What Is This World Coming To?

Barack Obama reacted to the latest racially charged dust-up at Trinity United Church by publicly resigning his membership. Evidently, he believes that withdrawing from the congregation will erase his twenty-year membership as an issue in the general election.

Given that most of his supporters seem to have the attention span of a gnat, it just might work. . .

“We had prayed on it. We had consulted with a number of friends and family members,” Obama said. “Frankly, it’s one that I made with some sadness. Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized.”

Obama said he has “tremendous regard” for the church community, but said he could not live with a situation where everything said in the church, including comments by a guest pastor, “will be imputed to me, even if they conflict with my long-held, views, statements and principles.”

It still doesn’t seem like the senator from Illinois ‘gets it’. The issue isn’t Jeremiah Wright or Otis Moss or Father Flueger. None of them are running for president. The problem isn’t that they are racists; the problem is that Obama either didn’t notice they were racists for twenty years, or he didn’t care for twenty years.

It isn’t what we learned about Jeremiah Wright, Otis Moss or Father John Flueger — it’s what we learned about Barack Obama. I don’t agree with everything my pastor says, but I agree with most of it.

If I didn’t, I would find one whose views were more in keeping with my own. That is NOT what Barack Obama is doing. He’s resigning his membership under duress and with admitted regret — it isn’t a conscience-driven decision, it is a political one.

“I’m confident we’ll be able to find a church that we’re comfortable with,” he said. “We probably won’t make any firm decision on this until January, when we know what our lives are going to be like.”

“Our faith remains strong and I expect that we will find another church home for our family,” Obama said. “We understand that our faith is something that we apply each and every day. We wish only the best for our friends and the wonderful people at Trinity. They’ll be in our thoughts and our prayers.”

The ‘wonderful’ people who believe that white America invented AIDS as a method of genocide against blacks, that white America deserved the 9/11 attacks, the ‘wonderful’ people who embrace the Nation of Islam as their ideological cousins, the wonderful people who believe that all whites are devils.

Obama’s resignation from the church is as meaningless as his denunciation of its doctrine. He claimed he ‘never heard’ any of the inflammatory sermons — despite having sat for twenty years under Pastor Wright’s tutelage. Does that sound even remotely credible?

No more credible than believing Obama’s resignation has anything to do with a difference of opinion. “I’m not denouncing the church and I’m not interested in people who want me to denounce the church,” he said.

Then why resign?