It is fairly obvious that a lot more is meant in that passage than is attributed by Obama. The use of the words "Captor" and "captives" and the phrases "Killing them off directly" and "encourage them to kill off one another" seem to corroborate there is a lot of hate being preached and a lot of blame on the United States and its people being taught within the walls of the TUCC.

Obama has a habit of saying one thing in front of white and or mixed audiences and when he is speaking to a predominately black audience.  sort of reminds me of the accusation about Clinton, that she picks up a southern cadence when speaking to southern audiences and a more clipped tone in NY or the congress.

I just wonder if his views are interchangeable as his language style.  

I certainly resent the comments by Wright when he said that trash about how Bill Clinton did the same thing to blacks as he did to Monica.  What absolute lies and distortions that was, I really felt Wright went too far in his hate filled speech about Hillary and Bill Clinton, which to my mind does not promote Obama but diminishes him.

In my experience, the only people who get worked up over this specific issue are Sean Hannity and his disciples.

I'm not enough of an expert to explain the concepts being discussed here, but it's all quite mainstream once you understand it, as far as I know.  The concept of the "talented tenth" originates from DuBois and is over 100 years old.

and the UCC is not at all a "black" church.

http://www.ucc.org/news/chicagos-trinity -ucc-is.html

   "Trinity United Church of Christ is a great gift to our wider church family and to its own community in Chicago," says UCC General Minister and President John H. Thomas. "At a time when it is being subjected to caricature and attack in the media, it is critical that all of us express our gratitude and support to this remarkable congregation, to Jeremiah A. Wright for his leadership over 36 years, and to Pastor Otis Moss III, as he assumes leadership at Trinity."

* * *

   [Rev. Steve] Gray, a member of First Congregational UCC in Indianapolis, has worshiped several times at Trinity UCC and is most impressed by the overflowing sense of welcome it extends to visitors.

   "When you're Euro-American, the people [at Trinity UCC] are so exceedingly gracious, warm and welcoming. They hug you and say, 'Welcome to our church!'"

Tread lightly, here. Without the African American vote, Democrats are toast.

Do we kick the Kennedy's and Kerry's to the curb because they're Catholics?

As a Catholic, it pains me to do this -- the reconciliation of my personally held views with church doctrine is a never-ending struggle -- but here's a snippet of a speech by Mother Theresa:

"But I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, `If you receive a little child , you receive me.' So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, the neglect of receiving Jesus." Peggy Noonan reported in CRISIS, Feb. 1998, pp. 12-17, the following. "Well, silence. Cool deep silence in the cool round cavern for just about 1.3 seconds. And then applause started on the right hand side of the room, and spread, and deepened, and now the room was swept with people applauding, and they would not stop for what I believe was five or six minutes. As they clapped they began to stand, in another wave from right of the room to the center and the left."

Now adds Noonan: "Now, Mother Teresa is not perhaps schooled in the ways of world capitals and perhaps did not know that having said her piece and won the moment she was supposed to go back to the airier, less dramatic assertions on which we all agree.

"Instead she said this: `[Abortion] is really a war against the child, and I hate the killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love....The father of that child, however, must also give until it hurts. By abortion, the mother does not learn how to live, but kills even her own child to solve her problem. And by abortion, the father is taught that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into that world. So that father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion.

"Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion." (more applause) Mother Teresa continued. "I know that couples have to plan their family, and for that there is natural family planning. The way to plan the family is natural family planning, not contraception. In

destroying the power of giving life or loving through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self. This turns the attention to self, and so it destroys the gift of love in him and her. In loving, the husband and wife turn the attention to each other, as happens in natural family planing, and not to self, as happens in contraception. Once that loving is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily. That is why I never give a child to a family that has used contraception, because if the mother has destroyed the power of loving, how will she love my child?"

Apologies for this link --http://www.aaplog.org/collition.htm -- but since we're citing NewsMax nowadays, I guess this should be OK.

Now.... you tell me...

I would suspect a good many Catholics - even Christians - would consider Mother Theresa a "personal hero".

In fact, I think when we add up the ledger of the good one places in the world against the inflammatory and the doctrinal -- MOther Theresa comes out roundly ahead.

But.... What if, rather than a lifetime of media advocacy and popular support in Western nations -- what if this speech alone was being used to capture the lifetime of Mother Theresa's work?

Ida B...

I, too, would love to have a long national discussion.  It's obvious that we need such
a discussion.

I say this as an Anglo-American woman who supports
Hillary Clinton married to an Irish-American man who watches Fox News.  LOL

If we could have such a discussion without the hate and invective that has made me cower in small corners of more-or-less friendly spaces, we will probably find we have a lot in common.

My problem is flaying people who are not racists with that odious accusation.  It somehow seems
cheap and self-serving.  

I have the same problem with women who falsely accuse men of rape or abuse in order to gain some advantage.  

It gives license to blunt the consequences of these actions, to invite denial that these events still take place
all across America every day.  

There's a lot of crazy stuff in religious texts.  Have you read the Bible lately?

We need to judge candidates by their acts and their words, not what their churches/synagogues/mosques say.

I am appalled to find this on what purports to be a progressive web site.

As a white male who was fathered by a Jew, raised Catholic, and now agnostic, I see nothing whatsoever objectionable or "scary" about the "Black Value System."

Keep in mind that this value system was adopted in the early 1980s, which was a particularly difficult economic time for black Americans.  Also keep in mind that this was right around the time that drugs and black-on-black crime was threatening to destroy the social fabric of the black community.  The value system is plainly a call to blacks to stop such nonsense; to return to strong family values; to dedicate themselves to hard work and commitment to love and justice; and to pledge to ensure that the fruits of their labor were given back to the black community so that it could regenerate itself.    

The value system that you find so "shocking" is, to this extent, scarcely different than the value systems that other religious sub-groups have adopted.  Why is it shocking that the black church would urge solidarity between members of the black church?  This is no different than the Quakers, the Amish, or the Hassidic Jews, all of whom make it a point to ensure that the fruits of their labor be shared by the members of their own communities.  In earlier times, you saw the same solidarity among Italian Catholics, Irish Catholics, and a host of other sub-groups.  

I've now read the black value system several times over.  I see nothing "separatist" about it, or racist, or anti-white.  I see a plea that blacks who succeed in moving up into the middle and upper class not lose sight of the community from whence they came.  

Here are the tenets of the black value system.  Please describe which ones you find so shocking:

(1) Commitment to God (self-explanatory)

(2) Commitment to the black community (urges blacks to contribute to the "strength and continuity of the Black Community").

(3) Commitment to the Black Family (urges the "family circle" to "generate strength, stability and love"; this simply echoes the almost universal recognition that the phenomenon of absent black fathers is one cause of social ills in the black community).

(4) Dedication to the pursuit of education (self-explanatory).

(5) Dedication to the pursuit of excellence (self-explanatory)

(6) Adherence to the black work ethic (urges that "high productivity must be a goal of the Black workforce").

(7) Commitment to self-discipline and self-respect (self-explanatory).

(8) Disavowal of the pursuit of "middleclassness" (urges that the most successful blacks not be seduced into leaving behind the communities from whence they came; also recognizes the destructive cultural phenomenon of labeling successful blacks as "sell outs").

(9) Make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the black community (simply urges skilled blacks to make sure they use their skills to help the black community; there is no "exclusivity" provision here, by the way).

10.  Pledge to allocate regularly a portion of personal resoruces for strengthening and supporting black institutions (no different than Mormon tithing; scarcely different from the letters I get from my Jesuit university's alumni fund, which urges me to give a portion of my salary back to the Jesuits).

(11)  Pledge allegiance to all black leadership who espouse and embrace the black value system (self-explantory and non-controversial in light of the clearly constructive purpose of the black value system).

(12) Personal commitment to embracement of the black value system (urges that blacks should "measure the worth and validity of all activity in terms of positive contributions to the general welfare of the black community and the advancement of black people towards freedom"; simply another call to make sure you are giving back to your community).

So please explain why this is "scary stuff"?  Explain how the black community would be better off if such a value system did not exist?  Explain to me why in 1982 black leaders should not have been urging the black community to heal itself by making making a social commitment to itself?  Explain how this is different from the Quakers, the Amish, the Hassidic, and -- in fact -- almost every discrete religious subgroup?  Explain how this is any different from, say, Magic Johnson determining that he would put his movie theaters exclusively in black areas so that the economic benefits would go disproportionately back to the black community?  Explain how this is different from the so-called "black capitalism" that is the premise of the regeneration of Harlem?  Explain how the black value system harms, rather than helps, both the black community and the community as a whole?  

Until you answer all of these questions, you are simply another hack.