American Thinker | Kyle-Anne Shiver | Mar. 16, 2008
I learned more about staying on the narrow path and avoiding trouble from my grandmother in five minutes than Barack and Michelle Obama seem to have learned in their whole lives. This lesson in human nature and relationships is pretty darned simple. And it gives no quarter to anyone; it applies to all human beings. “People will know you by the company you keep,” my grandmother told me.
“So, be very careful how you choose your friends, because a person’s most valuable possession is his reputation, and once lost, a reputation is nearly impossible to restore.”
But the most valuable nugget of all:
“If you remain friends with people up to no good, you are bound to become like them. If you think you’re above their influence, you are just fooling yourself. So, choose wisely.”
Barack Obama chose Jeremiah Wright as his pastor, his spiritual mentor and friend. Obama has kept the relationship intact for more than 20 years now.
I’ve watched videos of only five of Wright’s sermons, delivered in fiery oratory, and I’ve had to conclude that there is no way that Obama should not, or could not have known better than to keep going to that man’s church and listening to his hate mongering, racist rants.
Barack Obama was not exposed to this as a young child, taken to hear Wright in the company of his parents.
Barack Obama freely chose this as an adult, as a well-educated adult, having garnered his education at prestigious institutions of higher learning.
Yet, Senator Obama, now close to grabbing the Democrat nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America, has said, “I don’t think of my church as being particularly controversial.”
Well, I paid a visit to Trinity United Church of Christ in January to see for myself. After reading just a few well-covered racist snippets from Wright’s sermons, I needed to know if a man running for the highest office in the land was really exposing himself to this kind of hatred week after week and having the gall to call it Christianity. At that time, I gave Obama the benefit of the doubt because I didn’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill.
What I discovered was, that up until then at least, our mainstream press had been reducing a mountain into a molehill.
Racism Ain’t Rocket Science
The most universal message preached by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The content of a man’s character is not determined by the color of his skin.
And it’s opposite ain’t rocket science.
Making assumptions about a man’s character based solely on the color of his skin is racism.
Any way one chooses to cut it, slice it, dice it or rationalize it, Jeremiah Wright preaches, and presumably practices, black supremacist racism.
Wright’s racism is guileful, I’ll give him that.
He cloaks his gospel in the mantle of eternal black suffering. Where in the white racism I grew up in down South, white might made automatic right, this preacher man, Wright, just inverses the equation. If your skin is black, you’re good; if your skin is white, you’re evil.
Reverend Wright’s own admonition to his congregation on why they should vote for Obama is based solely on the candidate’s skin color and presumed mantle of suffering at the hands of white oppressors.
. . . more
A columnist in one of Canada’s national newspapers, the National Post, had an excellent column on the Obama/Wright controversy. In the article, the columnist Barbara Kay used a metaphor which I feel brilliantly captured the essence of Obama’s attempt to excuse himself and his pastor, writing as follows:
In a reference to former President Bill Clinton’s statement about marijuana: “I smoked but I didn’t inhale” she wrote:
“Nobody can smoke institutionalized vulgarity for 20 years without inhaling.”