Like JFK, Obama Lacks Spine to Repudiate Racists Whose Support He Needs

JFK made nice speeches about civil rights, but knew that he needed the support of racist Southern Democrats in the U.S. Senate, so he was relatively inert during the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement.

He also understood that Blacks were inalienably Democratic, and therefore would remain in his column despite his flirtations with white racist demogogues like James Eastland, Orville Faubus, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin.

Likewise, Sen. Obama has generated some soaring rhetoric about unity and racial reconciliation, but he understands as a prosperous biracial man that his bona fides with the resentful Black underclass are not secure enough to permit him to repudiate Black racist demogogues and economic hypocrites like his Chicago pastor.

Just in case Obama wavers, ideological enforcers like the Washington Post's Colbert King are at the ready with columns like the one below.

Why Obama Stands With His Church
By Colbert King

All they wanted to do was pray with the rest of the congregation. But that was asking too much.

To be sure, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two leaders in Philadelphia's black community, enjoyed great success in bringing African Americans into the Christian fold. But the steady growth in black membership at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church distressed the white congregation that owned the church.

At first, black Christians were moved to seats along the wall. That still allowed for too much mingling. So one Sunday morning as Allen, Jones and the other black worshipers knelt to pray, white church elders tapped Jones and Allen on the shoulders and told them to take their praying upstairs to a recently built balcony.

Rather than submit to such humiliation, Jones, Allen and the rest of the black worshipers walked out. The two men formed their own congregations.

Jones gained permission from the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania to establish America's first black parish, St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. He eventually became the Episcopal Church's first African American priest.

Allen formed a Methodist congregation that eventually became today's multimillion-member African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

The walkout in the City of Brotherly Love occurred in 1787 -- a year that marks the beginning of America's independent black church, a theological movement born out of racism.

This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

Trinity is Barack Obama's church and the place where the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. -- a gift to all who would bring down Obama -- served as pastor until his recent retirement.

Buchanan and his ilk look at Trinity's slogan with horror. They label the church's theological values "Afro-centric" and "racially exclusive." Trinity is beyond the pale of Christianity, at least their version of it. Psst: Trinity has plenty of company, coast to coast.

Many black congregations, from storefronts to mega-churches, are in sync with the Trinity slogan. They, too, see no need to apologize for their African roots. Nor are they ashamed of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But hey, what's with this newfound concern about African Americans worshiping among themselves in their own way? More important, who forced that separation?

As sociologist Kenneth Clark noted in his book "Dark Ghetto," ministers and lay leaders of white Christian churches historically were unwilling to incorporate large numbers of blacks into their houses of Christ. That's still the case today with some churches.

Truth is, folks like Buchanan don't really care that America's Christian congregations don't look like salt and pepper on Sunday mornings. The reality of blacks and whites worshiping apart doesn't disturb them. If anything, Buchanan thinks African Americans are ingrates -- that we should be satisfied with our station in life.

"America has been the best country on earth for black folks," Buchanan wrote in his column, " PJB: A Brief for Whitey," posted on his Web site yesterday.

"It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known," he wrote.

Why Are Barack & Michelle Obama Devoted to a Racist, Divisive, Anti-American Church?

John F. Kennedy was a lifelong, if nominal, member of the Catholic Church, which is not associated with any particular ethnic group, and indeed may consist of every race and ethnicity on the planet.

Barak H. Obama, by contrast, is a member of a highly ethnocentric sect so preoccupied with African racial identity that it lauds non-Christian afrocentric allies like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in its official publications.

Like Erik Rush, I have waited in vain for Sen. Obama to account for his devotion to a sect that is so hostile to assimilated American identification, and so hospitable to the divisive, anti-Semitic, racially inflammatory message of a Muslim race-baiter.

Demercrats
item by Erik Rush

How many Americans would vote for a presidential candidate who was the member of a church that professed the following credo?

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the White Community
3. Commitment to the White Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the White Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the White Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting White Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all White leadership who espouse and embrace the White Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the White Value System.

The question is rhetorical, of course. The answer is that such a candidate wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected dog catcher...let alone President, because that candidate would be instantly branded a racist, among the most vile and frightening of white supremacists. And those holding the branding irons would be 100% right.

Yet, in the “About” section of the U.S. Senate website for Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois and contender for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, it states that Obama and his family “live on Chicago’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.”

So…? Well, to say that the Trinity United Church of Christ (http://www.tucc.org) is afrocentric in the extreme would be a gross understatement. It’s not simply afrocentric, it’s African-centric. In fact, one could argue that this organization worships things African to a far greater degree than they do Christ, and gives the impression of being a separatist “church” in the same vein as do certain supremacist “white brethren” churches – or even Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Shocking? An overstatement? An overreaction? One can see for oneself on the Trinity United Church website, which is replete with confirmation of what I present here.

What follows is an excerpt from their Mission Statement:

“We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent.

We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism.

It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

“Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981. We believe in the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They must reflect on the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black
Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and
Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value
System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.”

Sound familiar? Of course it is, since it’s identical to the 12-point list at the beginning of this column – the one from the theoretical white supremacist candidate’s church; the only difference is the substitution of the word “Black” for “White.”

Trinity United Church of Christ’s congregation also claims to hold to a “10-point Vision” which is similarly afrocentric or, if you will, separatist. Again, like the Nation of Islam, a white separatist church or the Branch Davidians, Trinity United more resembles a cult than a church. Only this one has as one of its most prominent members a serious contender for the White House. And George W. Bush’s born-again Christian status scares people?

These revelations, of course shed all the light we need on Obama’s inscrutability; since before he announced his candidacy, both the Right and Left have commented on the lack of information vis-à-vis just who Barack Obama is and what he’s about.

From The Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2007, column "Against Middleclassness?" by Rich Lowry: “Vallmer Jordan, a church member who helped draft the precepts, said they were designed to empower the black community and counter a value system imposed by whites. ‘The big question mark was racism,’ he said. ‘Black disempowerment was an integral part of that historical value system. It became increasingly apparent to me that we black people had not developed our own value system . . . to help us overcome all we knew we had to battle.’”

“A value system imposed by whites…” Is Jordan speaking of the value system that kept families together and promoted morality, industry and integrity, or the one imposed by Liberal dependency pimps since the Civil Rights Movement?

True enough that many blacks did abandon values; again, this was due to the corruption of the black clergy by white socialists and their black foremen.

Trinity United seems to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Gravitation toward an Africanized “year-round Kwanzaa”-based pseudo-Christianity seems less of a solution than returning to the moral and social conservatism Blacks held prior to the aforementioned socialists gaining their stranglehold in the black community.

So is Obama seeking to be our first black president, or our first stealth black nationalist president?

You see, were he a run-of-the-mill insincere Christian of convenience like Bill Clinton, Obama might belong to a run-of-the-mill, lukewarm, large nondescript church. But he doesn’t.

He belongs to a church which is (as I indicated before) blatantly afrocentric and even suggests the supremacy of Africa’s descendants in America. Granted that the Left will have no qualms about this highly questionable affiliation, but what about all of the American swing voters to whom Obama has built broad appeal by presenting himself as sort of a generic, open-minded moderate Democrat (as Bill Clinton also did, by the way)? Are they going to go for a candidate whose heart is actually closer to that of a refined Black Panther?

Trinity United clearly embraces things African above things American. The content of their website makes this undeniably clear. Aside from this tack being divisive, separatist and calling into question its adherents’ identification as Americans, if they’re looking for values, they – and Obama – would be better served by looking to modern political conservatives and traditional Christianity than retrograde African precepts and the Democrat Party.

Obama’s affiliation with this church, if I must call it that, should be as alarming to the American voter as a Republican candidate for president belonging to the Aryan Brethren Church of Christ. Any argument against this assertion is politically-correct delusion, reverse discrimination and a hypocrisy – a very dangerous one.