I was a member of the kos walk-out/strike.
Very hard to try and post any anti-Obama concerns which are very legitimate.

The speech was good in many ways but it did open the can of worms in others which we will see in the MSM soon..

Obama never heard that particular sermon that has been circulating on the MSM and internet.

I'm not sure which sermon you are referring to.  Several of them are circulating on the Internet.  And all apparently come from DVDs that the church sells to further propagate Wright's views and make money.  They appear to be a message that Wright wants to get out as far and wide as possible.

Obama can't realistically claim that he was a devoted churchgoer, who was very close to his  congregation and pastor, on the one hand, and that he was completely unaware of outrageous comments his paster made on politically sensitive topics, such as comments made about 9/11 just a few days after the event.  Whether he was there or not is irrelevant, since members of the congregation would have been talking about them to no end, which is why Obama himself has backed away from suggesting that he didn't know.

As for your being a Catholic, sorry, the analogy doesn't hold.  Obama has actively promoted and supported Wright as his mentor and spiritual advisor, placed him on his campaign committee, named his book after Wright's slogan, etc.

Hey, even Mike Huckabee understands --

   HUCKABEE: [Obama] made the point, and I think it's a valid one, that you can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can't. Whether it's me, whether it's Obama...anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements.

   Now, the second story. It's interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Louis Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say "Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that."

   JOE SCARBOROUGH: But, but, you never came close to saying five days after September 11th, that America deserved what it got. Or that the American government invented AIDs...

   HUCKABEE: Not defending his statements.

   JOE SCARBOROUGH: Oh, I know you're not. I know you're not. I'm just wondering though, for a lot of people...Would you not guess that there are a lot of Independent voters in Arkansas that vote for Democrats sometimes, and vote for Republicans sometimes, that are sitting here wondering how Barack Obama's spiritual mentor would call the United States the USKKK?

   HUCKABEE: I mean, those were outrageous statements, and nobody can defend the content of them.

   JOE SCARBOROUGH: But what's the impact on voters in Arkansas? Swing voters.

   HUCKABEE: I don't think we know. If this were October, I think it would have a dramatic impact. But it's not October. It's March. And I don't believe that by the time we get to October, this is gonna be the defining issue of the campaign, and the reason that people vote.

   And one other thing I think we've gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say "That's a terrible statement!"...I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told "you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus..." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

   MIKA: I agree with that. I really do.

   JOE SCARBOROUGH: It's the Atticus Finch line about walking a mile in somebody else's shoes. I remember when Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981. There were some black students in my school that started applauding and said they hoped that he died. And you just sat there and of course you were angry at first, and then you walked out and started scratching your head going "boy, there is some deep resentment there."

Disagreeing with the Catholic Church on abortion or other issues - isn't the same as a preacher fomenting HATE with rants against America and Obama's political opponent.

I suggest that you cross post your Kos diary here. Those of us supporting this strike have removed bookmarks and will not contribute page hits/revenue for Kos and his horde of Obamalots. None for me thanks.

puffin' I agree with you.

I got lambasted by a couple of my obama-supporting relatives when I told them a month or so ago that it bothered me that he was following a pastor that belonged to TUCC which seemed to be (before all the videos) a kind of racist church whose pastor idolizes Louis Farrakhan....

They gave me all the same crap about catholic churches, etc...and how a candidates religion (they were saying even if he was muslim!!) shouldn't matter....

But - they also aren't gay, like I am. They also haven't really paid attention to the HATE spewed at gays for the last 8 years.

So - yeah - I'm gonna want a candidate that is from the least offensive, least religious-seeming church I can find...

Hillary being a methodist seems okay to me.

Furthermore, she doesn't have a preacher (at least that we know of) who is her "mentor" and "advisor".

I think the fact that Oprah left the church a while ago and I'm assuming is more 'in tune' with new-age thinking (based on her love of marianne williamson and deepak chopra), I start to wonder if Obama's reasons for staying with his church are either

a.) he agrees with it at some level, or

b.) he uses it for political gains.