THE US REPORT

None other than ABC News has an interview up with Chicago priest Michael Pfleger, who has returned to the pulpit and to a properly progressive network with comments about his anti-Clinton tirade during the primaries. Watching the video of Pfleger as he did a Clinton imitation is sort of like watching a stranger on the street come unhinged. If he spoke like this on the subway, you'd want to move down a few seats. Pfleger plays the race card, partly because he ministers to a mostly black congregation. He said he got death threats because of his remarks.

Unrepentant, he told Good Morning America, “The church has to be the one to be the voice of conscience to the world and can't be afraid to be that," he said. "It has to speak to politics and the policies and the politicians and to raise those questions, or we're not faithful to what our mission is.”

This statement is an opportunity for the federal government. Fine by us if you want to do morph into a political organization and lobby from your pulpit, but I’d like you to cough up some taxes, please.

What this man and others like him, in all races and different churches, are preaching is hatred. I am certain Pfleger has his counterparts pitting white against black, latino against black, creed against creed. And what they are also teaching is a past message, one as old as mankind. Hatred probably came to man shortly after he saw his toes wiggle, maybe before.

Here in the US we have made remarkable progress, all of us working together. Otherwise, the presumed Democratic nominee for president would not be a black man, one of the US’s richest most influential females would not be a black woman and we wouldn’t have a black female secretary of state. We Americans on the real street see successful people in every color and creed on a daily basis. We work with them, eat with them and share anecdotes while we’re waiting in line at checkout. In the South we greet one another on the street. I am taken aback not only by a man professing to be a man of God, urging people to despise one another. I am also taken aback at a holy man who seeks to divide rather than to unite and to do so with what appeared to me to be a mentally shaky performance in his pulpit. If my pastor acted in that manner, I’d run.

The US is obsessed with racial relations, primarily on a media and political level. This also benefits advertising because it’s easier to sell people things when they think as a group. The populace is about as peaceful as we could be if you think about it, except for the thugs and at least there’re more of us abiding the law than assaulting it.

What is also strange about those who build a platform based on racial issues is the complete lack of mention about countries where slavery is still an issue today. Mauritania outlawed it starting in 1981. Enforcing their abolition of slavery has not been accomplished. Check out slavery in the Congo or the Sudan. The US did not invent slavery, but we addressed it at a younger age I’m willing to bet than any other major country in modern times. Who alive in the US today owns slaves or expects to always sit at the front of the bus? Americans have doctors, lawyers, teachers and bankers in all colors. Has this somehow escaped those who follow Pfleger?

A man like Pfleger perpetuates a myth. That nothing has changed. He teaches the reverse of the "politics of hope." That’s an insult to our people and to our country. And to common sense as well.

[For related articles see References below. Text by Kay B. Day.]