Ed Young calls out Bill Clinton for another fib:
Ed Young, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Houston, said former President Bill Clinton's remarks about him at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta earlier this month came "out of the fantasy file" and were "completely inaccurate."
Clinton, during the closing session of the celebration Feb. 1, spent several minutes recounting a visit Young made to the White House in 1993 as president of the Southern Baptist Convention when Young supposedly asked Clinton, "Do you believe the Bible is literally true?"
Young, in a letter to Clinton released to Baptist Press, said he was stunned to read the transcript of Clinton's remarks and wanted to set the record straight.
"Your comments concerning our visit together were not just taken out of context; the conversation you described never took place," Young wrote to Clinton Feb. 8.
Clinton, while talking about the Conservative Resurgence within the SBC, said in his speech, "Rev. Young reached out to me and he asked if Al Gore and I would have breakfast with him and if I would go jogging with him up and down the Mall of Washington first. As I remember, he was a little younger and a little fitter than I was, but I managed to keep up."
During breakfast on the Truman Balcony of the White House, Young, Clinton recounted, "looked at me and he said, 'I want to ask you a question, a simple question, and I just want a yes or no answer. I don't want one of those slick political answers. Just answer me yes or no. Do you believe the Bible is literally true? Yes or No?'
"I said, 'Rev. Young, I think it is completely true, but I do not believe you or I or any other living person is wise enough to understand it completely,'" Clinton said at the New Baptist Covenant. "He said, 'That's a political answer.' I said, 'No it's not. You asked a political question.' I said, 'It is not.'"
Young, in his letter, said the most important discrepancy he wanted to correct is that he did not ask whether Clinton believed the Bible is literally true.
"I do not believe the Bible is literally, in the normal definition of the word, true," Young wrote. "Jesus said, 'I am the door.' No one takes that 'literally.'