Presidential Candidate Must Again Answer for Pastor's Remarks

While many Americans thought that Barack Obama's March 18th speech on "race" might encourage us to cross historic divides and begin a discussion that can move us beyond the racial, ethnic and religious distrust that keeps us from our common goals, a pastor's incendiary remarks have once again poisoned the atmosphere. Read all about it.

Comments

[thatneuro]

To me, those who desperately want Obama to succeed (for all the right reasons) are finding equal need to overlook some of the more troubling aspects of his candidacy thus far, and the Rev. Wright matter, more specifically.

Barack Obama belonged to a church, and kept as his spiritual counselor, a man who, for all his merits, at least occasionally espoused a virulently racist ethic.

It might be easier to understand this by imagining a white preacher calling black South Africans terrorists, or saying that Africans has conspired to spread AIDS, or that the U.S. was justified in fighting Vietnamese/Cambodian (etc) terrorists.

I would be appalled by those statements, and -I think justifiably- wonder at someone who claimed such a person as their spiritual guide.

We want to deal with the terrible impact of racism in America, it's been FAR too long, and too brutal, but -after the Wright revelations- I'm no longer sure that Barack Obama is the man to do it. At least until he can get some distance from what I perceive to be a long-lasting, formative but spiritually poisoned connection.

It's not just holding a person up for someone else blowing off pent-up steam, it's someone clinging to an association with a spiritually and politically abhorrent influence.

And I am deeply saddened by it.