Rev. Wright at the National Press Club
Nick Gillespie | April 28, 2008, 11:06am
Sen. Barack Obama's controversial former pastor, Jermiah Wright, has recently concluded a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The AP's gloss:
"I served six years in the military," Barack Obama's longtime pastor said. "Does that make me patriotic? How many years did (Vice President Dick) Cheney serve?"
Wright spoke at the National Press Club before the Washington media and a supportive audience of black church leaders beginning a two-day symposium.
He said the black church tradition is not bombastic or controversial, but different and misunderstood by the "dominant culture" in the United States.
He said his Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has a long history of liberating the oppressed by feeding the hungry, supporting recovery for the addicted and helping senior citizens in need. He said congregants have fought in the military, including in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"My goddaughter's unit just arrived in Iraq this week while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service while sending over 4,000 American boys and girls to die over a lie," he said.
More here.
From a Wash Times article about a speech Wright gave yesterday in Detroit:
While the TV sound bites that were constantly played on news programs often used only brief parts of his most incendiary remarks, the full statements from which they were taken were often broadcast or published in full context by numerous newspaper and periodical accounts at the height of the controversy that they sparked last month in the senator's campaign.
Among the full statements Mr. Wright has made in his sermons:
· "The government gives [black men] drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
· "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Mr. Wright said in a sermon five days after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Questions remain about Mr. Obama's relationship with the church.
Mrs. Clinton of New York raised the issue in her campaign and in their last primary debate with Mr. Obama in Philadelphia.
For "Pastor Wright to have given his first sermon after 9/11 and to have blamed the United States for the attack ... would have been just intolerable for me. And, therefore, I would have not been able to stay in the church," she said.
More here.
For the curious, I recommend checking out the official version of the Wright-approved "Black Value System" which is a statement of principles for Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. The BVS, among other things, pointedly rejects "the pursuit of middleclassness" as a strategy through which "captor" majorities neuter the threat of revolt by "captive" groups. The BVS represents a stark alternative to a more-integrationist model of social uplift of the sort originally espoused by the NAACP and others.
reason's Dave Weigel looked at the Wright-Obama kerfuffle here.
Fluffy | April 28, 2008, 12:43pm | #
Here's why I won't condemn Wright:
Because the people demanding that I condemn him are scum, and the reasons they want him condemned are scumbag reasons.
With respect to Alan, very, very little of reason that neoconservative scumbags want Wright condemned have anything to do with his statement about AIDS. [We'll leave aside the question of the CIA and drugs, since the CIA's admitted involvement in drug smuggling means that no one gets to complain about conspiracy theories about the CIA and drugs ever again. They fucked up; now that justifies any theory anyone wants to promulgate about the CIA and drugs. Forever.]
They want him condemned because he said that God should damn America for what it has done to blacks via its drug and prison policies. I don't expect everyone to agree with this statement, but I certainly don't see that it's beyond the pale of either political or theological discussion.
They also want him condemned because he said that America's bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unjust and terroristic. While I come down on the side of finding those bombings justified, I also certainly don't think the position is completely beyond debate. The position that holds that the bombings were not justified isn't my position, but it's a defensible and legitimate position.
As is the position that the 9/11 attacks were the fruit of the actions of the US in the world. Wright uses more religious language than I would [of course] to express this position, but trying to place this argument outside the bounds of acceptable discussion is a scumbag move.
So hey, if you want me to say that Wright is a chump for thinking AIDS was invented by the government, fine. He's a chump. But if you want me to say that anyone who thinks that US drug and incarcerations policies are damnable and that Japan should not have been attacked with atomic weapons and that 9/11 was blowback to US policy is a scoundrel who should be denounced and silenced, go fuck yourselves.
Fluffy | April 28, 2008, 3:05pm | #
It's as if there was some group of physicists in the early 1800's who had an all-encompassing proof of the nature of the universe that was composed of proof-sections A, B, C, D, E, F and G.
But when A was disproven by experiment they burned the guy who disproved it at the stake.
And when B was disproven by paleontological research they said, "Nuh-uh, nobody proved anything."
And then C and D were disproven and they said, "Um, yeah. Remember when we said that C and D were literally true? We were just kidding. Those were obviously metaphors."
And then when somebody actually sat down to read E and F, it turns out that buried in those "proofs" was text that said, "Please note: these sections are only true if slavery was a good thing, and if exterminating everyone in a city when you capture it is a morally good thing to do." And they defended this by saying "Well, you have to understand that people had different standards back when we first did this proof".
And today, left with only a dubious G, the advocates of this theory of physics somehow still command the affections of large groups of the population - majorities even - and claim an exclusive set of insights to physics, and demand respect for their arguments and denounce the people who laugh at them or get annoyed at their method of arguing as "intolerant bigots".
That's pretty much exactly what it's like. It looks different to you if you're inside it because you think religion is a special type of activity where it's OK to be dicks like our imaginary physicists would obviously be being, if they existed. I just disagree.
Fluffy | April 28, 2008, 4:06pm | #
Most people don't ask of their religion that it explain the physical phenomena of the world. Religion is rightly about things that cannot be proven.
Religion wasn't always about things that cannot be proven, Joe.
In fact, the men who first developed [or "received", if you prefer] the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam would have strenuously disputed that there was any distinction whatsoever between what religion could and couldn't prove and what God would or would not reveal to his chosen mouthpieces.
The substance of my complaint about religion is that religion has taken refuge in the realm of the unprovable as a strategy for surviving its utter humiliation in every realm where anything was remotely provable.
It is annoying to me that rather than discard a set of doctrines which were repeatedly and undeniably beaten like Rodney King by skeptics of every stripe, religious minds just
hid.
[By the way, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception only makes sense in the context of the various doctrines surrounding the "fall", and those doctrines only were developed as embroidery to the "history" revealed in the Book of Genesis. The history in the Book of Genesis, of course, was asserted to be literally true by ALL religious for centuries, and was begrudgingly admitted to be false only recently, after which it is immediately rehabilitated as "metaphor". The Immaculate Conception is no longer
necessary if Genesis is only metaphorical, but that doesn't stop the Catholics from pretending it all still fits together.]
Looking at the way religious thought has hidden away to evade its various refutations, I ask myself
Why? Why would people insist on sticking with Christianity, despite its atrocious record of error? Why bother? And the only answer I can see is that religion sought to preserve itself because it is the nature of corrupt institutions to seek to survive, and the beneficiaries of those institutions to dissemble in order to maintain them. And it's just really, really annoying.
Think of how annoyed you get at the silly things Neil says. Then imagine somebody being that silly for centuries at a stretch, and never letting go. Ever.
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