Video: Sheila Jackson Lee Booed at Texas Delegate Convention

Wow. I don’t wish booing and public embarassment on anyone. However, some of these politicians who chose loyalty to the Clintons as their primary reason for making an endorsement are due for a big shakeup come election time.

Letters of Support for Rev. Wright from Hillary’s former Church and Religion Scholar

Have there been a lot of major Christian leaders who have actually thrown Wright under the bus?  I haven’t heard of many and I didn’t think there would be many.  That’s why I wasn’t surprised about Mike Huckabee’s response.  Most of these ministers are well aware of Wright and his work.

The pastor of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s church when they lived in Washington, DC writes:

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is an outstanding church leader whom I have heard speak a number of times. He has served for decades as a profound voice for justice and inclusion in our society. He has been a vocal critic of the racism, sexism and homophobia which still tarnish the American dream. To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear. Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize. This is a critical time in America’s history as we seek to repent of our racism. No matter which candidates prevail, let us use this time to listen again to one another and not to distort one another’s truth.

Martin Marty, a top religion scholar writes:

Yes, while Trinity is “unapologetically Christian,” as the second clause in its motto affirms, it is also, as the other clause announces, “unashamedly black.” From its beginning, the church has made strenuous efforts to help black Christians overcome the shame they had so long been conditioned to experience. That its members and pastor are, in their own term, “Africentric” should not be more offensive than that synagogues should be “Judeocentric” or that Chicago’s Irish parishes be “Celtic-centric.” Wright and colleagues insist that no hierarchy of races is involved. People do not leave Trinity ready to beat up on white people; they are charged to make peace.

Video: Whose Pastor Is This????!!

Update: Also see “Father Michael Pfleger defends Jeremiah Wright to Fox News Reporter” Daaaaaaaaaagggg!!! LOL

UPDATE: Thanks to a tip from sagittarius, this is Father Michael Pfleger, the pastor of an African American Catholic church on the South Side of Chicago. Watch a video about their ministry below.

Video: Hillary’s “3 A.M. ad” Girl Does an Ad for Barack Obama

(h/t The Indisputable Truth)

Rev. Jeremiah Wright Was Bill and Hillary Clinton White House Guest

I knew it! I knew there had to be a Wright-Clinton photo out there. Everybody’s acting like they are just now hearing of Jeremiah Wright. This man is the second top black preacher in the country. There is no way he had not rubbed elbows with the Clintons before. Hillary Clintons’ White House schedules show she was at the event too.

The New York Times has more that you can read here.

Derrick Ashong Does a CNN Commentary on Obama’s Race Speech

(h/t ambboogie)

Gooooooooo Derrick!!!!!!!

Derrick writes on CNN:

Like many Americans I watched Sen. Barack Obama deliver his speech titled “A More Perfect Union.”

I watched in a state of minor shock, not so much at the deftness with which he defused the sophomoric conflation of his call for national unity with the inflammatory rhetoric of the retired head pastor of his church — a conflation that would imply that we must each swallow whole the entirety of views expressed by our friends and associates.

It was not his repudiation of small thinking that struck me. It was the fact that here we had an American politician speaking with both candor and compassion about the proverbial elephant in our national living room.

Read more.

Video: Audience Reaction Meters for Barack Obama’s Speech on Race and Rev. Wright

(h/t MediaCurves)

Interesting as always.

Video: Barack Obama Speech on Race and Wright “A More Perfect Union”

(h/t barackobamadotcom)

Read the full text of the speech here.

Text: Barack Obama Speech on Race and Wright “A More Perfect Union”

Here is the text of Barack Obama’s speech on race and Jeremiah Wright via Marc Ambinder.  Watch the video of the speech here.

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

Video: Pastor Gaye of Trinity UCC in Florida on Rev. Wright Coverage

Pastor Gaye of Trinity United Church of Christ in St. Petersburg, FL speaks out on the coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy.