Obama's Church Blows It

When a fire is dying down and starting to go out, what happens when you throw gasoline on it? BOOM! The same is true of political stories, and just as the Obama's Crazy Preacher story was starting to wind down a bit, his church throws gas on the fire:

The Chicago church attended by Barack Obama is fighting back against media coverage of its controversial pastor, issuing a statement on Sunday, saying reports on the inflammatory remarks by Rev. Jeremiah Wright are an attempt to attack “the history of the African American church.”

“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,” the leaders of Trinity United Church of Christ wrote Sunday in a statement distributed to the media.

Claiming that Wright’s 36 years as pastor of the church — the largest United Church of Christ congregation, with 8,000 members — is being demeaned, Rev. John H. Thomas, UCC general minister and president, said, “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 … 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.”

Neither Wright nor Obama was present at the church on Sunday, but all of talk news has been on the subject of the pastor, whose many sermons have been captured on video and replayed across television and the Internet over the past few weeks.

Some of the more flamboyant sermons have included statements saying that the U.S. created the AIDS virus to kill African Americans and that the United States was asking for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks because it had supported “state-sponsored terrorism” against black South Africans and Palestinian

Obama’s campaign has tried to distance the candidate from his Wright, the man who coined the phrase “the audacity of hope” that became the title of Obama’s bestselling book.

BOOM! Now every newspaper and broadcast news organization in the country has a license to dig even further into the bigoted messages of Rev. Wright and his association with Barack Obama.

The Hillary Clinton campaign thanks you.

UPDATE: From LGF, the church is furiously scrubbing their website to remove references to the "Black Values System" and other equally controversial subjects. Too late.

I'll talk about this subject and more on Monday's BlogTalkRadio program with special guest Dr. Andrew Jackson of SmartChristian.com which you can hear by clicking on the icon. Feel free to call in and join the conversation. The show kicks off at 7pm PT Monday night.

The call-in number will be (347) 347-5547. I hope you'll listen and call in to join the conversation.