In an interview today on The View, Barack Obama said he would've left his church had Rev. Jeremiah Wright not retired from the pulpit last year:
"Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church."
The problem with this defense is that Obama had twenty years to leave the church. Was all Wright's offensive rhetoric from the pulpit limited to just the last year or two? Obama has been a public official, as a state senator or U.S. senator, for nearly 12 years. Sure, he only started running for president last year. But shouldn't he have been concerned about Wright's inflammatory public statements as a state or federal officeholder?
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I don't know. Were all of the right-leaning politicians willing to disassociate themselves from the likes of Donahoe, Robertson, Falwell, Haggard, or any of the other Professional Christian losers that have elected to spew hate-speech over the past twenty years? No? Why not? Do they really believe that "teh ghey" caused 9/11? They must. That's just ONE example out of many and it's hypocrisy at its ugliest. If we're going to continue to scrutinize this, then we need to scrutinize all relationships that politicians have with their pastors and spiritual advisors.
Does George W. Bush condone sex with prostitutes and meth use? What does his long relationship with Ted Haggard say about his own views?
Fools and tyrants use religion to govern.
The question is: As president, will Obama carry out the radical separatist policies that Wright seems to advocate? I would think the answer is an emphatic no. Obama's adult life has been about bringing people together, not apart.
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