Obama's Double Standard on Reverend Wright

This is not to say that Obama doesn't support these programs. He believes government should take race and gender into account in university admissions, hiring, and contracting; he opposes any state initiatives that would prohibit using racial preferences to promote diversity; he supports busing and decried the Supreme Court rulings that limited it, so much so that he vowed "to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the constitutional importance of Brown," the school desegregation ruling.

On the issue of his admiring relationship with his described mentor and pastor, Obama was less forthcoming. He failed to explain why for two decades he allied with a pastor of such convictions unless he didn't regard them as loathsome. Pastor Wright, after all, continually delivered sermons that were hate filled, paranoid, and anti-American. He asserted that America got its "just desserts" on 9/11 and was morally responsible for the attack because of, among other crimes, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though our purpose was to end the war imposed on the United States. The "chickens were coming home to roost," Wright said. He has also promoted a series of fantastical claims, including that the U.S. government gave drugs to black people presumably to enslave them or imprison them and that the government invented aids as an instrument of genocide against people of color. He slurred Italians as "garlic noses" responsible for Jesus's "lynching." Just last year, Wright honored the radical Louis Farrakhan and, as part of a virulently anti-Israel stance, published an article in his pastor's letter giving a platform to Mousa Abu Marzook, deputy leader of Hamas and a known terrorist.

Close adviser. What many people are saying privately, if not publicly, is that they do not understand how a man who gives speeches about moving past the racial divide would choose such a minister and make him virtually a member of his family and his "sounding board" during two decades. Pastor Wright was one of the first people Obama thanked after his election to the Senate; he consulted him before deciding to run for the presidency; and then he selected him as his spiritual adviser.

Contrast this with Senator Obama's reaction when radio host Don Imus uttered his infamous slur of blacks last year. Then, Obama didn't hesitate to say Imus should be fired and asserted, "There is nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made any comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group." But when it came to Pastor Wright, he passed him off as "an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." This kind of double standard raises serious questions.

Pastor Wright was not some cranky old uncle. He was a public preacher, endorsed by Obama with his continued presence. And a senator and now presidential candidate isn't just an ordinary church member. Doesn't such a public figure as Obama have an obligation to denounce anti-American bigotry as well as those who praise bigots? Wasn't he aware that this kind of preaching doesn't just affect adults but infects and exposes a younger generation to precisely the kinds of racism that Obama says he is committed to transcending? Doesn't it undermine his role as a racial healer when he implies that the inflammatory comments of his pastor were somehow made understandable by history? What else could be justified by this logic?

No one suggests that Obama shares his minister's rage or his deep disgust with America. But many can reasonably say that if any presidential candidate had remained a member of the congregation of a white minister who had preached sermons using the "N" word and espoused the views of the Ku Klux Klan, the public and the press would have been all over the candidate. And then appoint the same hatemonger to serve on a religious advisory committee for a presidential campaign? The result would have been a public firestorm.