Wright defends fiery sermons

WASHINGTON -- An unapologetic Jeremiah Wright said Monday his former parishioner, Barack Obama, had to distance himself from some of Wright's remarks because "he would never get elected" to the White House if he didn't.

The Chicago minister whose fiery sermons forced Obama to tackle the issue of race on the presidential campaign trail got a rock star's welcome from an audience of mostly black religious leaders at the National Press Club in Washington. The crowd repeatedly cheered and applauded Wright and jeered the questions, submitted in writing, by the press.

Wright accused "corporate media" of taking snippets of his sermons out of context to portray him as unpatriotic and hostile to white Americans. "I served six years in the military," he said. "How many years did Cheney serve?" The reference was to Vice President Cheney, who obtained a draft deferment during the Vietnam war.

Obama's former pastor, who recently retired after nearly four decades in the pulpit of the church the Illinois senator attends on Chicago's South Side, said he decided to break weeks of silence about the controversy surrounding his fiery sermons to defend his religious traditions.

"This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," he said. "This is an attack on the black church."

In his prepared remarks, Wright expressed a hope that the controversy he has engendered will have a beneficial outcome. "Maybe now, an honest dialogue about race in this country will begin," he said. Wright said he hopes the nation will come to appreciate a black religious tradition that "in far too many instances still is invisible to the dominant culture."

Wright said his church welcomes people of all races and practices "a theology of liberation" that "frees the captives and it frees the captors."

Even so, he did not take back remarks that Obama has described as offensive, including a post-9/11 sermon that suggested that the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were payback for U.S. "terrorism" against minorities at home and civilians abroad. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," he said, quoting the Bible.