Ivy League Conservatives

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Earlier this month I posted about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his curious church, as did many bloggers and news sites. Yesterday, The Astute Bloggers posted an incredibly well-researched point-by-point bludgeoning of Wright’s logic. Let’s take a closer look:

Obama’s church and pastor of 20 years calls the white church in America SATANIC:

…the founder of the modern black liberation theology James Cone announced that Obama’s Church most embodied his message. Terrific. McClatchy reported:

Jesus is black. Merging Marxism with Christian Gospel may show the way to a better tomorrow. The white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation.

BUT: American slavery was not defended by white churches; it was abolished by white churches; (many who were not church leaders were children of church leaders) - here’s a partial list:

1. James Ramsay (1733–1789) was a ship’s surgeon, Anglican priest, and leading abolitionist.
2. The Clapham Sect was an influential group of like-minded Church of England social reformers in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century (active c. 1790 – 1830).Its members were chiefly prominent and wealthy evangelical Anglicans who shared common political views concerning the liberation of slaves, the abolition of the slave trade and the reform of the penal system.
3. The Quakers and the Committee for the Abolition Slave Trade: The first statement by Quakers was signed at Germantown, Friends Meeting in Germantown Pennsylvania in 1688. English Quakers had begun to express their official disapproval of the slave trade since 1727 and promote reforms.

The post lists another five examples of abolitionists. Why is that relevant?Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe brings it all home:

Were my rabbi to gloat that America got its just desserts on 9/11, or to claim that the US government invented AIDS as an instrument of genocide, or to urge his congregants to sing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America,” I would know about it straightaway, even if I hadn’t actually been in the sanctuary when he spoke. The news would spread rapidly through the congregation, and in short order one of two things would happen: Either the rabbi would be gone, or I and scores of others would walk out, unwilling to remain in a house of worship that tolerated such poisonous teachings. I have no doubt that the same would be true for millions of worshipers in countless houses of worship nationwide.But it wasn’t true for Obama, whose long and admiring relationship with Wright, a man he describes as his “mentor”, remained intact for more than 20 years, notwithstanding the incendiary and bigoted messages the minister used his pulpit to promote.[...]The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he has so long embraced, is a devotee not of King, - who in that same speech warned against “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” - but of the poisonous hatemonger Louis Farrakhan, whom the church’s magazine honored with a lifetime achievement award. The problem for Obama, who campaigns on a message of racial reconciliation, is that the “mentor” whose church he joined and has generously supported is a disciple not of King but of James Cone, founder of a “black liberation” theology that teaches its adherents to “accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.”Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama finally find the mettle to condemn the minister’s odium.When Don Imus uttered his infamous slur on the radio last year, Obama cut him no slack. Imus should be fired, he said. “There’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.”When it came to Wright, however, he wasn’t nearly so categorical. Oh, he’s “like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” Obama indulgently explained to one interviewer. He’s just “trying to be provocative,” he told another.” Far from severing his ties to Wright, Obama made him a member of hisReligious Leadership Committee — a tie he finally cut only four days ago.”Such a clanging double standard raises doubts about Obama’s character and judgment, and about his fitness for the role of race-transcending healer.