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Obama rejects minister's inflammatory statements

In the handful of years Senator Barack Obama has spent in the national spotlight, his stance toward his pastor has gone from glowing praise to growing distance to, as of Friday, strong criticism.

On Friday, Obama called a grab bag of statements by his longtime minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr, "inflammatory and appalling."

"I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue," he wrote in a campaign statement that was his strongest in a series of public disavowals of his pastor's views over the past year.

Earlier in the week, several TV stations played clips in which Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago, referred to the US as the "U.S. of K.K.K.A." and said the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were the result of corrupt US foreign policy.

Senator John McCain's campaign on Friday forwarded a Wall Street Journal opinion piece to reporters in which Wright was quoted as saying, "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run," and accusing the US of importing drugs, exporting guns and training murderers.

Later in the day, Rush Limbaugh dwelled on Wright in his radio program, calling him "a race-baiter and a hatemonger."

In the statement he released a few hours later, Obama, known for his uplifting messages about national unity, professed a certain innocence about his pastor's most incendiary messages.

"The statements that Reverend Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation," he said.

The eight-paragraph statement, first posted on the Web site the Huffington Post, did not recount Wright's comments but addressed concerns about whether his beliefs reflected Obama's.

"He has never been my political adviser," Obama wrote. "He's been my pastor."

Obama has belonged to Trinity for two decades. He was married by Wright, and his two daughters were baptized by him.

Obama credits a sermon of Wright's, "The Audacity of Hope," with drawing him to Christianity, and he used those words as the title of his second book.

But the evening before he announced his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama started to distance himself from Wright, canceling an invocation he had asked Wright to give at his presidential announcement.

Wright, 66, who last month fulfilled longstanding plans to retire, is a beloved figure in black American Christian circles. Since he arrived at Trinity in 1972, he has built a 6,000-member congregation through his blunt, charismatic preaching, which melds detailed scriptural analysis, black power, Afrocentrism and an emphasis on social justice.
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