During Barack Obama's speech, my thoughts returned to my late friends in Saint Paul, N.C., who made the long journey from our common heritage of racial bigotry to support of George McGovern's bid for the presidency and advocacy of equal rights.
Lost in those memories, I forgot for a time that Obama's epochal speech on American racial division was occasioned by Obama's handling of his relationship with his own pastor.
About that precipitating issue, Atlantic editor Andrew Sullivan anticipated Obama when he wrote:
Faith is not like a policy check-list; it's an unending engagement with a community and a set of truths. Any church, moreover, is its membership, all of it. And every Christian community speaks to a larger, eternal community of saints that redeems us even as we falter and even betray the Gospels.
Without attempting the prophetic voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Obama nonetheless told us that community, family and our love for one another often bring us all to accept from one another speech and behavior we do not embrace in ourselves. That behavior may be in a grandmother, someone else, or even a minister.
In the finest tradition of American political rhetoric he went on to enjoin us to transcend our own current differences, to push aside the chorus of appeals to bigotry and to walk a little farther down the long American path to a more perfect union.
I cannot say him nay.
Addendum: Here are the text and video of Barack Obama's Tuesday, March 18, 2008, speech.
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