Obama quits church after long controversyAny guess on how long it takes for the GOP smear machine to switch gears from "he endorses hate and racism" to "he has no convictions?" The predictability here is absolutely pathetic.
By TOM RAUM
Associated Press Writer
Barack Obama has resigned his 20 year membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in the aftermath of inflammatory remarks by his longtime pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and more recent fiery remarks at the church by another minister.
Obama campaign communications director Robert Gibbs said Obama had resigned from the church "over the last few days."
...Obama said he disagreed with Wright but initially portrayed him as a family member he couldn't disown. The preacher had officiated at Obama's wedding and been his spiritual mentor for some 20 years.
But six weeks after Obama's well-received speech on race, Wright claimed at an appearance in Washington that the U.S. government was capable of planting AIDS in the black community, praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and suggested that Obama was acting like a politician by putting his pastor at arm's length while privately agreeing with him.
Obama denounced those Wright comments as "divisive and destructive."
Comments by Wright inflamed racial tensions and posed an unwanted problem for Obama, front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, as he seeks to wrap up the nomination.
More recently, racially charged remarks from the same pulpit by another pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, kept the controversy alive and proved the latest thorn in the side of Obama. Pfleger mocked Obama rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as a guest speaker at Obama's church.
Although Obama condemned comments by both Wright and Pfleger, the controversy has persisted.
On Thursday, Obama was again forced to reject another man of the cloth, this time Pfleger, who made racially charged comments mocking Clinton in a guest sermon at Obama's church.
Obama made it clear he wasn't happy with the comments -- in which Pfleger pretended he was Clinton crying over "a black man stealing my show" -- and said he was "deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn't reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause."
Honestly makes you wonder why anyone would ever want this job.
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