Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Obama’s Speech: Part 1

If the 2008 presidential campaign season has had a single theme so far, it may be that if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. Hence, I have criticized Ron Paul for taking money from white supremacists. I criticized Mike Huckabee for holding fundraisers with Christian Reconstructionists. I criticized John McCain for giving a speech at Bob Jones Liberty University and for taking/seeking John Hagee’s endorsement. I criticized Mitt Romney for accepting endorsements from leaders of Bob Jones University.

And I have also criticized Barack Obama for his association with Pastor Jeremiah Wright. (A criticism, by the way, which generated the first obscene phone call of my blogging career from some Obama supporter.) As anyone who’s been paying attention knows by now, Pastor Wright has over the last many decades said some things that are, at best, controversial:

“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.”

It is much ballyhooed speech today, Barack Obama acknowledged the hurtfulness of many of Pastor Wright’s statements over the years and expressed his sharp disagreement with some of them. Yet, Obama explicitly refused to disassociate himself from Wright:

As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me.  He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.  Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.  He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

This is of course, specious. As the maxim goes, you can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your friends. People of faith routinely change churches or even denominations when they find what is coming from the pulpit offensive.

And, as Ann Althouse points out, Wright’s statements are more than just offensive:

Missing [in the speech], I think, is an explicit acknowledgment that Wright is not merely expressing the anger he feels but that he is leading people into anger, keeping anger fresh and alive.

I don’t deny that changing churches is very hard, having done so myself. But presidents are called upon to make hard decisions, some of which may be personally painful, all the time. Hence, while Obama’s loyalty to Pastor Wright may seem honorable at the personal level (although I disagree with it even there), it is troubling at the presidential level.

Update: Be sure to read Part 3.