Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Trumpet Magazine
Jeremiah Wright’s ‘Trumpet’ by Stanley Kurtz of the Weekly Standard informs readers that Trinity Church’s church newsletter (created by Wright) entitled ‘Trumpet’ shows that Reverend Wright based the church’s doctrine around his extreme leftist and Anti-American beliefs. Thus questioning how it’s possible that Senator Obama or any attendee could claim ignorance of the radical teachings of the church.
To the question of the moment–What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?–I answer, Obama knew everything, and he’s known it for ages. Far from succumbing to surprise and shock after Jeremiah Wright’s disastrous performance at the National Press Club, Barack Obama must have long been aware of his pastor’s political radicalism. A careful reading of nearly a year’s worth of Trumpet Newsmagazine, Wright’s glossy national “lifestyle magazine for the socially conscious,” makes it next to impossible to conclude otherwise.
Wright founded Trumpet Newsmagazine in 1982 as a “church newspaper”–primarily for his own congregation, one gathers–to “preach a message of social justice to those who might not hear it in worship service.” So Obama’s presence at sermons is not the only measure of his knowledge of Wright’s views. Glance through even a single issue of Trumpet, and Wright’s radical politics are everywhere–in the pictures, the headlines, the highlighted quotations, and above all in the articles themselves. It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years, Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet. In fact, Obama himself graced the cover at least once.
Even some of Wright’s famed “good works,” and his moving “Audacity to Hope” sermon, are placed in a disturbing new light by a reading of Trumpet.
Reverend Wright further muddies the water by stating that he sees no line between religion and politics…
[T]here was no separation Biblically and historically and there is no separation contemporaneously between ‘religion and politics.’ . . . The Word of God has everything to do with racism, sexism, militarism, social justice and the world in which we live daily.
Wright views the United States as a criminal nation. Here is a typical passage: “Do you see God as a God who approves of Americans taking other people’s countries? Taking other people’s women? Raping teenage girls and calling it love (as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings)?” Anyone who does think this way, Wright suggests, should revise his notion of God. Implicitly drawing on Marxist “dependency theory,” Wright blames Africa’s troubles on capitalist exploitation by the West, and also on inadequate American aid: “Some analysts would go so far as to even call what [the United States, the G-8, and multinational corporations] are doing [in Africa] genocide!”
Full Article Jeremiah Wright’s ‘Trumpet’
16 comments May 12th, 2008
