Professor Schaff notes the Jeremiah Wright sermon available on YouTube. Ronald Kessler at the Wall Street Journal has some fascinating quotes from another Wright sermon, this one at Howard University in 2006. Here is an interesting tidbit from the Howard U. sermon
"No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."
Now the Obama campaign was still over the horizon on January 15th, 2006, when Rev. Wright made those remarks, but Condoleezza Rice had been Secretary of State for nearly a year. Rev. Wright is apparently a man of invincible ignorance. No fact has enough power to penetrate the wall of prejudice he has built around himself.
And then there are these gems: "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs," which apparently refers to the belief that the U.S. Government intentionally allows heroin and other narcotics into the country in order to weaken Black Americans; and "We started the AIDS virus," which refers to a similar belief, that the U.S. Government created the virus in the laboratory, and then set it loose to kill undesirable populations.
Now these views are not just stupid and hateful, they are tinfoil hat weird. To be certain, Rev. Wright has every right to believe and say such things. It may be true, as Professor Schaff suggests, that Rev. Wright is in violation of laws preventing political advocacy on the part of tax exempt churches. Since I regard such laws as an abomination against free speech, I have no quarrel with Rev. Wright on that count. But such views do identify him as a hate monger, and a person who is about as sober and grounded in reality as your average issue of The National Enquirer. If you can believe what Rev. Wright believes about drugs and AIDS, a two year old girl giving birth to a two-headed Elvis clone is not much of a stretch.
I don't believe that a presidential candidate is responsible for everything his or her church has said or done in the past, or for everything his or her pastor has said. But it is not like it never matters. If John McCain had been attending a church where the preacher regularly dished out hatred for Jews and claimed that AIDS was God's punishment for homosexuality, who believed that Catholics and Jews were in league with communists to poison our water supply, well, McCain would have some explaining to do. And if the explanation were not pretty good, he would be in serious trouble.
We really do need to know why Obama kept going back to this Church when it was so abundantly clear what kind of message he would hear. Is it not possible that he liked that message?
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