Across the pond

Obama is showing that he can stick to the essence of the Christian faith better than his long-time pastor, Jerimiah Wright, who wanted to God Damn America soon after 9/11. In the last fow days a series of old videos of Wright’s inflamator sermons have appeared as the US Presidential campaign hots up. Obama removed him as a religious adviser. But he made a speech restating his own religious position. He forgave the pastor, who married him, but concentrated his fire on the need to tackle racial prejudice.

Whether his friendship with Wright will do any harm, I doubt. Sally Quinn, in her God Slot column for the Washington Post, reminds readers of some of the prominent pastors to Presidents in the past. Jesse Jackson, who came around to the White House in the Monica Lewinsky days, and gove spitual guidance to the First Lady, the First Gentleman and little Chelsea. In his public life Jackson was sometimes equally inflammatory, making anti-semitic slurs, such as calling New York City Hymietown. In his private life he fathered a child by a staffer. Quinn also reminds us that Billy Graham, spiritual advisher to several US Presidents in including Clinton and Bush was caught on tape exchanging anti-semitic comments with Richard Nixon, including one choice complaint that reporting had deteriorated now more Jews had become journailsts. (One of them was, of course, Carl Berstein, one half of the Post duo who had those talks with Deep Throat in the car park.)

The exposure of Wright’s fire-raising sermons comes days after Geraldine Ferraro made an even more inflammatory remark suggesting Americans were voting for Obama, just because he was black. Her implication was that it was more difficult for a woman to become President than a black. The best analysis of this continuing debate I have seen is in an article by The Guardian’s Gary Younge the day before yesterday. He exposes the sloppy thinking which brackets sexual identity and racial identity together.

His conclusion below:

Pitting underrepresented groups against each other in this way simply undermines any potential for building the kind of progressive coalitions necessary to eradicate the very obstacles to the emergence of more black and female candidates. If this is what the Democrats do to each other, just imagine what fun the Republicans will have.