Thursday, May 1
Old news: The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. is Barack Obama's pastor. While pastoring Obama's church, Wright said, "God damn America" and called the USA "The U.S. of KKK A."

By now, Obama's promise of a "post-racial" candidacy seems like it's from another lifetime. As in, oops, that one didn't work out.

New news: As Obama has discovered after trying to keep his pastor out of sight, it's impossible. Rev. Wright is everywhere. His continued domination of successive news cycles finally pushed Obama over the edge on Tuesday, when he as much as declared he never really knew Rev. Wright in the first place. Even so, "God damn America" and "The U.S. of KKK A" will not disappear easily, no matter what Obama says or how well he says it.

Prognosticators seeking moral high ground opine that this is all just gutter politics generated and sustained by right-wing hate, that Rev. Wright's comments are being taken "out of context," and the uproar is distracting us from issues that are far more important. With apologies to Meatloaf, one out of three ain't bad.

As is clear to everyone except maybe Bill Moyers, the Rev. Wright controversy is sustained and generated by the Rev. Wright

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himself through his on-going pronouncements about his previous pronouncements. Far from being taken "out of context," the controversy is now fully within the context created by the expanding contextual framework provided by Rev. Wright in his own follow-up commentaries.

Asked on Monday to clarify his earlier statement that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus as a tool of genocide against people of color, Rev. Wright could have said, "No, I don't believe that," and, with a few more disclaimers, put much of the controversy to bed. Instead, about AIDS and genocide, he said, "I believe our government is capable of doing anything." Obama said he was "outraged," but Rev. Wright had only repeated what Obama heard him say way before Monday.

Preaching reconciliation at the National Press Club, Rev. Wright remained stuck on divisions: "the Christianity of the slaveholder is not the Christianity of the slave. The god to whom the slaveholders pray, as they ride on the decks of the slave ship, is not the god to whom the enslaved are praying, as they ride beneath the decks on that same slave ship."

Abraham Lincoln saw it differently. In his second inaugural address, speaking of the warring Union and Confederate armies fighting over the future of slavery and the future of the nation, he observed, "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God" And then Lincoln closed with the penultimate American admonition: "With malice toward none, with charity for all"

On Monday, amidst the howl of damning America and assigning black genocide to its government, Rev. Wright entered the calm eye of the hurricane for just a moment and said something that went mostly under the radar -- words that fit the best traditions of Christian scripture, American history and the Constitution of the United States. He was almost Lincoln-like in spirit, the words updated to fit a Chicago pastor in 2008. Whatever Rev. Wright's intentions, these words are true:

"God does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other people. God does not want the powerless masses -- the poor, the widows, the marginalized and those underserved by the powerful few -- to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society ... God's desire is for transformation, changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders and changed hearts in a changed world."

Of all Rev. Wright's remarks, these are the ones that are truly American, and in this political season, they appear particularly well-suited for certain needy audiences:

"God does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other people." (That's for the U.S. Congress.)

"God does not want the powerless masses -- the poor, the widows, the marginalized and those underserved by the powerful few -- to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society" (That's for those politicians who don't allow the parents of poor urban children the same opportunities for school choice those same wealthy politicians enjoy for their own children.)

"God's desire is for transformation, changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders and changed hearts in a changed world." (That's for all of us.)

God bless America. God bless the U.S. of A.

Matt Kinnaman's column appears every Thursday in the Transcript.