Kathleen Parker needs an education about race and religion. She uses her column today to argue that the president’s past association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a legitimate issue because it “shine(s) a light on how Obama’s character was formed.” That seems fair. But looking at the president’s character is not what people are concerned about. That has nothing to do with why the Wright issue is considered a taboo.
First of all, she’s looking at the wrong target. Yes, the issue is raised to cause political damage to the president. Therefore, it seems like he is the target. But he’s not the one being treated in a racist fashion. Jeremiah Wright, and by extension, the black church culture of our country are the ones being smeared here. Yes, you can take a few lines out of years and years of sermons and make Rev. Wright look bad or radical or un-American. But what you’re really saying is that anyone who belongs to a black church is unfit to be president. That black churches are radical and un-American. That’s both because the attackers are creating an unfair caricature of Rev. Wright, and because his views are nowhere near as unconventional in the black community as the attackers would have you believe. The idea that the government created AIDS to decimate the black community was once a quite common fear. That a preacher voiced that fear is really only reflective of what his community was feeling at that point in time. That may have been a paranoid belief, but are we going to now say that no one who was sitting in the pews is an American? That they’re all unqualified to be president?
What Kathleen Parker is missing is that you can’t make distorted attacks on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in isolation. If he can be attacked that way, so can many other preachers and churches. You delegitimize his church and you are attacking black churches all over the country.
Secondly, there’s a common understanding that you don’t attack people for their privately-held religious beliefs and practices. Lord knows we on the left could spend all day every day between now and November highlighting the strange doctrines of the Church of Latter Day Saints. We’re not going to do that. Sure, some individuals will do that. But the president isn’t going to do it. The DNC isn’t going to do it. Our Super PACs aren’t going to do it.
Didn’t the Mormon church help form Mitt Romney’s character?
It sure did. But if we’re going to say that’s not a legitimate way to have your character formed, we’ll be attacking all Mormons, not just Mitt Romney.