One has to wonder why he still refuses to disown Wright. The excuse that he can’t disown a family member just doesn’t fly. When I was young, my parents took us away from a church and pastor that they cared about, the very pastor that married them, simply because they decided to allow smoking inside the church. That church has since taken on increasingly radically liberal philosophies (such as saying that every soldier of the Iraq war is committing murder), but we left as soon as there were warning signs that their philosophy had begun to diverge from ours. You don’t stay with a church and a pastor whose philosophy is fundamentally different from your own, you always have the choice to leave - there is no moral equivalency with a family member situation.
Obama says that we’ve all had pastors who have said things we disagree with, but I can say that my family had no problem leaving a pastor and his church after they began saying and doing things we deeply disagreed with. It just does not make any sense to retain a spiritual advisor whose philosophy and outlook you deeply disagree with. This is not a minor quibble over the interpretation of a verse of scripture, this should be a deep fundamental division that prevents Wright from being a good pastor or advisor to anyone who isn’t a conspiracy theorist nutjob. Obama claims he never heard Wright say these things before, and though I don’t believe he’s being honest about that, I still expect his response to be that he will disown his pastor and never seek his advice again. He failed to do that, indicating that he does not disagree with what he sees as his pastor’s “wisdom.”
If Obama is the nominee I look forward to finding out what dates we can be certain that he was in attendence, and then comb through the archives of “sermons” to find out just how radical they were. It’s likely that we can prove Obama flat out lied when he said he had no idea that his pastor had said any of these things. It will be the death of his canidacy if we can do the research. The trick will be to nail his attendence down to specific dates.
And he was quick enough to “disown” his own grandmother.
And all the denials and pleas of his ignorance at the beliefs of his own pastor for 20 years, how can any thinking person be expected to believe that he was unaware, for twenty years, of what it took the media and the general public only a few weeks to know?
If my Priest said that 9/11 was the US chickens coming home to roost or that the US Government invented AIDS in a genocidal plot, he would not have to wait until the end of the sermon to see the last of me.
You can bet the files of Trinity UCC are being scrubbed even as we speak to eliminate such tasty tid-bits.
But, it is not Wright who is the most troublesome to Senator Obama, it is Michelle, who's statements directly contradict anything that Obama might say that attempts to distance himself from Wright. Michelle's most problematic comments were her advice to people not to strive for Middle class jobs and executive positions. This advice is right out of the rants and hatred that is at the core of the Trinity Church of Christ, regardless of whether Rev. Wright is in the pulpit or not.