I attend an extremely liberal church... openly welcoming to LGBT people, we are on the same interfaith commission as the local Buddhists, our pastor has a doctorate from Northwest and likes to go all rhetorical-critical on us in her sermons, etc.

But I have never heard politics from the pulpit the way this Wright character seems to use them. Taking explicitly political stances, instead of spiritual ones that may inform our politics, has always seemed to me to be a right-wing abuse of church authority, and something to steer clear from. We pray for world peace and for world leaders to work towards peace in my church, but we never condemn government figures in sermons. God is bigger than politics, and the church's business is not to influence people's vote, but to provide people with a responsible and caring community of faith. That an educated, liberal pastor, and of all things a pastor of the UCC, would use his pulpit as a place to preach about politics, in any way, is disgusting to me. I don't give a damn about race or whatever. But by injecting politics into your sermons, you're just stooping to the same level as the radical right-wing pastors who give sermons on which pro-life candidates to vote for.

This affair may end up going any one of many directions, but it is interesting nonetheless to see how these things are panning out. It's interesting to me that Wright is said to be selling out Obama, when it seems to me in some ways Obama is the one selling out Wright. It seems Wright was suspicious of Obama's motives for joining the church from the get-go... the warning that the church was too radical or too "black" seems to demonstrate this. But now that Obama is trying to distance himself from his church and from radical black liberation theology in general in order to appeal to the white masses, it seems as though Wright has decided enough's enough... he's going to stick to his guns, even if Obama won't.

I don't agree with all of Wright's theology, and I think much of liberation theology has always been far too narrow focused to be a complete vision of God and reality, but I think he at least has the integrity to say, "This far, no farther." I think he has recognized Obama for being the ordinary, cynical, calculating politician that he is, and he's decided he's not going to be Barack's quiet stepping stone on the way to the most powerful station in the world. He is going to say what he believes, and if he must, use his fame and association with Obama to get his real message out.

I respect that more than I respect Obama's motives at this point.

To me, the most interesting thing about this is not whether Obama agrees with Wright or not, but how this whole thing has begun to reveal Obama's campaign strategy in a rather unflattering light. Either Obama didn't know Wright that well, and didn't attend church too often, or he did know Wright well, and was Wright's spiritual pupil as he has said in the past. Either way, Obama is basically screwed: The first option shoots his whole "Christian leadership" thing out of the water and paints his membership with the Chicago church as an alliance of convenience made for political purposes, which completely contradicts his message of hope and change in politics. The second option would make him an intellectual radical and certainly not someone who believes in unity and the other things he's talked about so much.

In other words, this affair has revealed that Obama has been playing both ends towards the middle. First he had to prove how "black" he was to get elected as an outsider in Chicago, and now that he's on the national scene, that extreme "blackness" has become a liability and he has to distance himself from it.

In other words, Obama is a cynical political opportunist like the rest of them. Boo hoo.

At least Sugarman's daughter probably learned how to type the English language correctly in school.

What Ivy League school did you graduate from, again?

Couldn't graduate from one of them so you had to go to two?

MSU isn't even in the top 50 colleges and universities in the nation. But if you want to sit here and congratulate yourself on your own brilliance, feel free. The rest of us will feel equally free to roll our eyes. The fact that you have put Michigan State and the Ivy Leagues into the same category is, to quote, stunningly narcissistic. But I'm not going to sit here and act surprised.

As for me, I hardly feel the need to bring up my educational credentials, and instead will let my own ability to reason and write speak for itself here on Salon.

Is that why it's ranked 71st in the US? Because it's so much better than those silly Ivies?

You're funny sometimes, Thrasher.

Either you went to Michigan State like you said the first time or you went to UM like you said the next times. If you had actually gone to either, you wouldn't have made a silly mistake like listing your chief rival school as your own alma mater.

If I weren't as jaded as I am, I might even expect you to react to having been caught in such a ridiculous lie, but I guess you will just find another inane line of argument, followed by the same inane old "lol,lol,lol"