Obama’s Double-Life

Filed under: Current Events — Barry Carey at 4:20 am on Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Thomas Sowell has a well-written piece at National Review Online in which he addresses the recent embarrassment to the campaign of Barack Obama. For those who haven’t read or seen the news in the past few days, Sowell is refering to Obama’s 20 year membership in a church pastored by Jeremiah Wright, and his regard of Wright as his mentor and spiritual advisor. The problem with Wright is his black liberation theology and blatantly racist ideology. Sowell states:

While talking about bringing us together and deploring “divisive” actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that “God Bless America” should be replaced by “God damn America” — among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.

Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours more of the same.

Wright’s actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.

Wright’s sermons have been divisive and anti-American, damning America for spreading drugs in the black community and calling the U.S. the “US-KKK-a”. Sowell, and many others, are rightly criticizing Obama, not just for being a part of this church (It is America and a man can hold whatever views he wishes), but for now pretending that he had no idea that the church and Pastor Wright held such radical views. Here is a youtube excerpt from one of Wright’s inflammatory sermons.

For a man ful of rhetoric about uniting America, Obama has a lot of explaining to do concerning his double life.

2 Comments »

Comment by Jeremy

March 19, 2008 @ 1:23 pm

There may still be questions to be answered by Obama about his beliefs and relation to this church, but in fairness to him it should be mentioned that he wasn’t in attendance when that sermon was delivered, that he has publicly acknowledged that the comments were wrong and divisive, and that, while he remains loyal to a man who was a friend and support to him, he has admitted the man’s flaws and publicly distanced himself from him, including letting him go as spiritual adviser to his campaign.

While I am by no means now endorsing Obama, I think he has handled this situation well and I would need further evidence to conclude that this in any way affects his fitness as a president.

Comment by Francesca

March 19, 2008 @ 1:57 pm

Hey Dad,

I read the article and looked at the video, and feel like if all of this is true, and Obama adheres even slightly to some of the racist fanatical comments of this “spiritual” leader, then I feel that the article should end with urging Christians to pray for Obama.

So many times Christians (or non-Christians: I’m not sure of Obama’s status) of all walks of life get caught up in churches that teach false things that aren’t even in the Bible, and through God’s grace and the prayers of others come to see this and leave such churches.

Now, I don’t know if Obama will ever leave this Church, but if the teaching is like it is presented in your article, then we should pray that he does, and that he puts in faith on the Rock. Also, I’m not fully convinced that because Obama goes to a church headed by this person that he agrees with and lives his life by all that this leader says. Also, I’ve been thinking of the other two contenders of this political year and wondering about their spiritual lives. It would be lovely to have a born-again believer in the White House, wouldn’t it?

Lastly, I would like to admonish both you and Jeremy about posting articles specifically to do with presidential candidates before the final vote. God only knows who will win, but until then I would hate to see your guys’ website turn into a political sounding board against candidates. I don’t think it is wrong to post articles about thinking about politics in general (e.g. passing bills on human euthanasias or abortion), but this article’s tone comes off as a personal attack on a specific candidate. I feel that this article is unfair to Obama (as I would if this article were about Clinton or McCain), and unlike some Christians feel that persuading Christians to vote one way or another is like persuading them about which forms of birth control to use, or if any is to be used at all. (I know that was a weird analogy, but it’s the best I could come up with).

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>