In a campaign add that features the Reverend Jeremiah Wright thundering his now famous “God Damn America” the North Carolina GOP has focused a central question in this political season; why aren’t we allowed to judge the character of a candidate by examining his or her associations?

The Democrats, with predictable hypocrisy, are attempting to keep Obama’s past relationships and alliances out of the limelight, and for good reason; they would tank his candidacy if they became common knowledge. The North Carolina GOP is correct, Obama is too radical for North Carolina, and he is too radical for America. Unfortunately, Senator McCain has bumbled into their camp. If anything, the North Carolina republican stalwarts should have included a longer clip.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' “No! No No! “God damn America...for killing innocent people. God damn America for threatening citizens as less than humans, God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and supreme.” Barack Obama’s Pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright

“Let me repeat what I’ve said earlier. All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn. They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country.” Barrack Obama

Obama has condemned the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s controversial sermons, sermons the Reverend had been giving for many years while the Obama’s attended services there, sermons that were particularly distasteful after 9-11, so laden with falsehood and moral relativism that they should have been hard to swallow for anyone who reads a newspaper or watches the nightly news.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," – Sept. 16, 2001. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

In our duplicitous politically correct culture, words that would rightly bring down public wrath on a white supremacist are defended when uttered by a black clergyman. In the vexing double standard that truly makes two Americas, we cannot criticize for fear of the inevitable accusation of racism. The tired canards of white prejudice orbit Obama’s campaign. The poorly defined “hope” and “change” he promises mean little unless one buys into the vision of race relations his pastor paints. Selling that hopeless vision to black Americans is what Democrats try very hard to do.

Racial entitlement and exceptionalism is an industry that many high profile black clergy make a living from; the Wrights, Sharptons and Jacksons of America do more to confound improved race relations that ten times their number of knuckle dragging Klansmen. Where there is no racism, they invent it: where there is racism, they exploit it: and where there is black resentment, they nurture it.

The campaign add in North Carolina brings up another question; How could the Reverend call down Gods damnation on the land where his church prospers? After all, this is the same country that has gone through many decades of introspection, self-criticism and painful correction where race is concerned. It is the same country that teaches reverence for Dr. Martin Luther King in every school and where Americans of African descent hold leadership roles in the highest levels of government, the military, academia, medicine, sports and entertainment. This same land provides more aid to Africa than the rest of the world combined. This is the truth of America that Reverend Wright never paused to consider, and was loathe to preach.

"America is still the No. 1 killer in the world...We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers...We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi...We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic...We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means...We started the AIDS virus...We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty..."

Reverend Wright reinvents history with every sermon. Pundits defend him with the classic race bait and switch, saying he has the right to say them and to question them is racist. Whether his words are true or not is ignored in the ever-louder accusations of white prejudice. While no one questions his right to his opinion, however nonsensical, all of us have the right to judge the validity of those words for ourselves without being shouted down. Watch any discussion on TV, the volume raises quickly, particularly when a questioner examines one of Wright’s specific statements. That those words come back to haunt the Obama campaign is right and just. They reflect on who Obama is and on his character.

How should Americans view Rev. Wright? Exactly as we view any racist extremist, white or black or otherwise, with scorn and censure. He has replaced his Christianity with an ideology of racial exclusion and hatred. The central Christian tenets of redemption and grace is replaced by an ideology of black liberation that does not liberate, that does not empower, but divides and fractures, forestalling a society that strives to be colorblind, where peace, and prosperity prevail between the races.

The life of the average American of African descent is no longer one of hopelessness and poverty. Much work remains and we must always guard against repeating the sins of the past, but as a people, we are winning. We have beaten down the greater evils of our forefathers, we have made enormous progress, and we should take pride in that fact. The America of fire hoses and German shepherd’s is gone. Despite the rhetoric, despite the feigned rage, Rev. Wright has been blessed in this land where he claims, “We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. Many of his parishioners are powerful people, with six figure incomes, the Obama family first among them. His church is wealthy, even opulent, with excellent facilities, able to provide education, outreach and charity. The Reverends retirement will be a comfortable one.

The black liberation theology Rev. Wright sold is a fraud. He was a spiritual huckster who misled his congregation, telling them Jesus was a black messiah, a poor black man suppressed by white Romans, that the white man is the root of all the worlds’ evils, that America hates its black citizens. Reverend Wright fanned the flames of acrimony in his congregation for decades; he reinforced what was wrong with America and demeaned its achievements.

Barack Obama wants us to believe he slept through it all; that he never saw the poison his pastor poured into the spiritual life of his fellow church members. Do not believe it. Obama buys it all, and says what he needs to, to hide the truth. In a recent softball PBS interview with Rev. Wright the situational ethics he and Obama subscribe to came out.

“He’s a politician, I’m a pastor,” he said. “We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. But they’re two different worlds.”

You can be sure that when the faithful attending Sunday service at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago heard Jeremiah Wright shout his racism, lies and profanity, Barack and Michelle Obama said amen, and smiled down at their young daughters as they learned the theology of hatred.