The media stood and applauded yesterday when President Obama and his family went to churchfor Easter. Yesterday’s visit to Shiloh Baptist Church in D.C. shows again that Obama really is a man of faith, the reports seem to suggest.
But while the media rushed to report on the first family’s attendance of the predominately black congregation (and the family’s outfits), what it failed to mention were the views held by the church’s pastor. And while those views are not delivered in the same fiery manner as Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, they sound eerily familiar.
What views are those? How about that the country is still racist, that racists get programs on Fox News, and that Rush Limbaugh is the new KKK.
James Parker at WRNO-FM in New Orleans did some digging yesterday about Shiloh Baptist’s pastor, Dr. Wallace Charles Smith. Not only did he find that Smith loves to preach on race, but he noticed Smith even infused race into yesterday’s Easter sermon:
One has to dig into the blog notes from various reporters to piece together the content from the sermon. Aside from the First Couple being honored guests, Pastor Wallace Charles Smith also announces that his 4 week old grandson is attending church for the first time, and a pool reporter noted an interesting perspective on the infant:
“[Pastor Smith] talked about how his baby grandson’s gurgling is actually “talking” because he is saying ‘I am here … they tried to write me off as 3/5 a person in the Constitution, but I am here right now … and is saying I am not going to let anybody from stopping me from being what God wants me to be.’”
Parker asks the obvious questions:
The pastor hears American institutional racism in a baby’s gurgle? Do most people with infants hear Constitutional bigotry in their baby’s gibberish? Did any mention of the 3/5 clause or racism in general make it into the Easter service you attended? Is this pastor’s amazing leap from a baby bark to white oppression another coincidence to add to the list, or has he established a pattern of race baiting and white bashing in the past?
The answer, Parker says, is easily found in a quick YouTube search. During a speech last year at Eastern University, Smith rejected the idea that America is moving past race. In fact, he said racism is alive and rampant in America, especially on the conservative airways. Not only did he insinuate that Fox News hosts are racist, but he also said Rush Limbaugh is a new breed of KKK member:
“Anytime you can have the kind of hate-mongering that continues in the hallowed halls of talk radio it show that Barack’s presidency has not solved the problem,” Smith said in 2010.
“Now Jim Crow wears blue pin stripes … and he doesn’t have to wear white robes anymore, because now he can wear the protective cover of talk radio, or can get a regular news program on Fox. He doesn’t have to wear his white garments anymore.”
He continued: “Even such venerable saints as Rush Limbaugh know the lines they are not to cross. But any of their constituency can hear clear the same vile filth spewing forth in their statements that was once the purview of Robert Shelton and members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizen’s Council.”
Discoverthenetworks.com has an excerpt from one of Wright’s sermons: “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!… We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”
Sound familiar?
“POTUS sits through service listening with his arm around Malia, nodding,” the pool report said of Obama’s attendance yesterday. And while it’s impossible to know what he was agreeing with, or if the nods were simply out of habit, the fact is that he was once again in attendance as race baiting flowed from the pulpit.
Will Obama have to deny this pastor, too?
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