[Marxism] Obama's church responds to smear campaign against former pastor

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/obamas-church-responds/index.h
tml?hp 
 
Obama's Church Responds
By Kate Phillips

On the morning news shows today, surrogates of the Obama and Clinton
campaigns tried to tamp down the volatile, gut-wrenching elements of
racial/gender identity politics that have been playing out in the campaign
in the past week, through the Internet and rippling through the electorate.

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's surrogate,
Representative Nita Lowey, Democrat of New York, and former New Jersey
Senator Bill Bradley, supporter of Senator Barack Obama and former
presidential candidate, both urged everyone to move on from the inflammatory
remarks made last week by Geraldine Ferraro, and by Mr. Obama's longtime
church pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. 

Videos were played endlessly last week and over the weekend of Ms. Ferraro's
comments and of the Reverend Wright's sermons, both of which served to
expose the cleaves of race and gender that are, by many accounts, splitting
the Democratic party into factions. 

While Senator Obama has distanced himself from the incendiary remarks by his
former pastor, including comments about how the United States brought on the
Sept. 11 attacks by its own actions abroad, the Chicago church's current
pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, issued this statement on Palm Sunday. 

Nearly three weeks before the 40th commemorative anniversary of the murder
of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A.
Wright Jr.'s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he
has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men
in America and around the globe.

Dr. Wright has preached 207,792 minutes on Sunday for the past 36 years at
Trinity United Church of Christ. This does not include weekday worship
services, revivals and preaching engagements across America and around the
globe, to ecumenical and interfaith communities. It is an indictment on Dr.
Wright's ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or
30-second sound bite," said the Reverend Otis Moss III, pastor of Trinity
United Church of Christ. 

During the 36-year pastorate of Dr. Wright, Trinity United Church of Christ
has grown from 87 to 8,000 members. It is the largest congregation in the
United Church of Christ denomination.

"It saddens me to see news stories reporting such a caricature of a
congregation that has been such a blessing to the UCC's Wider Church
mission," said the Rev. John H. Thomas, UCC general minister and president,
in a released statement. " . It's time for us to say 'No' to these attacks
and declare that we will not allow anyone to undermine or destroy the
ministries of any of our congregations in order to serve their own narrow
political or ideological ends."

Trinity United Church of Christ's ministry is inclusive and global. The
following ministries have been developed under Dr. Wright's ministerial
tutelage for social justice: assisted living facilities for senior citizens,
day care for children, pastoral care and counseling, health care, ministries
for persons living with HIV/AIDS, hospice training, prison ministry,
scholarships for thousands of students to attend historically black
colleges, youth ministries, tutorial and computer programs, a church
library, domestic violence programs and scholarships and fellowships for
women and men attending seminary.

Moss added, "The African American Church was born out of the crucible of
slavery and the legacy of prophetic African American preachers since slavery
has been and continues to heal broken marginalized victims of social and
economic injustices. This is an attack on the legacy of the African American
Church which led and continues to lead the fight for human rights in America
and around the world."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached the Christian tenet, "love thy neighbor
as thyself." Before Dr. King was murdered on April 4, 1968, he preached,
"The 11 o'clock hour is the most segregated hour in America." Forty years
later, the African American Church community continues to face bomb threats,
death threats, and their ministers' characters are assassinated because they
teach and preach prophetic social concerns for social justice. Sunday is
still the most segregated hour in America. 

We talked with Angela Faison, a spokeswoman for the church, just moments
ago, who verified the statement from the Reverend Moss. We asked her if
Senator Obama or his campaign cleared the statement, and she asked: "Why
would we do that? We are that? We are two separate entities."


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