LIKE FERRARO, WRIGHT WAS RIGHT IN THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME. ON THE OTHER HAND. . .

SAM SMITH - Illustrating how far our politics remains from reality, both the Clinton and Obama camps have dumped supporters who told true facts, something often not desired in a campaign. Just as Ferraro was right about Obama's blackness being a factor in his otherwise inexplicably precocious rise in politics, so the Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke some uncomfortable truths about this land that many are not ready to hear. He did it for his own crowd, with the hyperbole of hyperactive pulpitry and left at least one of his parishioners with some explaining to do.

The political lesson for Ferraro is stop talking about race and for a politician as ambitious as Obama it is to find a duller church at which to stake your claim to the love of Jesus. Either that or acquire a reputation for sleeping through sermons.

As it is, the actually quite conservative, cautious and crumbly Obama is being unfairly recast in the radical image of his preacher. This is not only inaccurate, it's politically unfortunate. It was a dead certainty that the right would try to turn Obama into an extremist; it's a shame that the moment had to be wasted on the Reverend Wright rather than on something useful - such as support for single payer healthcare that the Obama has so carefully avoided.

But we are ordinary citizens, not candidates or their managers, and so it is important on such occasions to consider the non-political aspects of such furors as well. Things like reality, for example. We have already offered some kind words for Ferraro and now pass along a few thoughts on the reverend, leaving the Review that only journal in America to rise to the defense of both of the latest apostates in the Church of Latter Day Syntax & Semantics.

DEBORAH MATHIS, BLACK AMERICA WEB The eruption of outrage, shock and fear that is flowing over Barack Obama's campaign like hot lava because his pastor has preached some strident sermons tells us one thing for certain: Many white people don't know black people at all.

If they did, they would know that Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago is hardly the only black minister who uses the pulpit to rant against racial duplicity and injustice. The black church has always been the place for letting our hair down and speaking our peace -- a safe haven from the criminations outside. It's how and why the black church became the nursery for the freedom and civil rights movements. Not every minister seasons his or her sermons with political commentary, and not every one who does is as fiercely spoken as Rev. Wright, but there is nothing unusual about the black clergy as social agitator. Guess the shockees didn't know that.

It seems they were also clueless that, when race, racism and discrimination do invade the pulpit, it is not always in the context of forgiveness and humility. Much of black America is resentful, angry and distrustful -- rightly so, some of us would say. Did the uninitiated honestly believe that slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, white resistance and flight, economic and educational duality, hyper-incarceration and yawning disparities in wealth, health and longevity have had no lasting effects; that all of that is really no big deal -- something we can kick off as easily as our Sunday shoes?

In a fair world, Obama would be able to elaborate about the black perspective and thereby give some context to Wright's comments and the facts of black expression. But, then, in a fair world, there would be no racial divide to bridge. Of course, Obama's detractors would never consider that.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL THE ROOT . A black orator stood before a rapt audience, his voice rising to a crescendo as he made this fiery statement: "Statesmen of America beware what you do! The soil is in readiness, and the seed-time has come. Nations, not less than individuals, reap as they sow. The dreadful calamities of the past few years came not by accident, nor unbidden, from the ground. You shudder today at the harvest of blood sown in the springtime of the Republic by your patriot fathers."

Sound familiar?

These are not the words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the embattled minister of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. These words were uttered by Frederick Douglass in his appeal to the U.S. Congress for African-American voting rights.

Douglass, like Wright, was speaking as a patriot and as a Christian. Douglass, like Wright, was speaking out of an honored tradition in black church life. Douglass, like Wright, was speaking in the tradition of biblical prophets.

In his 1993 text, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, historian Wilson Moses labeled this tradition the black jeremiad. Like Rev. Wright himself, it is named for the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was among the biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless. Frederick Douglass was a master of the jeremiad.

He called slavery a curse to the nation and argued that, "we shall not go unpunished." He said it was the patriotic duty of blacks "to warn our fellow countrymen" of the impending doom they courted and to dissuade America from "rushing on in her wicked career" along a path "ditched with human blood, and paved with human skulls.". . .

This week Barack Obama was pressured to denounce Jeremiah Wright. But in the hundred years following the end of the Civil War more than five thousand African Americans were lynched and not a single president denounced the atrocities. Because of this history, black patriotism is complicated. . .

Trinity UCC does represent an important segment of black religious tradition. It is not scary, racist or un-American. Quite the opposite, Rev. Wright is integral to the broad prophetic tradition that informs many black churches. . .

For African Americans, evil takes the very specific and identifiable form of white supremacy, first through enslavement, then through Jim Crow and lynch mob rule, and into what many today experience as seemingly intractable racial inequality. Black Americans struggle to reconcile the sin of racism with the idea of a loving and powerful God. Different churches resolve this issue in various ways.

In churches like Trinity UCC, black folks read the Bible with an eye on what it has to say about experiences of bondage and oppression. In this way the Bible is both a moral guide and a political text. Even though slaveholders declared that God wanted slaves to obey their masters, black people believed that God wanted them to be free. They believed this because they read the story of Moses. . .

I attended Trinity United Church of Christ during the seven years I lived in Chicago. Although I do not know him personally, I heard Rev. Wright preach on dozens of Sundays. His sermons soothed my broken heart while I divorced, they eased my mental anguish when my sister was ill, and they helped give me strength as I watched the destructive power of racism, sexism and homophobia within my Chicago community. In short, his words did what a pastor's words are supposed to do. I am grateful for Jeremiah Wright and for his prophetic witness.

DEVIL'S TOWER, DAILY KOS - In the King James Version, the first part of Luke 6:24 reads "But woe unto you that are rich!" That comes off as quaint and a lot less shocking to modern ears -- not the kind of preaching that nets you space on Fox News. But Jesus meant his words to be shocking. He meant them to strike against the status quo and shake up the comfortable. . .

From Gandhi to King, it's in the nature of spiritual leaders to grab their audiences by the throat and their nations by the short hairs. This was true at the time of the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement. Martyrs did not become martyrs by appealing to the status quo.

Don't take this to mean that I agree with every word that Wright spoke (e.g. the United States did not create AIDS), but neither do I feel like his words require that "his church should lose it's tax exempt status" that he's a traitor, or that he's an embarrassment to his church or to Senator Obama -- all comments that have appeared on this site.

Do I think that 9/11 was the "chickens coming home to roost?" Yeah, I pretty much do. Of course the terrorists bear the personal responsibility for their actions and the deaths that resulted. But to pretend that decades of actions overseas had nothing to do with that terrible morning is far more delusional than anything said by Rev. Wright. If you jab a stick into a hornet's nest and shake it for fifty years, the hornets might do the stinging, but you can't blame only the hornets. Actions have consequences, and though we may pretend to both purity of motive and prescience about outcomes, the truth is that violence tends to generate violence in return. Or, as that radical I quoted above said "those who take up the sword, will die by the sword."