Why the Obama - Rev. Wright Connection Matters

I am Catholic and I go to church. I do not belong to my nearest Catholic parish. I belong to one about five miles away because I like the priest. I feel the local one gives sermons that are too intellectual, particularly for my children. I have chosen my parish consciously and in the past I have stopped going to others because I just didn't connect with the priest.

Senator Obama went to Rev. Wright's church for 20 years. Rev. Wright married him, baptized his children and has been a spiritual mentor for him. Rev. Wright is also a raging, racist loon.

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama's longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.

Senator Obama is finally being questioned on this topic and his answers are what they would have to be - evasive and shallow.

No one would go to a church for 20 years led by a pastor who is as completely deranged as Rev. Wright unless they agreed with him. There's no reason to sit in the pews week after week listening to some madman scream about damning America if you didn't want to hear it. Churches are plentiful - in an economic sense, the Christian religion is a nearly perfect free market.

What you're seeing is the mask slipping off of Barack Obama. Whether it's his opposition to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act which was supported by such staunch liberals as Barbara Boxer or his opposition to the bipartisan compromises engineered by John McCain, Barack Obama has consistently been a far left extremist. His claims of being a healer of our divisions are based on nothing at all.

The recent publicity given to his pastor of 20 years is crucial because it shows us just who Barack Obama is and there's nothing he can say to contradict it. That's why this whole controversy matters.

Update: In a comment thread somewhere it was noted that the wife typically picks the family's church. That seems to be a decent generalization and the coincidences here are too great to be ignored. Rev. Wright's sermons would certainly lead a believer to say that Barack's presidential campaign was the first time they've been proud of America as Michele Obama said recently. If that's the case, then there must be significant tension building up between the true believer Michele and the straddling politician Barack.

Update 2: There's another aspect to this that isn't getting any attention as far as I can see. What kind of people go to this church? Wouldn't you expect racist, hateful people to be attending these services? Unless Barack has been getting in and out of the church as fast as possible for the last twenty years, unless he's just been going to this church to "check off the box" every Sunday, if you will, he's been voluntarily socializing with this kind of person for two decades. It's not the pastor that's the biggest problem, it's the entire environment of the church.

That leads to the issue of Sunday School for his kids. Were his children going to Sunday School here? If so, he can no longer distance himself from Rev. Wright's lunacy. How can you distance yourself from the church that you rely on to give your children moral teaching? It just doesn't make any sense at all to claim that Barack disagreed with some of the sermons, but kept going anyway. Rev. Wright is clearly a toxic nut. You wouldn't put your children anywhere near him unless you didn't mind what he was saying.