As all eyes are directed at the Democrats' squabbling over the Florida and Michigan delegates, news comes that Barack Obama has cut his ties with his spiritual home for twenty years, the Trinity United Church of Christ.
No doubt the timing of the announcement, very late on this Saturday afternoon, was meant to avoid the analyses of talk radio. That's silly.
Obama's resignation as a member of the church he so strongly defended isn't going to go unnoticed.
From the FOX News:
Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have resigned their membership at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, FOX News has confirmed, after controversies stemming from the congregation created a persistent distraction for Obama’s campaign.
The criticism started with the sermons of his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., but Obama’s pastor problems were compounded this week by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, whose videotaped guest sermon at the church Sunday showed him taunting Hillary Clinton and saying she felt she was “entitled” to the presidency because she’s white.
Obama said he was deeply disappointed by the remarks and Pfleger apologized, but Clinton’s campaign still demanded Obama specifically reject the latest remarks.
By resigning his membership, Obama is taking the most definitive stand to date against the church.
This is such a political stunt.
If Obama thinks that he can make the issue of his longtime ties with the church and its extremist, divisive, hateful pastors delivering hateful, divisive, bigoted, anti-American sermons just go away, he's wrong.
The fact that he is resigning his membership verifies that the church is not the wonderful place he argued that it is.
His connection to it was so damaging to his candidacy that he and his family are abandoning their congregation.
How can he explain his long, long, close history with Trinity United?
He can't.
His praise for his church and its pastors, documented in his own books, is on the record.
That's here to stay.
Is Obama going to say that he had a twenty year lapse in judgment?
Does he think he can simply wash his hands of all the ugly rhetoric that has come from the pulpit of his church after so many years of membership?
He financially supported the church, tens of thousands of dollars. Now, he's suddenly not on the same wavelength? Really?
Bottom line: Obama and his wife's resignation from the Trinity United Church of Christ doesn't excuse them from their years of being part of the faithful flock.
This is as meaningful as Obama donning the American flag pin. It's political posturing.
It's all politics, politics as usual.
Obama is ugly politics as usual.
Change? I don't see change.
Hope for change? No.
3 comments:
Wright said one thing right: He's speaking as a politician.
Which ruins his whole image schtick, as a Washington Outsider who would do things different.
Exactly. Obama is no agent of change.
I don't doubt that the people of the church have accomplished good things and ministered to those in need. That goodness isn't hateful.
The problem is some of the things that have been said by the spiritual leaders of the church have not been good.
It sounds like you're a church member. I'm wondering what you think about Barack Obama abandoning the TUCC.
Do you feel that he betrayed you by resigning his membership and condemning the pastors and other preachers at your church?
The fact that he left certainly is a poor reflection on the church.
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