The unreality based left and religion

James Kirchick:

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... the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.

The lunatic remarks made by Wright in videotaped sermons released in March — which, lest there be any doubt that these pearls of wisdom were taken “out of context,” Wright reaffirmed at the National Press Club last week — are indefensible, and it is beyond pedantry to quibble over whether a spirited defense of Louis Farrakhan is more or less offensive than blaming abortion doctors and gays for Sept. 11, 2001, as Jerry Falwell infamously did two days after the terrorist attacks.

But in the warped minds of some on the left, uttering such inanities is not only “understandable,” it’s laudable. That is, of course, if the person alleging that the government created AIDS to kill African-Americans is an aggrieved black man lashing out at the rapacious, capitalist and irredeemably racist United States. Wright, you see, is actually a “patriot” for speaking uncomfortable “truths” about his country.

John Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation. Like most of his comrades, he tends to be a vociferous critic of the religious right, regularly denouncing them for all manner of bad deeds. But to Nichols, Wright is not a divisive figure spreading dangerous lies. He is, in fact, “in possession of the balm that has frequently proven to be the cure for what ails America,” that is, “an eyes-wide-open faith in the prospect that this country can and will put aside the sins of the past and forge a future that is as just as it is righteous.” Nichols ended his ode to Wright by comparing the preacher to none other than Thomas Jefferson, a comparison that Wright would likely find insulting, given that he’s accused the author of the Declaration of Independence of pedophilia.

Indeed, many on the left are trying to outdo one another comparing great historical figures to Wright, whose most proximate antecedent would be a black, religious Lyndon LaRouche. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell called Wright “Our Jeremiah,” in that he is akin to the “biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless.” She then decided to insult the very notion of historical memory by comparing Wright to Frederick Douglass. Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, was perplexed as to what all the fuss over Wright was about. “I’m trying to figure out what it was that got everybody’s shorts into a twist,” he wrote in Commonweal magazine. (Wycliff’s bewilderment over the reaction to Wright’s lies and hyperbole does not speak well to his skills as an ombudsman.) The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.

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The prophetic tradition in the white church is bad, but is "understandable" in the black church? Do liberals have any idea how racist and condescending that is? At least Falwell had the gumption to apologize for his statement rather than attempt to portray all his critics as being against the "white church."

What Kirchick is really noticing is that many liberals are hypocrites, but then most of us already knew that.