By Harry T. Cook

This essayist is one liberal for whom the emergence of Barack Obama as a serious candidate for President of the United States has not exactly amounted to the dawn of a messianic age. The junior senator from Illinois seems still a little green in some areas, despite his brilliant educational credentials and his multicultural background. He is, however, eminently electable, and almost anyone would be a welcome change from George W. Bush.

The You-Tubing of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has provided kindling for those who would oppose any Democrat and who will do anything to keep as much of the neo-con, Republican status quo ante in place after noon on January 20, 2009. Indeed, the Rev. Dr. Wright uttered some pretty radical stuff from his Chicago pulpit, and if he weren’t African American, his oratory would have been dismissed as that of just another crank.

Ever since the arm-waving reaction to Wright’s post- 9/11″God damn America” sermon I have wondered why the Right and its hangers-on did not react in precisely the same way when the late Jerry Falwell and the still-living Pat Robertson piously opined that 9/11 was their deity’s punishment of America for its coddling of gays and lesbians. What they were saying was that God had damned America. But Falwell was – and Robertson – is white. White preachers get to say a lot of things with impunity. But let a Jeremiah Wright let loose in his pulpit in high dudgeon, and let one of his parishioners be a man of color running for President, and all bets are off.

To some of my fellow bloggers and former newspaper columnist colleagues, I say j’accuse. Barack Obama is no more responsible for what Jeremiah Wright said in any sermon than any of my parishioners are responsible for what I have said in any sermon. There are members of my congregation – none, admittedly, running for President – who over the years have taken great exception to some of my homiletic offerings. They nonetheless remain congregants because they are open to having their ideas challenged and submitted to critical discussion – as am I.

Let us not forget the last years of the public career of Martin Luther King Jr. as he made bold to connect the moral corruption of America’s treatment of African Americans with America’s prosecution of the Vietnam war. King was denounced even by liberals who resented his sermonic incursion into foreign policy.

No, King never said “God damn America” from the pulpit, but if you listened carefully to what he said about the immorality inherent in the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, you could sense that he believed America was damning itself.

I remember that King and his sermon were called “un-American.” The same thing is being said about the Reverend Wright. Echoes of the 1950s and its notorious House Un-American Activities Committee and of the late Senator Joe McCarthy. Have we learned nothing?

Meanwhile, my ministerial colleague, the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP and Heaster Wheeler, its director, have given a not-yet-damned America a splendid lesson in the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of speech – and, come to think of it, freedom of religion.

Preach it, Reverend Wright!

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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