*UPDATED* The Audacity Of Hypocrisy

Barack Obama will deliver a major address today. Ostensibly, the speech is about race relations but in fact, his forthcoming address will attempt to refocus his relationship with Jeremiah Weight and the Trinity United Church on Chicago's South Side. Recent revelations have shown Wright and the church to harbor very ugly and racist beliefs. The church did not hide their abhorrent and repulsive ideas. Some of the most outrageous and disgusting sermons delivered by Reverend White were proudly offered as part of the 'Best of Trinity United' boxed CD gift set.

Obama will do one of two things. He will either repudiate Reverend Wright and the Trinity United Church or he will seek to 'redefine' his relationship with Wright and the church.

It is unlikely that Obama will repudiate Wright or the church. He has already coming to the defense of Trinity United Church and his own long time association with Jeremiah Wright, whom he claims as a spiritual mentor.

That leaves Obama with the unenviable task of trying to rewrite history. It is even more astonishing that the attempt to redefine, reinvent and whitewash a bigot is being made by a credible candidate for the office of the President of the United States of America.

Obama will no doubt point the good works of the Trinity United church under Reverend Wright. He will speak of rehabilitation programs and food banks and social services and all the wonderful things the church does on a regular basis. 'Trinity has 70 ministry programs, 22 of which target youth. Half of the programs target the community, including adult education, literacy, computer, child care, and education for unemployed or low-income families.'

Of course, this is the very argument made by the KKK, Hamas, Hizbollah and countless outher bigots and racists and others of the same ilk. 'So what if our ideologies and beliefs are centered around racism and bigotry, we do good work for our supporters and that's all that matters!' they say. For twenty years the Obama's sat in the pews of a church that offered that kind of ideology and in which they admittedly found spiritual comfort.

If the likes of Reverend Wright are acceptable to Barack Obama and many on the left side of the political spectrum, when can we can we expect a full blown apology to white evangelical preachers, none of whom preach the kind of hate of Jeremiah Wright? When will the left acknowledge the good works of Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell or the Pope? Churches and synagogues in this nation have been an example of good works to the entire world. Churches feed millions of people every day. When will the left acknowledge their admiration and righteousness of those churches in the same way they are coming to the defense of Reverend White and Trinity United? The legacy of the good works of those other churches and are indisputable and virtually every one of those churches decry racism of any kind, unlike Trinity United.

(There are of course, a very few exceptions. Their are lunatics in Idaho who hold services with one eye to the sky looking for the United Nations secret black helicopters. These flying machines with Philadelphia Experiment type of of invisibility cloaking capabilities are supposedly piloted by Israelis who were also Bildeberger conference attendees. The Idaho lunatics believe the plan is to attack them at any moment and hold them hostage until large black men come and rape their women. When the attack is over, Jewish doctors will erase their memories and they will resume their vigil atop singles wides, armed with beer, Cheese Doodles and walkie talkies. Only church members who are real believers get the walkie talkies.

It is interesting to note there are far more churches like Trinity United than there are like the ones just noted).

Obama and other defenders of Trinity United refer to Jeremiah Wright as a 'scholar' of sorts, citing some mindless 'Black Liberation' drivel, a collection of various idiotic ideologies that assign permanent victimhood to black Americans and perpetual blame for black problems to white people. It bears remembering that Arab world have pretend religious and intellectual 'scholars' who legitimize their own racism and bigotry giving their own ugliness a cloak of respectability, while assigning blame for their own failures to Jews, Christians and every other non Muslim.

Mahmoud Ahmadenijad convened an assembly in Tehran for a 'scholarly' and 'scientific' examination of the Holocaust. Like the Nazis that preceded them, Ahmadenijad assembled self proclaimed 'scholars' on racialism. One has to wonder about the kinds of conferences convened or attended by Jeremiah Wright. His association and admiration for world class bigot Louis Farrakhan is already well known.

There are those who will claim that a church's stance on homosexuality determines the bigotry of that church and thus equate Wright's Trinity United with other evangelical churches, but that argument is absurd. Reverend Wright and his ilk demonize white America (and Europe) in it's entirety. Unless they see things his way, the 'other' is rejected. Evangelicals may demonize the sin, but virtually every evangelical will embrace the sinner. Whether or not you agree with the evangelical or other church or synagogue communities, there is a profound difference between their ideologies and faith and those of Reverend Wright and Trinity United.

Barack Obama will try to make the Wright and Trinity United issue about race, as if somehow a history of racial or religious oppression make reverse bigotry an acceptable proposition and legitimate form of political expression. Contrast that with George Bush who decried the 'soft bigotry of lowered expectations.' If Obama makes the Wright matter about race, he is legitimizing the failures of a community that desperately needs to find it's own successes. It will be he and the likes of Jeremiah Wright and not white America that has burdened yet another generation of black Americans with a ladder that has the rungs deliberately removed. While he may have made it out of the spiral of failure, he and Wright seem to care little about the others behind them.

To fully understand the vacuousness of the Obama position, see Gerard Vanderleun's superb essay, Graven Images:Racist Fundamentalist Churches In America.

We're told, over and over, that Christian Fundamentalism is the single greatest threat to the American way of life; that it is, among many other evils, a breeding ground for race hate. We are reminded of the virtual descendants of Simon Legree among the Baptist Republicans of the Caucasian persuasion. We are harangued without end about their ceaseless lust for power. Baptist Democrats, it would seem, possess a "Get Out of Racism Free" card. Not because of their religious belief, but because of their party affiliation. It is a strange religion where sanctity is determined by politics and not by faith, but that seems to be the case...

...I've attended more than three dozen churches whose congregations could be considered Fundamentalist. I've been in these churches from Seattle to Key West, from California to the Carolinas...

From my direct observation, these Christian Fundamentalist churches have all -- every single one -- had congregations composed of all the races. From my auditing of the sermons I have never, not once, heard a message of race hate preached. Neither have I heard race hate promoted in the social meetings after. Not one single time, not even in the whitest of congregations. I have never, not for one instant, felt anything coming from these meetings that is anything other than embracing tolerance and Christian love for mankind. I have never, not for one instant, detected a whiff of bigotry or of anti-Semitism in these gatherings. Being a reformed radical from Berkeley in the 1960s I have keen radar for this sort of thing. Like many of my unreformed cohort I can detect it even when it doesn't exist.

Now I will admit that there may well be some churches that are, somewhere, all-white and that specialize in race-hatred, but they have to be pretty well hidden. Hidden not only from the world at large but from people like me...

This is not to say that white racism does not exist in America. It does. There are, as we know, a lot of white folks around that do not take kindly to people of other races and differing lineage. But that doesn't mean you find it in the churches. Indeed, it is harder and harder to find anywhere with every passing year. Whatever you may feel about racism in America in 2008, it is clear that the trend is not up.

What has also become clear to me -- what has been a revelation to me -- in the last week is that you do find racism embedded in some Christian Fundamentalist churches; churches whose congregation is almost strictly African-American. Indeed, scanning the tapes of the Reverend Wright Church that Barack Obama has attended it was difficult for me to find one white member of the congregation. I have, it is true, seen a tape where a white female pastor of another church was brought in to gush over the church, but that seemed to me to be a special occasion; something performed for the cameras.

While I can imagine many parishioners of many of the fundamentalist churches I've attended over the last few years sitting through a lot of sermons on this or that, I cannot imagine a white person sitting through the kind of sermons I've heard coming out of Reverend Wright's mouth -- unless they were overwhelmed with guilt and had a twisted sort of Christ-complex.

Glass houses can be broken from the inside, too.

*UPDATED*

See Dr Sanity's The Inauthentic Self. Excerpt:

There is still much work to do to heal ourselves as a nation over the racism of the past. That healing--including both justice and forgiveness-- is a very worthy goal and priority for Americans. But understand this: it will NOT happen; it will NEVER happen if the pendulum of racism and bigotry have only swung to the other side. We cannot heal our racist past BY BEING RACIST, and ultimately judging a person--even if it is a positive judgement--on the basis of the color of his or her skin.

Superb.