Obama’s Church Fights Back

The church attended by Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, which came under fire this week when former minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s comments about Sept. 11 and the government’s involvement with AIDS were made public on news channels and YouTube, fought back Sunday on the cable news shows. 

Church officials said the news media reports on Wright are an attack “on the history of the African-American chuch.”

“Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe,” the leaders of Trinity United Church of Christ wrote Sunday in a statement distributed to the media.

The Chicago Church is the largest in the denomination known as United Church of Christ. Obama began attending the church when he was a community organizer in Chicago 20 years ago. He and his wife Michelle were married at the church.

Obama has called Wright’s comments about Sept. 11, in which Wright says America deserved what it got, “inflammatory.”

While Obama has attempted to distance himself from his former Pastor -Wright was kicked off Obama’s African-American Religious Committee- Sen. Hilary Clinton has taken a hands-off approach to the criticism, saying she doesn’t judge anyone based on comments made by somebody else.