Updated March 25
The Washington Blade headline (top of page 1) proclaims Obama pastor backs gay rights. Oh, so that makes the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a good guy as far as we (that is, the "LGBT community") are concerned? Wright's gay defenders represent the sort of inbred myopia that distresses many of us who have moved away from the LGBT left-liberal party line. Rev. Wright may call on the Lord by saying "God damn America," he may blame 9/11 on the "chickens are coming home to roost" for U.S. support of "state terrorism against the Palestinians." He may declare that the U.S. government invented and spread HIV/AIDS "as a means of genocide against people of color." But hey, he upholds the progressive line on gay rights, sort of. Let's rally to his support, and that of his most-famed mentee. (Yes, Obama has stated he disagrees with some cranky statements uttered by his most revered spiritual adviser for the past 20 years. Sorry, my bad.)
More. From the funny pages.
Furthermore: Why the speech was a brilliant fraud. Writes Charles Krauthammer:
Why didn't he leave—why doesn't he leave even today—a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction….
Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "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." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?
And yet Andrew Sullivan, Chris Crain, and other gay pundits still find themselves in full swoon. And they argue that Wright's support for gay rights balances his instances of hatefulness (Sullivan, here, and Crain, here). Just what, one wonders, would be needed to shake their entrancement?
More still. Bruce Bawer writes:
I was no fan of the late Bill Buckley, but a piece by him in the current Commentary has proven surprisingly timely. In it he describes how he and others, back in the 1960s, dealt with the huge and unwelcome influence in conservative circles of the John Birch Society, whose nutbag leader Robert Welch believed Eisenhower was a Communist agent. What did Buckley do? Give a speech in which he refused to disown Welch, explaining that Welch was a part of the big, complex picture of American conservatism and that he couldn't disown him any more than he could disown his grandmother? No, Buckley sought, through the power of the pen, to weaken the Birch Society's influence and separate Welch from the bulk of his followers. Others, too, took part in this effort. And, over time, it worked. It's called behaving responsibly. It's called leadership
And Gregory Rodriguez writes in the LA Times on what he terms Obama's brilliant bad speech:
Just maybe more progress will be made if average, fair-minded, decent people simply chose not to associate with—and lend their credibility to—haters, extremists or sowers of racial discord. Obama could have taken that simple path any time over the last 20 years. He chose not to. Now it's too late.
Yet still more. Christopher Hitchens' take:
You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily.... To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith.
