Read for yourself:Barack Obama's pastor's words echo through campaign
I Obama really a friend of such a man? The guy endorses Louis Farrakan-a racist anti-semite, who repeatedly lis and distorts his message.
How can anyone with a conscience support such a man? :smack:
You’re not a churchgoing man, I take it?
And yes, Obama has already done the requisite condemnation.
Is it your position, then, that this story exposes Mr. Obama as secretly being an anti-white racist?
Obama is apparently being held accountable primarily for remarks made by Pastor Wright on the Sunday after 9/11/2001. Mr. Obama apparently, according to an AP article I read before logging on to the Dope, denounced these remarks last year, so they are somewhat old news. To the best of my knowledge, he has never suggested that he agreed with the tone or content of the quoted remarks. Could you point to some credible evidence that Mr. Obama agrees with Wright’s quoted statements? I couldn’t find any.
As I said in the thread about Ferarro:
Why do we need to ask candidates to denounce views they don’t appear to hold? What purpose does that serve? Millions of people support Clinton, Obama and McCain. A few are bound to say something stupid in public now and then. I can imagine some situations in which it’s appropriate for the candidates to make it clear they don’t agree, but most of the time there is no point whatsoever.
And which of those statements are racist? I asked Flying Dutchman the same question twice today when he talked about these statements and never got an answer. Wright may be wrong, and saying women have never been defined as non-people is inaccurate in spirit if not in literal fact, but I don’t see the racism in his comments.
I was mildly annoyed by the hysteria in the thread title … until I started imagining it being read by Gollum’s character in the Lord of the Rings movies.
I have heard multiple quotes from this guys attributed to sermons over at least the last eight years. And more keep coming out. It was not just one speech.
I myself couldn’t care less if a candidate goes to church, since I don’t. But the candidates themselves feel it is important. I guess a significant portion of the voters think it is important. It is important enough to Obama that I have heard him talk about being a member of the same church for twenty years. He used it as a rebutal against the Mulim rumors. With the amount of quotes I have heard from this pastor I have a feeling that Obama must have heard some of them in twenty years and yet still went to the church. Unless he really didn’t go to church that often. So then he is lying. If I was in a church and heard the pastor says as part of his sermon, “God fuck America”. I wouldn’t go back there again. A denoucement years later when you still go to the church isn’t going to fly with me.
Sure it is way down on the list for who I will vote for but it is a negative against Obama.
He said, “God damn America.”
Oops. I’ll take your word for it. I just heard it (with beeps) as part of a large volume of anti-American rhetoric over many sermons. I kind of zoned out after a bit.
There, and that’s the mistake. If he’d only have said “God damn the pusher man”, none of this would be happening right now.
Obama had a 20 year relation with Wright. It is asking a lot for people to believe that he wasn’t aware of his racist remarks. Until today he was part of his campaign support as a member of the African American Religious Leadership Committee..
The logic that will hurt Obama is that if he disavowed this man’s racist remarks then why is he a part of his campaign and why did he remain a member of the church. This is a church that gave an award to Lewis Farrakhan. If you hear Wright speak it sounds like a black version of the KKK and that’s what will hurt Obama more than anything else.
He also said:
America deserved 9/11.
The government invented HIV and lied about inventing it.
The government knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor beforehand.
The government gave black people syphilis.
All the clips playing on television and the radio are from just two or three sermons.
That one is true, at least.
That is outrageous. They just denied treatment for those you already hadit.
ETA: that is a bit of sarcasm of course. The Tuskegee study was horrible and inhuman. But they didn’t give syphilis to anyone. They did watch some of them die without giving treatment that they knew would be effective.
Echoing this sentiment and the point that both McCain (anti-Catholic pastor endorsement) and Clinton (Ferraro) also had to deal with these sorts of ridiculous accusations in the last month.
And Obama had to deal with the same thing regarding Louis Farrakhan.
Cite?
There’s a link in post #14. You’ve never heard of Tuskegee?
The difference is Clinton dumped Ferraro immediately and McCain only had to disavow a supporter. Obama has to deal with a timeline in which he disavowed the statements but not the support of Rev. Wright. The sound bites will follow him on the internet forever because of this.
This one’s close enough to being true
Obama’s in a pickle, for sure. I think it is possible that he simply didn’t know. Wasn’t in church those days. Even if he had some idea, it’s quite possible that he felt Wright’s other qualities as a spiritual leader outweighed those remarks. No one in an organized religion agrees with everything their preacher says.
I really sympathize when Obama says that he can’t repudiate Wright the man because he’s like family, or leave the church because he has roots there. I’m no longer even a Christian, really, and I still feel like my pastor is family and the (UCC, coincidentally) church is a home to me. If my pastor had slipped in some nastiness over the years (and he may have, even when I was a believer I skipped many a service, though I doubt it, my congregation is far too comfortable to say that kind of thing), I’d be prone to overlook it, because he’s like family to me.
Anyway, this isn’t really all that like the Ferraro situation. Obama can’t possible be behind or profit from Wright’s comments.