President Barack Obama’s former preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, targeted Southern Baptists, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the tea party and Theodore Roosevelt during a three-day revival meeting in West Virginia.
He even attacked founding father Thomas Jefferson as “a pedophile” during his sermons at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Charleston, W.Va.
And picking up on comments that he is a “divisive” figure, Wright insisted it’s the media, not him, that is responsible for divisions in the country.
“CBS, ABC, MSNBC and Fox News spent $4,000 each buying 20 years of my sermons so they could hear what Barack Obama had heard for 20 years,” he said in seven minutes of his sermons spliced together and posted on
Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze.
“Then they took an 8-year-old sermon and a 5-year-old sermon and took two clauses out of context to try to scare white voters away from Barack Obama. I ain’t dividing, they dividing.”
Wright became a controversial figure during the 2008 election as Obama’s pastor. His statements that the 9/11 attacks were “chickens coming home to roost,” and that the saying should not be “God Bless America but God Damn America” led to Obama quitting his church in the run-up to the election.
The 70-year-old preacher showed he had lost none of his talent for controversy during his West Virginia sermons, The Blaze reported. “Let me tell you who’s going to get into heaven, Santorum,” he said referring to Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum.
“Let me tell you who’s going to get into heaven, Mitt Romney. Let me tell you who’s going to get into heaven, tea party,” he preached before saying that Jesus would give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, not cut off food stamps and “shovel all the money to the rich.”
“There are politicians who are making decisions about you, about your lives, about your future, about your family, about your children, and the real tragedy is they live in a different world from your world altogether. There are people in power right now who have opinions about you based on their privilege of skin color,” he said, adding, “Pilate was European, Jesus was not European.
“They are ignorant and arrogant – and these are graduates of Harvard and Yale – setting policies for you based on the stupidity of David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Thomas Jefferson — a pedophile — Theodore Roosevelt and a racist Supreme Court.
“The ignorance and arrogance of white supremacy have the shapers and movers of world policy living in a different world from people of color altogether. And the sooner you realize that, the better off you’re going to be.”
Wright told his audience that the God of the slaveowner or of Wall Street is not the same as the God of the slave or of Main Street, the videotape shows.
“But I’m not talking about black and white,” Wright said. “Some of ya‘ll think I’m talking about white folk. There’s a whole lot of folk who look like you who are worshipping some other God — somebody shout Clarence Thomas. Hallelujah!”
Wright, the pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, claimed conservatives are selective in their choice of Bible passages, quoting Luke 19, where Jesus persuades the rich tax collector Zaccheus to give his ill-gotten gains back to those he had cheated, The Blaze reported.
“You won’t hear this Luke 19 Scripture exegeted in the comfortable pews of the rich folk, the greedy folk or the tea party praisers,” he said.
And he attacked what he called “church folk,” lumping together the Southern Baptists, the Ku Klux Klan and Jerry Falwell among others.
“Jerry Falwell said when the World Trade Center was hit, it was because of gays, lesbians and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“When the levees broke in New Orleans, leading churchmen said it was God’s punishment on a sin-filled city. When the earthquake hit Haiti, right- wing Christian churchfolk said it was because the Africans made a pact with the devil back in the 1780s.
“I wonder what the church folk say now that the earthquake done hit Japan?”
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