It’s been 15 months since the presidential candidates started campaigning and only now is Obama’s personal relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. coming to light.
Why, with months of media scrutiny grilling Mitt Romney about things that happened in the LDS church 100 years ago, didn’t the media spend as much time digging into Obama’s close ties to a present-day pastor who spews hate-speech every Sunday and why Obama sat in his pew listening to his racist rants against “white America” for 20 years?
Obama attempted to distance himself while not disowning Wright in a speech attempting to rescue his campaign from the public backlash. He talked about how there is anger on both sides, black and white, and neither side is innocent.
He tried to compare Wright to his “own white grandmother…who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made (Obama) cringe.”
The only problem is that there is a huge difference between an old woman sharing feelings of fear with her family and a pastor shouting in rage from a pulpit to inflame countless others. I’m sure Obama’s grandma wasn’t out there preaching racial hatred the way Wright does.
Obama tried to excuse Wright’s comments by saying that a powerful anger in the black community rooted in “memories of humiliation and doubt…may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends” but “does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table…and occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.”
This sermon was not a one-time event. Wright has been spewing his hatred for more than 40 years.
How can you excuse a man who asserted from the pulpit that because of “state-sponsored terrorism” (bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki), America is morally responsible for Sept. 11, and that the attacks were “chickens coming home to roost.”
Although that statement is reprehensible, that’s not all. Wright refers to the United States as the U.S. KKK of A while accusing the U.S. government of not only knowing about Pearl Harbor but lying about it. Next, he claims that the U.S. government gives drugs to black people to enslave and imprison them, and that the government invented HIV “as a means of genocide against people of color.”
He says blacks are asked to sing “God Bless America” but he says “No!” and yells three times from the pulpit, “God Damn America!”
Let me tell you what. Wright should be falling to his knees thanking God he lives in America, the greatest nation in the world, that guarantees his right to “worship” how he pleases and say such horrible things about his country without being shot.
Nowhere else in the world have black people been blessed with so many freedoms and opportunities for success.
If Obama believes race division is a thing of the past and that we must work past feelings of injustice on both sides, why is it he chose to align himself with a church that preaches such malice?
Wright isn’t just some unfortunate supporter whom Obama barely knows.
Obama described Wright as his mentor, spiritual adviser and friend. The racist reverend married Obama and his wife, baptized their children, gave him the title for his book and was consulted before Obama entered the presidential race.
It’s too late for Obama to disavow Wright’s statements and say he disagrees with him. If that were the case, he would’ve stood up and walked out of that church a long time ago.
