Clinton Pastor Backs Reverend Wright

[Wretched Excess]

Clinton Pastor Backs Reverend Wright

WASHINGTON — One of the Democratic presidential candidates has a pastor who opposed both Iraq wars, supports same-sex marriage, opposes the death penalty, and has been a passionate critic of American foreign policy. The clergyman isn't the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama's spiritual leader who has become a household name and a campaign issue for his fiery rhetoric, but the Reverend Edward Matthews, a little-known Arkansas preacher who is the closest Senator Clinton has to a pastor of her own.

While Mrs. Clinton says she would have quit Rev. Wright's church, Rev. Matthews expressed sympathy for Rev. Wright in a 35-minute phone interview with The New York Sun.

"We preachers get irresponsible," Rev. Matthews, the former pastor of First United Methodist Church in Little Rock, said yesterday with a laugh. His take on Rev. Wright's now-infamous exclamation, "God Damn America," is that many pastors, himself included, say things "that if we had to say it over again we probably wouldn't say it in the same way."

Rev. Matthews served as pastor of the Little Rock church from 1990 to 1998, overlapping with the final two years that the Clintons lived in Arkansas capital before Bill Clinton became president. First United Methodist remains the only church of which Mrs. Clinton is a member, according to a campaign spokesman, despite the fact that she has not lived in Arkansas for 16 years.

Rev. Matthews stayed in touch with Mrs. Clinton during her years as first lady, performing the funeral service for her father, Hugh Rodham, and attending White House prayer breakfasts at Christmas.

More recently he campaigned for Mrs. Clinton late last year during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, and he taped a testimonial for one of her Web site features, "The Hillary I Know."

In the interview with the Sun, Rev. Matthews voiced a sense of solidarity with the embattled Rev. Wright, the recently retired pastor of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Mr. Obama has been a member for more than 20 years. He bemoaned that clips of Rev. Wright's sermons had been taken out of context and said he understood and at one time in his life even shared some of his critical views of America.

Rev. Matthews, 73, cited in particular the period during the Vietnam War, when he spoke out against America's stance on colonialism. "I've come pretty close to saying in some sermons, I guess, what Jeremiah Wright did," Mr. Matthews, referring to a time in the 1960s after he returned from a stint as a missionary in the Congo. He described his preaching style as "about as blasé as they come" compared to Rev. Wright's, but he said that both his sermons during the Vietnam era and Rev. Wright's today shared a critique of American foreign policy and the belief "that America's going to have to get its act together, you know, that if we're going to be a leader, we can't just say, 'America right or wrong.'"

He said that Rev. Wright's sermon was "a totally different animal when you look at its full context," rather than the minute-long clips widely circulated on the Internet and played nearly on a loop on cable news, which focus on his exclamation, "God Damn America" and his racially charged criticism of Mrs. Clinton.

Rev. Matthews is one of several clergymen who are likely to have influenced Mrs. Clinton over her lifetime. The pastor who made the most lasting impression, according to Mrs. Clinton's memoir, was Rev. Donald Jones, the youth minister at the Methodist church Mrs. Clinton attended while growing up in the middle class suburb of Park Ridge, Ill. She writes that Mr. Jones introduced her to the cause of social justice and the civil rights movement. He has also been credited with aiding her transformation from "Goldwater girl" to loyal Democrat.

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hey, Rev, quit helping me.