Below The Beltway

Depending on how you count, it either took twenty years or three months.

In either case, yesterday Barack Obama cut ties with the Church where he was married and his children were baptized:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and his wife, Michelle, announced yesterday that they have left their longtime Chicago church, Trinity United Church of Christ, after racially charged comments by a visiting pastor last week dragged them into yet another controversy over religion and race.

The resignation came Friday in a letter Obama sent to the church’s head pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III.

“We make this decision with sadness. Trinity was where I found Christ, where we were married and where our children were baptized,” the letter said. “But as you know, our relations with Trinity have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own view.”

Obama held a news conference last night during a campaign stop in Aberdeen, S.D., after news of the resignation began to spread.

The Democratic presidential candidate said he and his wife had been discussing leaving the church since his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., made a theatrical and controversial April 28 appearance at the National Press Club.

“We had consulted with a number of friends and family members who are also connected to the church, and so this is not a decision I came to lightly, and frankly it’s one that I make with some sadness,” Obama said.

Obama’s split with Trinity, where he had been an active parishioner since 1992, came after his campaign was dogged by new questions about a guest sermon made last Sunday by a Roman Catholic clergyman, the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger.

Anyone who doesn’t see the political expediency in all of this is, quite simply, willfully blind. This is the same Church that Obama has been a part of for 20 years. Last year, right before he announced his candidacy for President, his campaign made a conscious effort to hide Jeremiah Wright from the public by dropping his appearance from the campaign kickoff. In March, when Wright’s invective-filled, partially insane, rants became public, he said that he could no more renounce Wright than he could renounce he own Grandmother — that would be the one he described shortly there after as a typical (bigoted) White person. Only a few short weeks ago, after Wright made another bizarre public appearance, Obama finally denounced Wright, but said nothing about the church Wright ran for more than two decades. Then, finally, when we learn that Trinity United played host to a Catholic priest who plays the race card as well as Louis Farrakhan and, now, he backs away ?

The guys at The Corner aren’t convinced:

It’s been just over two months since Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race — the one that was compared by the historian Garry Wills to Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. In that speech Obama famously said he could not more disown the Reverend Jeremiah Wright than he could disown the black community or his own grandmother and spoke about how Trinity United “embodies the black community in its entirely.”

Since that speech Wright has been tossed under the bus — and now, so has Trinity United.

Obama’s twenty-year participation at Trinity United and his close relationship with its senior pastor raised a lot of questions about Obama — both about his decision to associate himself with Trinity United and Wright in the first place and Obama’s tortured explanations since the public first learned of Wright’s anti-American tirades.

To which Justin Gardner responds:

Do we really believe that Obama believes in the stuff that Wright said or the divisive nature of Pfleger’s comments? And does anybody think that these sermons represent the majority of what is said at Trinity?

As far as the first question goes, the fact of the matter is that a lot of people don’t know, and that is precisely Obama’s problem with this issue. Up until the Wright story broke, Obama was essentially a blank slate upon which anyone, supporter or detractor, could write whatever they wished. It’s why his empty, meaningless speeches about “hope” and “change” were so well-received and why women were fainting at his speeches early in the campaign as if he were the political equivalent of Frank Sinatra or The Beatles.

When the Wright story broke, the fact that Obama was a blank slate with no real national reputation or experience meant that there would be some segment of the public who would associated Wright’s invective with him; especially given the fact that the everything Obama had said about Wright before this was positive, that he had credited Wright with “bringing him to Christ,” that Wright had performed his wedding and baptized his children, and that Obama had taken the title of his book from one of Wright’s sermons.

Obama’s responses to the Wright controversy didn’t help him either. Quite simply, it defies credulity to believe that one can be a member of a church for two decades and not have any idea that the church’s pastor, whom you’ve described as a friend, had a tendency to make racist, anti-American, and, quite honestly crazy comments as part of his sermons. Do I believe it’s possible that Obama wasn’t present when some of Wright’s more controversial statements were made ? Yes. Do I believe it’s possible that he had no idea that Wright said such things until he saw the video in March, as he claimed ? Absolutely not.

As to the second question, the only evidence we have for the kind of church that Trinity is comes from what we’ve seen. Wright’s sermons and the cheers that accompanied them, for example. Or the inane rantings of “Father” Michael Pfleger and the cheers that accompanied them. Or the fact that Trinity United gave an award to one of the most vile anti-Semites in America today, Louis Farrakhan.

Given that, it’s fairly obvious that there is a radical agenda at that church that has little to do with Christianity.

The idea that the Obamas had no idea what was going on for 20 years simply isn’t believable.