was on the side of the God Abe replied. “It is more important that we are on God’s side.”

Instead of assuming that God was on his side Rod Grams would have been better off praying that God was on his side. Back in 1999 I sure wasn’t on Grams’s side.