Jeremiah Wright, former pastor to Barack Obama, strides back on stage
With timing unwelcome to Democratic candidate's campaign, Wright defends his racially charged comments.
WASHINGTON — At a moment when Barack Obama is struggling to win over white voters worried about the economy, a series of public appearances by his former pastor is threatening to revive a tempest over race, patriotism and religion that the Democratic presidential front-runner hoped he had quashed.
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. appeared at the National Press Club on Monday, delivering a defiant address in which he defended and amplified some politically and racially charged remarks from past sermons.
The speech was the third nationally televised appearance Wright has made since Friday, in what Democratic strategists and pollsters described as an unwelcome distraction for an Obama campaign that would prefer to see Wright fade from the scene.
Taking questions Monday, Wright stood by some of the most divisive assertions he had made in church sermons -- statements that Obama has denounced.
He declined to retract a statement from a post-Sept. 11 sermon that "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
"You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you," Wright said after his speech. "Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."
Asked about his earlier suggestion that the government had created AIDS to harm black people, Wright said that "based on the Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything." He was referring to an infamous experiment conducted over decades in which the government studied syphilis by allowing blacks to go untreated for the disease.
Wright spoke admiringly of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, long criticized for making anti-Semitic comments. Wright described Farrakhan as a hugely influential figure -- "one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century."
"Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy," Wright said. "He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery and he didn't make me this color."
Wright had kept a low public profile since portions of his sermons were widely played on television in March, including snippets in which the pastor said "God damn America." Obama, a longtime member of Wright's church in Chicago, partially quelled the controversy with a speech on race in Philadelphia that month. But Republicans are already using Wright's comments in advertisements against Obama.
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