With all the heated feelings and rhetoric surrounding the
firestorm that is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a bit of truth telling may
be in order. Conservatives have demanded that Barack Obama
repudiate all of the controversial statements made by his spiritual
advisor, while supporters of the Illinois senator believe that he
has sufficiently distanced himself from them. But what if there is
actually some truth in Wright’s allegations?
Barack Obama is said to be a tremendous orator, and the speech
he delivered last week was hailed by many as superb and spiritually
moving. And he should know about preaching and inspiring events;
after all, his justification of same-sex unions based on the Sermon on
the Mount earlier this month was quite illuminating.
But, laying aside his racially-tinged, finger-pointing diatribe
itself, let’s go to the veracity of a few of his Pastor’s
statements and the extent to which Obama and those of his party may
or may not be in agreement with them.
One of Wright’s dependable mantras is that America is a country
controlled by “rich, white people,” who, according to him, are
doing harm to people of color. To a certain extent this is true.
There is a large group of people for whom it is politically
expedient to keep blacks in “their place.”
But these rich white folks — let’s call them limousine liberals
— are those who support Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.
Almost from this country’s founding, politicians of all stripes
have been known to make promises to those in need of government
largesse. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his New Deal coalition
to form a solid Democratic base of big city political machines,
labor unions, subsidized farm groups, and ethnic and racial
minorities, which purchased millions of votes via federal
handouts.
THIS WAS HONED into an art form in later years by Democrats who,
unlike their predecessors, sought to keep those in need perpetually
needy, and therefore dependable on Election Day.
This is the ugly truth of modern liberalism. Keeping minorities
dependent on government help instead of self-help is their goal;
and race and class envy are their weapons. Indeed, in his “healing”
speech, Obama identified our “corporate culture” as the “real
culprits of the middle-class squeeze.”
We used to salute as “Captains of Industry,” risk-takers who
invested their own money in order to found solid companies which
used their profits to create jobs for all classes of people. These
men drove the machine that fueled the American dream.
Today, those once proud men are now shunned as “culprits” by
liberals, some of whom have grown wealthy investing in the very
corporations they seek to vilify and drive into submission via
unionization, litigation, regulation, and taxation. And when these
burdens become too heavy to bear and these companies are forced to
relocate offshore, they are deemed un-American.
Rev. Wright has famously said of the 9/11 attacks, that
Americans were “indignant because the stuff we have done overseas
is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s
chickens are coming home to roost.” And, despite the view of
liberal relativists who believe there are no objective truths —
such as, you’re either with the terrorists or against them — this
charge actually has a ring of accuracy to it.
Most Americans believe that “the stuff” we’ve been doing
overseas for decades — liberating countless millions of people of
all faiths and colors from brutal regimes and dictators in every
corner of the world — is a major reason why thugs like Osama bin
Laden despise us and our way of life.
But a belief that countries like America may be the only thing
standing athwart bin Laden’s dreams of global Islamist domination,
is incomprehensible to liberals who believe that all American
military actions are somehow “imperial” in nature.
PROBABLY THE MOST outrageous claim of Rev. Wright is that our
government lied about its involvement in inventing “the HIV virus
as a means of genocide against people of color.”
Here, he’s got the right church but the wrong pew. The real
genocide perpetrated against all of the American people and
particularly its people of color was, in a way, brought to bear by
a branch of our own government. The U.S. Supreme Court, usurping
the powers of the legislative branch and therefore the American
people, discovered out of whole cloth the right of women to murder
their own children in the womb.
You can total up all of the deaths that Wright and his ilk
assign to the Imperial U.S. of A., and they wouldn’t be a drop in
the bucket next to the 40 million or so American children — one
third of whom were black — whose lives have been brutally cut
short by abortion and its supporters. And who are these
supporters?
Well, the parent denomination of Wright and Obama’s
congregation, the United Church of Christ, for one. In a 1996 document, the UCC supported President Clinton’s veto of
the Partial Birth Abortion ban stating, “The directorate of the
UCC’s social action office first addressed the abortion issue in
1970, affirming freedom of choice for women, calling for church
action supporting the repeal of overly restrictive abortion
legislation and encouraging the expansion of sex education
programs.”
Wright has famously asked God to damn America and only time will
tell if his invocation is worthy of God’s ear. But one thing is
certain; if we continue to elect politicians who would use racial
hatred and class envy to hold people back; who would have us shrink
in fear of “chickens coming home to roost” when confronted by our
enemies; or would use His name to support the killing of unborn
children; we will have damned ourselves.
