Thank you for your great post.

What he said to Wright during their 20 year friendship is about his judgement.

What he has done or proposed in this race to bridge the racial divide is a about leadership.

He simply used his silver tongue to talk his way out of a potential political disaster.

On Dan Abrams show the other night (I think it was Tuesday), I heard a white female commentator say that she'd talked to friends of hers who attended TUCC (Obama's church). This commentator said that the regular Sunday sermons were more like Sunday sermons everywhere - not these sorts of snippets being played over and over.

We've seen about 3-5 minutes of preaching from this man who has a career spanning 30 years (including the 20 years Obama has attended Trinity) - that's about 0.01% of his total preaching - or one ten thousandth. I think if we judge candidates (or their supporters for that matter) on one ten thousandth of the public speeches of their supporters, we won't have any candidates left.

For the record, I don't think Geraldine Ferraro deserved to be pilloried for her initial statement, nor did Samantha Powers for her "monster" slip. I don't think Bill Clinton (or Hillary Clinton) is a racist becasue of the Jesse Jackson comment or the fairy tale comment.

I also think we ought to make distinctions between what candidates say on the stump, what their surrogates say on the stump, and what their supporters say in "quasi-private" settings - e.g. in a church to their own congregation, on a blog, etc. Sometimes the supporter's statements are months or years removed from the candidacy (in 2001, when the 9/11 comments were made, Obama wasn't running for President). Candidates have thousands or millions of supporters - no candidate can police every single statement made on their behalf.

This last point is pointed at both Obama and Hillary supporters in particular. Please look at the CANDIDATES before you decide who to vote for. By saying you will vote for McCain over Clinton because you don't like the Clinton supporters on blogs (or McCain over Obama because of the Obama bloggers), is silly.

I'm an Obama supporter. I've had my differences with Clinton and her supporters. However should she get the nomination, I will vote for her. Why? Because her POLICIES are way more sane and a better path forward for our country than McCain's. No matter who is our nominee in the fall - please remember their policies in the voting booth - not some silly resentment from some silly comment some iditot made in the blogosphere.

What the hell is an "AA"?

I never said Wright's statements were racist. But since you asked I do think the hatred expressed was at its core racially motivated. That's the only way I could explain an educated man believing and teaching his flock that the US was engaged in the creation and dissemination of HIV to infect the blacks. His statements were clearly designed to incite anger against the white race.

My thinking on this subject was sparked by obama's juxtaposition of wright and his grandmother. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman 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 me cringe."

I began to think of my own father and some others in my life and how I had at times confronted racism similar to his grandmother's.

If it is true he believes his pastor has made statements that, "have the potential not only to widen the racial divide" and, "that rightly offend white and black alike" I wondered why he has apparently never taken any similar action to attempt to at the very least express his discomfort with the speech of his mentor.

I believe that part of change in this area comes when people are willing to speak up when friends and neighbors engage in this sort of speech. I'm certainly not proud of the times I kept silent not with standing the times I spoke up. Obama had 20 years to attempt to make his feeling known and attempt to make some small change. He didn't have to reject and denounce him in the middle of a sermon. He at least could have expressed his discomfort at some later date. That he didn't shows a lack of judgment and a passivity I find troubling.

I'm not going to defend any of Rev. Wright's statements that we have now seen many times. I will say this. I have refused throughout this whole process to take the media's word on ANYTHING, and instead have used the fabulousness of the Internet to find out myself.

When this came up, it was no different. I am wary of even posting this on here because again it is just a snippet, a soundbite, which I think are extremely detrimental to our abilities to ever see the whole picture, but here goes. I found this as part of a sermon Rev. Wright had preached on the weekend of Martin Luther King Day. I might add that I had assumed, falsely, that a church day on that weekend would hold quite a bit of talk about race. But it didn't. Here's a little excerpt.

He talks of Martin Luther King’s writing, “The Beloved Community.” An excerpt from the sermon: “Dr. King fervently believed in a community of the faithful that was not bound by denominational preferences, doctrinal drawing of lines in the sane and particular faith claims that saw one part of the family of faith being superior to another part of the family of faith. The beloved community in many ways is reflected today (in 2007) in the government of our country at its highest level.” He goes on to list the religions and churches whose members comprise members of our government: The United Methodist Church, the Catholic Church, Islam, Buddhism, Jewish, Episcopalian, Mormonism, Baptists, the various Methodist churches, United Church of Christ, and Quakers. He goes on, “Our religiously diverse Congress is best described by the Yale historian Jon Butler’s words. It is “awash in a sea of faith.” Our religiously diverse Congress reminds us of the power of religious freedom - one of America’s strongest selling points. The “Beloved Community: as demonstrated in the 110th Congress is not made up of persons who are Christian only! It is also not made up of persons who follow “traditional lines of Christian belief.” It is, however, made up of persons of faith who are a part of God’s community and who are all God’s children! Think about this as you celebrate Dr. King’s birthday through this weekend.”

I would also suggest reading the full sermon of Rev. Wright's for which Obama named his book, the first sermon Senator Obama ever heard at the church. You can read it here:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/03/for-the-record.html

I also might point out that sometimes it is when we hear statements which we most profoundly disagree with that we are provoked to the most thought.

Like I said, I won't defend the five minutes or so of statements we have heard from Rev. Wright up till now. But I also won't condemn the man for an almost infinitely small portion of his life, and I respect Senator Obama for not doing so either. I certainly wouldn't want my friends ditching me on the rare occasions when the worst in me comes out. Throwing your pastor under the bus, or anyone, certainly isn't in God's teachings. I'm not a religious person, but I know that forgiveness and acceptance is pretty high up there on the list of things I imagine might be important to God.