I have something to say to my liberal friends. You know I respect and admire you despite all our disagreements, but when someone I care about is doing something very wrong, I believe I have an obligation to tell them.
You are are making a terrible mistake.
With the revelation of yet another horribly racist rant at Barack Obama’s church, it is time for you, my liberal friends, to accept something that is very painful. In 2004 when Senator Obama was asked by the Chicago Sun-Times who his spiritual mentors were, he named Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger. When Reverend Wright’s offensive sermons came to light, it was easy to think of him as an aberration. He could be dismissed as just one of those crazy things that happens in a presidential campaign.
But this past week at the Trinity United Church of Christ, Father Pfleger preached a sermon just as hate filled and racist as those given by Reverend Wright. The rants of one man could be written off as an aberration, but not both.
It is time for you to put aside your denial and face the truth. Trinity United is a church thoroughly infused with the most vile type of hatred. The man you’re about to nominate as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, has for 20 years belonged to that church and he has proudly embraced two horrifyingly racist men as his role models.
If you saw this pattern in a white candidate, you would be the first to label him as unfit for office and demand that he immediately exit the race and resign from the Senate. But when it occurs with Senator Obama, you say it’s a distraction from real issues, you say it’s dirty politics, you go through amazing mental gymnastics to find ways to excuse it.
If you continue to condone, excuse, deny and refuse to see the ugly face of racism just because this time it’s within your own party, you are turning your backs on the struggle for racial equality that you once led. You are denying Dr. King’s dream of an America free of racial hatred. You are betraying everything you stand for. If you are truly a liberal, you cannot do this.
You can ignore racism when it is politically convenient, or you can be faithful to the principles that have guided you from Selma to Montgomery to Birmingham. You can not do both.
You are my friends and it would be a shame to see you lose your souls.
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