5/2/08

NYT: Muzzle the Reverends

Clyde Haberman is a sane man. His NYC article in today's times hits the nail on the head.
NYC
First Thing, Muzzle the Clergy?
By CLYDE HABERMAN

Wouldn’t it be nice if, in the name of ecumenism, certain clergymen could reach an understanding about why 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001? Most New Yorkers probably never thought that the victims had it coming. But some gentlemen of the cloth seem to know better.

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor-cum-present millstone, suggested once again the other day that the United States brought the pain on itself by engaging in, as he put it, overseas terrorism of its own....more

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Most clergymen at the extremes find someone, something or some group to blame for anything that has gone wrong. I think Mr Wright is more insidious. I believe he's trying to kill off Obama's candidacy so that he can justify his extreme racist views. If we had a president of color, Mr. wright could no longer claim victimhood.

John D. Enright said...

The poster of the previous comment may be correct in his conclusion that Wright is determined to damage Obama. If Obama succeeds in attaining the nomination of the Democratic Party for President, a fundamental tenet of Black Liberation Theology will be destroyed.

According to The Marxist Roots of Black Liberation Theology by Anthony B. Bradley, who is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and Assistant Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis:

"Black Liberation Theology encourages a victim mentality among blacks. John McWhorters’ book Losing the Race, will be helpful here. Victimology, says McWhorter, is the adoption of victimhood as the core of one’s identity—for example, like one who suffers through living in "a country and who lived in a culture controlled by rich white people." It is a subconscious, culturally inherited affirmation that life for blacks in America has been in the past and will be in the future a life of being victimized by the oppression of whites. In today’s terms, it is the conviction that, 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, conditions for blacks have not substantially changed. As Wright intimates, for example, scores of black men regularly get passed over by cab drivers.

"Reducing black identity to 'victimhood' distorts the reality of true progress. For example, was Obama a victim of widespread racial oppression at the hand of 'rich white people' before graduating from Columbia University, Harvard Law School magna cum laude, or after he acquired his estimated net worth of $1.3 million? How did 'rich white people' keep Obama from succeeding? If Obama is the model of an oppressed black man, I want to be oppressed next! With my graduate school debt my net worth is literally negative $52,659.