More Outrageous Talk from a Minister at Barack Obama's Church, and it's Not Reverend Wright

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Not Over

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright may have stepped down as pastor, but the Trinity United Church of Christ may continue to haunt Barack Obama.

Newsmax reports the new Senior Pastor, Otis Moss, has called biblical patriarch Abraham a pimp, said Noah and Moses were thugs and said Jesus had a "soft spot for thugs." Moss has also praised late rapper Tupac Shakur as a prophet despite his profanity-laced lyrics that glorify violence and a criminal record including assault and sexual abuse.

Cybercast News reports another pastor as the church, reverend Reginald Williams, has written in the church bulletin that the Pentagon trains Latin Americans to become terrorists and the major TV networks are run by right wing racists who see blacks as subhuman.

The Obama campaign has not yet responded to our request for a comment.

Unwelcome Mat

More than 200 students and faculty at Furman University are protesting President Bush's planned commencement address next week. The co-signers have put an explanation on the school's Web site.

They say they are ashamed of the actions of the Bush administration and specifically cite the linkage between Iraq and 9/11 – “Sowing fear and using threat levels to sidestop the constitution... suppressing or ignoring evidence that contradicts administration ideology... and encouraging reckless overspending.”

Carmela Epright, a bioethics professor at the university said, "For me, I'm an ethicist. How could I not be upset about Bush's torture policy?"

But many students are upset with the protesters. The senior class voted unanimously in favor of the president's address. One student tells the Greenville News that it is the faculty response that has taken away from the honor.

Explanation Please

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison made headlines in 1998 with her famous comment that Bill Clinton was the first black president. Now she says it had nothing to do with his attitudes toward race.

Morris tells TIME magazine, "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race."

Opinion Piece

Another African-American woman, this one an administrator at the University of Toledo, has been suspended for writing a newspaper op-ed challenging the notion that homosexuals are civil rights victims. Associate Vice President of Human Resources Crystal Dixon was responding to an editorial in the Toledo Free Press.

She wrote, "I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a black woman... Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle evidenced by the growing population of PFOX (Parents and friends of Ex-Gays) and Exodus International, just to name a few."

Even though Dixon said she was not speaking on behalf of the university, the school has suspended her with pay, saying her comments "do not accord with the values of the University of Toledo." The conservative group "concerned women for America" tells Cybercast News this is "classic viewpoint discrimination", and says it almost invites a lawsuit.

— FOX News Channel's Martin Hill contributed to this report.