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Home >> United States & Canada >> Elections & Politics What Do Americans Know About Obama’s ‘Black Liberation’ Theology? Nicholas M. Guariglia - 7/7/2008 Several months ago author Christopher Hitchens, on the heels of his magnum opus God is Not Great, wrote an opinion piece suggesting it was not out of line to question former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith. Besides some of the more peculiar aspects of the Mormon doctrine –– that whole business about Garden of Eden being in Missouri –– there were more pressing matters, Hitchens felt, which required an explanation on behalf of Governor Romney. The primary concern went as follows:
If one reads the Book of Mormon, or examines the religious interpretations of some LDS theologians, these inquires into what Romney does and does not believe, I feel, were not without legitimacy. Does Gov. Romney, for instance, truly believe Joseph Smith’s account of the battle of Cumorah, whereby the fair-skinned and “handsome” Nephites clashed with the recluse Lamanites, whose chastisement from the heavens for shunning God’s will was to be fraught with dark skin? Or that a third faction, who mistakenly remained neutral between God and Satan, was to be punished by God for their impartiality –– “and hence the Negro or African race,” as the dogma goes? What did Gov. Romney think about his church’s policy, until ’78, of disallowing black membership into even the lowliest positions of clergy? No further elaboration is needed. Hitchens was making a modest and fair appeal to Romney, a soft ball for any politician to hit out of the park. The obvious and most rational response would have been to reassure Americans that he was not a dogmatist, did not take everything about the texts of his faith literally, disagreed with racist scripture vehemently, and is glad that his church moved beyond periods of divisiveness and division. And to Romney’s credit, I felt he tried to handle this issue as best he could (even if, undoubtedly, the likes of Hitchens still considered his answers insufficient). The same, sadly, cannot be said about Senator Obama. If it was appropriate to question Gov. Romney’s beliefs regarding his church and its view of race –– and it was –– then it is certainly appropriate to continue questioning Sen. Obama’s beliefs, at the least, and aspects of his character, at the most, until the presumptive Democratic nominee can adequately explain his relationship with hate-monger and “black liberation” theologian Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Those who have been following this story are now well aware of Rev. Wright’s ridiculous and racist statements, his charade of a race-baiting career, his relationship with Col. Qaddafi in Libya, his honoring the likes of Louis Farrakhan, and, coincidentally, his close personal friendship with Sen. Obama. The pastor married Obama to his wife Michelle, baptized Obama’s two daughters, inspired the title of Obama’s book, was part of Obama’s “African American Religious Leadership Committee” (whatever that means), and, until this controversy, donned the candidate’s website as a testament to the senator’s history of working with the “grass roots” of urban Chicago. For some two decades, Obama sat in the pews of Chicago’s Trinity United Church as the recently retired Wright preached a radically sectarian “Afro-centric” doctrine of black separatism. In the interim, Rev. Wright screeched, just days after the crater in lower Manhattan, that the burned ash and crushed bodies under the rubble of the World Trade Center was a case of “America’s chickens… coming home to roost.” He would go on to assert that “white America,” or the “U.S. of KKK A,” infected “people of color” with syphilis and the HIV virus “as a means of genocide,” and would periodically wail “God damn America” amongst other ludicrous banalities and anti-white epithets. You have to credit Sen. Obama for having the gumption, the nerve, to stake the rest of his candidacy on salvaging his credibility by first promising us, the electorate, that he “did not attend,” over the course of twenty years, any of these hateful sermons, thus not partaking in the mindless rah-rahing and bawling of Wright’s enthralled parishioners –– fiery and angry congregations more apt for a bullhorn mob rally in Gaza City. (I’m sure his campaign would be open to the idea of providing at least some proof of Obama’s whereabouts during these successive Sundays for twenty years.) I wonder what Harry Truman –– “the buck stops here” –– would have thought about Sen. Obama’s much publicized speech on race. Most people who took the time to watch Obama explaining Rev. Wright’s antics did not see the historical, timeless, and beautifully transcendent speech hailed by the press. They saw, and heard, a complete and unequivocal copout. What they heard was trivial minutia (and of course continued clichés) from a young, overachieving, upstart politician attempting to rescue his career by insisting not only does the buck not stop with him, but he was not really anyway near the buck during any of Wright’s odious invectives –– he swears! (During the past few weeks, Obama seemed to go back on this specific claim, but has yet to be called out on it in a public forum.) Sen. Obama equated Rev. Wright’s envenom, propagation of hate, and decades of inflammatory tirades to 10,000 parishioners to the occasional bigoted sneer by his white grandmother –– whom he later called “a typical white person.” His grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, will now no longer be remembered for once saving the Obama household, but rather in the manner her ambitious “post-racial” grandson opportunistically threw her under the bus. By imploring the public to put Wright’s hatred in a historical framework; by suggesting that in growing up during a different time Wright’s rhetoric is more explicable; by declaring “I can no more disown (Wright) than I can disown the black community” or his grandmother; by flowering us with inane moral equivalences (Wright’s televised hate-fests with a private remark by grandma or a wisecrack by Geraldine Ferraro); by applying a double standard in castigating the vulgarities of a Don Imus who Obama felt should be fired and the “biblical scholar” Wright who he feels ought to be understood; by blaming an up-until-now starry-eyed media for taking Wright’s comments out of perspective; by all this and more, Sen. Obama is promoting and utilizing an ethic of contextualization, trying to outweigh bad with conjured up “good” (Wright’s social work, etc.), and is therefore setting an atrocious precedent, whereby concrete wrong can never be ostracized and disavowed in an unapologetic and absolute spirit. The next time someone somewhere says something hateful, racist, and inflammatory, one wonders if the Obama model of rationalization will be employed. Nobody expects Sen. Obama to end his personal friendship with Rev. Wright. All we ask is to be spoken to like adults and to be told the truth (some straight talk, if you will). If it is true that Sen. Obama never attended any of these hate speeches, we would like to know if the senator was or was not aware of Wright’s tendencies and idiosyncrasies? If not, why not? Is that the kind of aloofness Americans deserve in our chief executive? And if it happens to be the case that Obama did attend one of these particular sermons, or many of them, as he later seemed to admit, then why did the senator first tell us otherwise? Did the senator feel ill at ease sitting there listening to such filth, and if so, how come he did not politely excuse himself from the pew and leave? Or was he jumping around, laughing, and lap-slapping, as well, like the rest of the parishioners? We would be curious as to know why Obama let his daughters, who were baptized by Wright, frequent a house of black liberation theology, having vile nonsense “inculcated” into their ears. Obama asserted he disagrees with “some” of Wright’s highlighted comments. Which ones are these, and which are the comments in question he does not disagree with? There is a tragic irony to this whole episode. The irony is this: Obama has made it such that he is no longer being criticized for what he obviously could be criticized for –– that is, being a novice social-worker-turned-legislator with a paper-thin record and absolutely no executive experience or qualifications –– but rather, dejectedly for his supporters, he is being criticized because the very heart of his message is now seen to be in want. A few weeks ago, Clinton supporters and moderate Democrats were wondering why this rookie thought he deserved the enormous power and capacity of the world’s strongest country to be turned over to him, but still nonetheless considered the senator a bipartisan fresh face and, as it were, a candidate of coalescence. Today, many are instead mocking the notion that this post-racial candidate –– who talked about not talking about race nonstop even before this Wright controversy –– is the unifying figure he claims to be. There is a disconnect there. The allusions of racial transcendence fall on deaf ears when Michelle Obama insists that soon “black America will wake up and get it,” help elect her husband, so she can feel proud of her country “for the first time in her adult life.” Somewhere along the way, for these two Ivy Leaguers, to be American meant to “feel justified in your own ignorance… that’s America.” Somewhere between growing up middle class, going to Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton, being the benefactors of sweetheart housing deals, grants, and loans, and filing over $1 million in tax returns, the United States became “downright mean.” Somewhere between campaigning for votes across the likes of rural Scranton and speaking privately to wealthy-yuppie elitist donors in San Francisco mansions, middle-class Pennsylvanians became “bitter,” whereby blue collar Midwest voters “cling” to their guns and religion. (Sen. Obama did not know he was being recorded.) The indignation of this candidate, this couple, and this campaign is apparent to anyone who isn’t aroused by Obama’s supposed trace-like eloquence. Aside from the vague calls of “change” and “hope,” some still see the man as just a man; a talented and well-intentioned, but calculating and flawed man. Some still see little biracial “Barry,” raised by his white mother, growing up abroad outside the African-American experience, who later, as an upcoming Chicago politician, transformed into “Barack” –– now “black enough,” earning his fides at Wright’s Trinity United –– while wetting the appetites of his diverse urban constituents, as well as those of academic intellectuals and suburban guilty white upper-class liberals who all equally salivated at the opportunity to support a candidate who would underscore their own egalitarianism while alleviating them of whatever past ancestral sins they still felt responsible for. Whereas the Hussein middle name used to be “exotic” and championed as evidence of Obama’s multicultural credentials, today the mere mention of it has his campaign crying smear. The cold, calculating switch is unpardonable, and is only now being recognized for what it is. I suspect that the Obama-as-iconoclast perception, as the symbolic figurehead to end “old politics” and polarization as we know it, will fade into the woodwork as time progresses. As Hitchens himself noted, Obama’s crowds and their monotonous “Yes we can” mantra is the “sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.” It’s getting old, and, at least according to most Democrats I speak to, it’s getting old really fast. People are starting to see the campaign’s attitude of entitlement seep through. To counter this, the senator, in conceding “Washington experience” to his rivals, has placed a premium on the idea of trusting his judgment. I am glad to take him up on that proposal, and so should the electorate. Not only is much still to be explained regarding Rev. Wright, but as the general election approaches, a good number of people are going to want to know more about Sen. Obama’s contributions from, and business ties with, the wealthy and corrupt Illinois slumlord Tony Rezko. A good number of people are going to want to know more about Sen. Obama’s open friendship with former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, who bombed military bases, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Capitol (amongst other targets). At last account, Ayers was unrepentant, insisting “I don’t regret setting the bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.” A good number of people are going to want to know more about Sen. Obama’s relationship with Rashid Khalidi, his relationship with Iraqi-born billionaire Nadhmi Auchi (who, according to any prominent member of the Iraqi community, was a front man for Saddam for years), and the extent of his personal relationship with his childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a known communist who belonged to a proxy party to the Soviet Union. Judging on his judgment, it is. Aside from some Chicago soup kitchen altruism, nobody, including Obama’s fervent supporters, quite knows anything the senator has done. Why should we therefore believe an incurious electorate would be aware, at present, of Mr. Obama’s connections with shady individuals which spawned his political career, and the extent of their influence in his life and in his rise in politics? There is a crisis of information in this country, but as Democrats start to fret with buyer’s remorse, I suspect not for long. |
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