Obama has a Bro. Souljah moment

NY Times:

Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city’s largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama on Sunday invoked his own absent father to deliver a sharp message to African-American men, saying, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.”

“Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Mr. Obama said, to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

The speech was striking for its setting, and in how Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, directly addressed one of the most sensitive topics in the African-American community: whether absent fathers bore responsibility for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans. Mr. Obama noted that “more than half of all black children live in single-parent households,” a number that he said had doubled since his own childhood.

Accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha, who sat in the front pew, Mr. Obama laid out his case in stark terms that would be difficult for a white candidate to make, telling the mostly black audience not to “just sit in the house watching SportsCenter,” and to stop praising themselves for mediocre accomplishments.

“Don’t get carried away with that eighth-grade graduation,” he said, bringing many members of the congregation to their feet, applauding. “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”

His themes have been also been sounded by the comedian Bill Cosby, who has stirred debate among black Americans by bluntly speaking about an epidemic of fatherless African-American families while suggesting that some blacks use racism as a crutch to explain lack of economic progress.

...

He is right. Hopefully his message will be heeded and he will not become an outcast in the black community the way many have treated Bill Cosby. I am not sure why this should be a sensitive topic. I did not think sperm donors were all that sensitive about abandoning their responsibilities.

When 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock that is a tragedy for each of them that has led to terrible consequences as the boys become young men who are murdering each other at a rate higher than the combat deaths in Iraq at the peak of the war.

Political correctness has done no favor to the black community by trying to hush this conversation. It is a shame upon liberalism and the so called black leadership that so few have addressed the problem. Obama deserves respect for making the case for fathers.