the Obama's contibuted over $20,000.00 to this  church last year...it's right there in his tax records...this guy d has been Obama's mentor and father figure.

If you're not wearing a flag pin leave the country.

I have said God Damn America a lot since George Bush has been president.  When we have a new democratic president I will gladly sing God Bless America.

Many feminists feel that Geraldine Ferarro is like an old aunt who says things that we don't agree with. And yet Hillary was forced to repudiate her.

It looks like Obama will have no choice in this matter, given the big stink his campaign raised re GF.

is a Republican, but that has nothing to do with why I attend the church.  I feel that I am being spiritually fed by scriptural message and enjoying working with the other members of the congregation.  I don't care about my pastor's political views.

Why are we giving religious leaders too much attention?

They're in the bottom rung of the food chain, in my universe.

THEY SHOULD ALL RESIGN from whatever position they have anywhere.

Obama partisan... However, I'm an expert on 20th Century American Religion specifically concerning politics.  And implore people on both sides of this campaign not to tread here.

I understand the attraction and Responsibility to report the news. But, too much is at stake here.  I've written similar defenses toward people's questions on Hillary even being religious.  Wright is not on Obama's finance team, or a senior consultant, he is the pastor of what I believe was Michelle's Church... he should step down from the huge religious reach-out panel.  This sermon is likely racists to your ears, and many others ears, but that is really to be ignorant to the conversation Jeremiah Wright is, and has, engaged in.  Wright is speaking to a Church steeped chiefly in Cone, Katie Canon, Copeland, and West - where this is acceptable language.  He is not being literal in suggesting "Christ was a Black Man," nor is he intending to be exclusive.  Your right about the irrelevance about his standing in the Church.  The truth us, he is one of the most respected Black Theologians in the country, and widely respected (with and for numerous comments like these) at the leading theological schools in the country.  I just suggest before
(likely joining the rest of the media ignorance) you read Cone's God of the Oppressed or an article surrounding it.  In order that you understand what Wright was saying in the context of a black and womanists theological conversation... if the media blows this up it will blow up (wrongly) a long standing theological conversation - it will destroy Cornell West, Cannon, and others.  I ask that you take hold of your actions, even if it means not going along with the rest of media, and not report on what any persons church says.  Can you imagine the shame if anybody were called to "reject and denounce" their Church?  While Wright's rhetoric is harsh, trinity has a large white population, and is not a racists Church.  

Thank you,
Grant

outrage-off.  

As I said in another diary about this issue, I don't hold Obama accountable for the Reverend's inflammatory rhetoric, and in the larger scheme of things, I don't think that we serve anyone when we escalate the already tense situation between the campaigns with an outrage-off.  

I was really sad and disappointed by the way many Obama partisans treated Geraldine Ferraro in response to her misguided remarks the other day (seriously - someone equated Ferraro with David Duke).  It make me heartsick, as I have a great deal of respect for Ferraro and the crazed response was all out of proporation to her remarks.  (Incidentally, the outrage police really had to search for that stuff.)  

So I think that it is equally important that I give Senator Obama the benefit of the doubt with regard to Reverend Wright, and perhaps even give Reverend Wright the benefit of the doubt with regard to the ABC News story.  There is context there, which, in my opinion, makes the Reverend's statements considerably less inflammatory than they appear on the surface. I'm not saying that I agree with the offensive portions of his remarks, but I do agree with some of the underlying sentiment - that we've built too many prisons, that three strikes laws have led us to incarcerate a generation, that mandatory minimums are bad policy, and that it is important for Americans to understand our own ambivalent history in the world, even as we celebrate our unique strengths.

So: there's my defence of Senator Obama and Reverend Wright.  

(**I note that I support HRC for president, and donate regularly to her campaign so that fellow Clinton supporters will understand that my opinion comes not from a partisan place or a desire to defend everything Senator Obama says or does.)

The Obama Lemmings remind me of the W lemmings.

Always finding excuses.
Always denying anything anyone opposed to them says as trivial. Or being the FIRST to call names (especially the Racist remark)

While their PHONY outrage is justifiable???

LMAO!

What a joke all the LEMMINGS have become.
Like mirrors of each other from both sides of the extremist camps.  Neo cons are like a flip side of the same coin with the far far left loonies!

Really a SAD day!

Wright comes out of a specific type of black religious tradition where this kind of hyper sermonizing is meant to get the congregation to become politically active; it's not meant to be taken as anti-american or anti-white. By the same token it isn't meant for non-white audiences for the very same reason. it can be taken in an entirely different way. Obama MUST distance himself from this quickly and firmly, especially given the hyper awareness and vitriolic way they react to the slightest, whiff of a non-pc comment from anyone else.

How do you explain that during a presidential campaign on a national stage? to a diverse national audience that you have tried to convince you are beyond racial politics? I have no idea, but that's Obama's challenge here. The campaign had to know this was coming; they should be prepared for it. We'll see.

I for one am offended, not so much by what Wright said, but more so by Obama's dismisal of it when he reacts so strongly to much less hateful statements from others.

Obama should ask Wright to step away from the campaign and he should distance himself from him publically.

There is a really off the wall sermon clip on Politico - Ben Smith.

The Clintons have now gone to an all-race-baiting, all-the-time strategy.  "Look at the crazy BLACK preacher and the crazy BLACK things he says.  Vote for us or lose your jobs to angry BLACK people."  The dog whistles are certainly out and it's a terrible black mark (no pun intended) on the Clinton legacy.

This is who these people are: they will stab you straight in the back if it will help advance their cause.  They've been using the Sista Souljah act for 15+ years now-- it's one of their most time-honored techniques.  But they will regret giving the middle finger to the AA community.  HRC's campaign is now forever tainted with the stench of race-baiting, and if she is the GE nominee this will cost her the election.  

Pat Robertson says the same types of things...  What's the difference?  Well, he's white and not portrayed by the media as "different" and "scary".  This smear attempt will hit home, I'm afraid.  It's not fair, but when has life ever been fair to minorities.

Six weeks to go and the gutter level politics has gotten this bad.  I realize that this was a media creation designed to prolong the primary season, however, we shouldn't be repeating GOP talking points here.  There are plenty of others able and willing to do that for us.

Do not forget that we are democrats first, candidate supporters, second.

My mother is a die-hard Roman Catholic who thinks abortion is wrong and that divorce should be illegal.  I obviously disagree with her on these things

Would I need to disown, reject, and renounce my mother so that I can run for political office?  Or perhaps there are some personal things in my life that should be deemed "out of bounds" were I ever to run for office.

I've lost my patience with the Clintonistas around here.  Absolutely disgusted.  You're truly dredging the lowest, dirtiest muck.  You should be ashamed.

Who needs Republicans with Clintonistas around?

I'm an ordained Baptist minister. I firmly believe in the separation of church and state. I think that it was unwise for Jeremiah Wright to speak politically from the pulpit regarding Senators Clinton and Obama, and I object to that, just as I would if any pastor stood behind a pulpit and made comments supporting or opposing a candidate or political view.

That said, as a person in the majority who has taken special interest in the plights of minorities throughout America, whether African-American, Hispanic, handicapped, GLBT, or whatever, I think that Jeremiah Wright has the right to say many of the things that people here are complaining about. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, and a number of other civil rights leaders said similar things about our country. And I agree with them. A country should be judged on how it treats the least among us.

As many people have said, it has been very difficult for many of us to say or sing "God Bless America." For those of us with a theological slant, it is like us asking God for something that we know our country does not deserve.

Constitutionally, there is no religious test needed to be elected into public office, and I really wish that these kinds of attacks would not be used in the course of an election, especially in the course of a primary. There are far too many Democrats who are mad at other Democrats right now, and the last thing we need is four more years of, well, what we have now.

Peace.

SEC

Here are selected paragraphs from 2 articles on Obama & Jeremiah Wright :

=========

=============

The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago [......]

The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright.
[......]
Obama could have picked any church -- the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. [......]
Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright.

From:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/sto ry/13390609/campaign_08_the_radical_

Is this on TV news or just online?

If Sen. Obama is the nominee, this will be plastered all over the place in the general election.

In one of them he keeps mentioning Hillary and basically put her in league with the same white establishment that killed Jesus.

Turns out that Obama couldn't even come up with his own title-- it was this pastor in the videos who came up with it and Obama used it.

The pastor was the one who married Barack and Michelle Obama and baptized their children.

Except that -
Rev. Wright is right.

How many villages were napalmed in Vietnam?
How many Guatemalans and Salvadoreans were murdered by thugs trained at the School of the Americas?
How many Palestinians have lost their homes to American-made Cat bulldozers and their lives to the American-funded IDF?

Yeah, oppressed peoples throughout the world are really pissed at America.
The sooner we realize it, the better.

I think a lot of you are forgetting the racial element to this sermons comes from a place of fighting for rights:
Black power has historically been about equality.
White power has historically been about racism.

What Rev. Wright is saying is pretty inflammatory but more so because he's yelling and screaming. This is the typical angry black man type of attack that I'd expect from the GOP tho, so I'm not surprised it's come out.
It'll be interesting to see how Sen. Obama handles this, "controversy" since he knew it was going to come out.

Spoken about the Reverend and about his comments.    If you were the least bit interested in anything other than smearing him, you'd have found those statements and included them in your diary.

So, we are at least informed.  James H. Cone is respected as one of America's greatest theologians.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/watch.html

Let's lay out the facts here. If you don't vote for Obama, you're racist. If you don't vote for Hillary, you're sexist. Either way, you're screwed. We're all a bunch of bigots, and there's no escaping it. The only people in this nation who had a chance to be neither racist nor sexist were the good folks in TX because I guess they had the option of voting for one candidate and caucusing for the other. As for the rest of us, we're wicked and bigoted, and we'd better just accept it and ask forgiveness from Christ... er, I mean, from Barack.

(In all seriousness, is there any way we could all stop calling each other f*cking racists? It's getting old.)

Are all of you Hillary supporters really repugs?  Because I gotta say I don't watch Fox News, and ABC is getting almost like Fox with Cokie Roberts and George Will as commentators on the George (Clintonista) S. show.  Also, CNN is starting to be more and more like Fox too.

I just sent Obama's racist preachers video to like 300 of my peeps on Myspace and Facebook. The racists are coming alright and they ain't white

I'm a Catholic liberal Democrat, a member of a party that has reproductive rights, separation of church and state, and pro-science planks vital parts of its  platform.

The Pope and every cardinal, bishop, monsignor and priest responsible for my spiritual well-being vehemently disagrees with those things and occasionally they make inflammatory comments concerning them. Needless to say, I don't plan on excommunicating myself anytime soon.

Bottom line: I don't go to church for politics - I have enough of that in my daily life. Let's not make equivalency arguments about the two.

The biggest problem is Barack Obama sat in the pews and listened to these sermons for 20 years.  This is not just a peripheral association.

He and his wife chose to raise their daughters with these beliefs.

It's very troubling and very outside the mainstream.

I've been emailing news outlets to ask them not to stigmatize black theology while running this story, and to not pass judgment on TUCC...and, strangely enough, politico and fox news reporters emailed me back, very nice notes.

I'll hold my breath

Sorry. No religious test for president. This cannot be submitted as evidence of anything. You are going down a pretty slippery slope here. Come back to me when you find a high ranking Obama surrogate who says:

"Hillary is lucky to be a white woman (at least one of them) whom slept with Bill Clinton. And she won't be where she is today had that not been the case"

That the US brought the hostility of the Arab world
upon itself is not even controversial.  You could
start by Googling [ Iran Mossadegh 1953 ], for
example.

Of course, the Arab world is not special in this
regard.  The US has basically gotten it all wrong
on the foreign intervention front since WW2 ended.
For the long version, click here.

Democrats are not normally supposed to need this
explained to them.  Given that Bill Clinton dodged the draft
before he un-dodged it, and we have been
supporting him all this time, we are supposed to already know
that America has been squashing democracy
(as opposed to supporting it) everywhere it reared its ugly little head
since 1946, allegedly in the name of anti- communism.
How can you possibly champion democracy "as opposed" to
socialism   in any country where the left is participating
in a political campaign and winning??
You know, VietNam in 1956, Chile in 1973, Cuba in 1959,
Nicaragua in 1978, the Dominican Republic in 1965, ad nauseam ??
It has always been a shame that Hillary was too
stupid to figure out that you cannot win a
DEMOCRATIC primary by running to the RIGHT of
your opponent.  ESPECIALLY not when HE'S the one
pulling in the independents and crossovers, and
the black left ON TOP of that.

If I were someone who claims to be against racism and this kind of radicalism,
I think I would have found another pastor a couple of decades ago.

I do agree with you that it does indeed constitute
"radicalism", in the American context, to allege
that black Americans deserve equality.  Bill
Clinton was not serious about that but at least
he did make an effort to have dialogue (click
here).
This is hardly enough to compensate for dumping
Lani Guinier, Jocelyn Elders, Mike Espy, affirmative action, and welfare
in the name of political expediency.  But the
point is, he wouldn't've needed to worry about
the political untenability of these black and pro-
black people and positions if Rev.Wright's criticisms of
America as a racist society had not been entirely correct.

... that no black person on this planet gives a flying #
what you think about this question.

Should Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who is a member of Barack Obama's African American Religious Leadership Committee, resign?

what it's like to be black in America?  Do you have any appreciation for that?

Wow.  Just Wow.

This isn't just anybody's pastor.  It's the pastor of a man who is attempting to be the President of the United States.  Should a president be taking in and digesting this negative talk and belief on a frequent basis? Seems to me, that the last person who should be condoning this type of thinking would be a president.  We should be singing, "God damn America".  That will appeal to the country in the fall.  I know it really lifts my spirits.

Do I want to be in someones hands who thinks like this and trust him to do the best for my country?  

interesting both ABC and CBS had something on Rev. Wright,  but it was not even mentioned on NBC.

Neither ABC nor CBS played the "God damn America" part though (maybe they thought that too offensive.)

This is absolutely unbelievable.  What the hell is wrong with this country?

Why are we responsible for what others say?

I don't care what his pastor said, because it wasn't said by Obama.  The only thing that should matter is what the candidate says or doesn't say.  It's incredibly sad that people are actually trying to blame Obama (or any other politician for that matter) for what ANOTHER PERSON says.  Does this mean that I'm responsible for when my church leader says something he shouldn't?

I mean, it's outrageously stupid.  Come on, we must be better than this.

20 years isn't a lapse in judgment, it's a commitment.

$22,000 dollars isn't a just a commitment, it's an endorsement.

Rev. Wright isn't just a "senior adviser", he's a long time mentor.

Why did you put that stupid poll on an otherwise excellent post?

Resign the campaign? That solves nothing. Barack Obama has some answering to do. This isn't something that can be taken care of with a simple resignation.

This is the man who married him who baptized his children. This is Obama's church.

It's over as far as I'm concerned. If Obama is the nominee, McCain will be president.

Nice try.

Your pathetic spin won't work in middle America.

They will be HORRIFIED by this. If you are too young to understand that, then you have a lot of growing up to do.

It is offensive to take something deeply personal, like who baptizes your child, or the church your family belongs to, and turn it into the fodder for the Hillary Clinton campaign to attack Obama.

That video comes from Fox, the person who posted the video posts GOP stuff like Huckabee speeches.

You are doing yourself no favors bringing this here to MyDD.

Now I understand why Michelle Obama so glibly claimed she did not love her country until her husband ran for President.

First, you guys tried to make Obama out to be too conservative, and now he's too radical (by virtue of the fact that he is associated with radical thinking- by white middle class standards- individuals.)

I hope you can settle on the one version of the Obama you guys want to attack...

Frankly, I don't see what's so controversial...  He preaches about social injustice in the world.  Of course he's going to step on some toes.  

I'm proud that Obama would choose such a politically charged church to be his home congregation.  

no, but he sure got his ass handed to him for visiting Hanoi with Jane Fonda.  

Sorry Obama is unelectable.  This must be a painful moment for many.

I saw the video yesterday on ABC in GMA program. I was shocked. I even think Barack Obama and Michelle Obama has been brain washed by hearing these hatred speeches from this pastor for 20 years. Him not wearing a US Flag Pin http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id= 3690000 and Michelle's comment that she is not proud of America until now http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/el ection2008/2008-02-19-michelle-obama_N.h tm are strong evidence that the damage has been done permanently in their brains. What a shame?