Excerpts from recent appearances by Jeremiah Wright
Excerpts from recent remarks by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor:
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From his appearance Monday at the National Press Club in Washington:
-- "I stand before you to open up this two-day symposium with the hope that this most recent attack on the black church is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright; it is an attack on the black church. ... The most recent attack on the black church, it is our hope that this just might mean that the reality of the African-American church will no longer be invisible."
-- On Obama's denunciation of some of his past remarks:
"Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever's doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they're pastors. They have a different person to whom they're accountable. As I said, whether he gets elected or not, I'm still going to have to be answerable to God November 5 and January 21. That's what I mean. I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do. I am not running for office. I am hoping to be vice president. ...
"He didn't distance himself. He had to distance himself because he's a politician. From what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American. He said I didn't offer any words of hope. How would he know? He never heard the rest of the sermon. You never heard it. I offered words of hope. I offered reconciliation, I offered restoration in that sermon, but nobody heard the sermon. They just heard this little sound bite of a sermon."
-- On whether he should apologize for shouting in a sermon "God damn America" for its treatment of minorities:
"God doesn't bless everything. God condemns some things. And dem, D-E-M, is where we get the word damn. God damns some practices and there's no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn't make me not like America or unpatriotic."
-- On his previous suggestion that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities:
"Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything."
-- On anyone who says he's unpatriotic:
"I feel that those citizens who say that have never heard my sermons, nor do they know me. They are unfair accusations taken from sound bites and that which is looped over and over on certain channels. I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"
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From a speech during the NAACP's annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner on Sunday in Detroit:
--"I'm not here for political reasons. I am not a politician. I know that fact will surprise many of you because many in the corporate-owned media have made it seem as if I have announced that I'm running to for the Oval Office. I am not running for the Oval Office. I've been running for Jesus a long, long time, and I'm not tired yet."
--"In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We establish arbitrary norm and then determine that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different."
--"I come from a religious tradition where we shout in the sanctuary and march on the picket line. I come from a religious tradition where we give god the glory and the devil the blues. The black religious tradition is different. We do it a different way."
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From an interview that aired Friday on PBS' "Bill Moyers' Journal":
-- On what he meant by his sermon in which he said "God damn America":
"When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government, a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie."
-- On the sermon he gave after Sept. 11 saying "America's chickens are coming home to roost" after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan and "supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans":
"The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly. What is not the failure to communicate is when something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public. That's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or as the learned journalist from The
-- On Obama's denunciation of some of Wright's remarks:
"He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds. I do what I do. He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I'm a pastor."
