Famous parishioner disavows himself from partisan tilt
http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3775
By Suzanne Sataline
On Christmas morning, http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2838 Jr. compared presidential candidate Barack Obama’s impoverished childhood to Jesus Christ’s. “Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people,” he then trumpeted. “Hillary [Clinton can never know that.”
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2886 wasn’t at a convention or a campaign stop. He was standing at the pulpit before the mostly African-American congregation of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, where Sen. Obama has worshiped for more than 20 years.
Wright, who will be ending his 36-year tenure as the church’s senior http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3013 in June, has previously been criticized for comments deriding President George Bush and lauding Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Now Mr. Wright’s and his successor’s repeated enthusiastic promotion of their famous parishioner may be running afoul of federal tax law, which says churches can endanger their tax-exempt status by endorsing or opposing candidates for public office.Sen. Obama’s campaign issued a statement saying that he has repeatedly stressed that personal attacks “have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they’re offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church.” The statement also said he “does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Senator Obama deeply disagrees.” Wright declined to comment.
Trinity’s national parent, the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1922, recently disclosed that it’s being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service for a speech Sen. Obama gave to 10,000 people at a church conference in June in Hartford, Conn., in which he mentioned his candidacy and parts of his platform, namely health-care reform.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120511457633523621.html?mod=special_page_campaign2008_leftbox