Barack Obama has a problematic preacher and I think I can help him. I sent him this letter:

Dear Senator Obama,
We have never met but I thought I might write and share with you some thoughts about how you might respond to the problem you are having now because of the sermons of your pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I would say this if I were you,

My fellow Americans,
Much has been made lately about the statements of my pastor. This is what I believe about him and about what he said.

His statements were not a distraction. They were not a mistake, They were not taken out of context. They were not merely wrongheaded. In my view, and in my soul and in my faith, I consider them to be nearly pure examples of hate speech. They were bigoted and like most bigotry, they were utterly false and terribly hurtful. They were also unpatriotic and utterly false. I have come to believe that my pastor and other members of the church are also anti-Semitic. This is not hard for me to say because it is the truth, but it is not the whole truth.

This is the whole truth. This flawed bigoted man saved my life. He took me from a life of despair to a life of hope, from a cynical indifference to a life of faith. He did this for me. He saved me. And this is why I never left his church. This is why I will always credit him as my mentor and friend. This is why I asked him to marry me to my beloved Michelle. This is why I asked him to baptize my girls. This is why I will always honor him as my teacher. I would rather lose the presidency than spit on my pastor.

However, I did not go to him for his anti-American politics or his blatant racism. I went to him for personal guidance, for hope and for a way to Christ. To understand how that could be true I ask you, all of you who are listening to my words, to think about your own lives and your own mentors and teachers and family and friends. The ones who loved you and believed in you and taught you to believe in yourself may also have been bigots. Many of them may have come from immigrant pasts or slave pasts or pasts where they were beaten or degraded or worse because of the color of their skin or the nature of their religion or their country of origin. Many of them were right about you but wrong about many other things, perhaps most other things. God works with broken instruments. Let me ask you how you dealt with the awareness that the people who had helped you and loved you the most were themselves broken and bigoted because of their experience of suffering discrimination. Did you denounce them for their flaws or did you accept them for their love. It is unfair to end a friendship or break the bonds of family or friendship because the person who loved you could not find the love and spiritual generosity that you developed in your life.