So there's this rhetorical figure called antithesis.  It involves contrasting two starkly opposing ideas, to emphasize the distance between them.  It can come off heavy-handed in a written text, but it's a staple of just about any of your great oral traditions, from Greece to hip hop.  If African American oratory were a toolbox, antithesis would be its hammer--it's the tool you use the most often because it's so damn versatile and powerful.  It can emphasize the chasm between the way things are and the way they ought to be.  That's what it's doing in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 speech at the march on Washington:

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

It can dramatize how starkly two separate realities differ.  That's what it's doing when young Frederick Douglass looks out at the ships on Chesapeake Bay and thinks of them:

You are loose from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and a slave.  You move merrily before the gentle gale; and I sadly before the bloody whip.  You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron!

It can measure the extent to which conventional wisdom misrepresents reality.  That's what it's doing in the Jeremiah Wright, Jr. sermon that seems to have raised the most hackles:

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes three-strike laws and wants them 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.

See, it works because "damn" is the opposite of "bless."  You may or may not like the vehemence of the condemnation, but I don't think there's any doubt that Wright is not "damning America" in a theological sense; he's condemning particular actions and ideologies.  He's saying the criminal justice system plays God with the lives of Americans, and that it does so unequally.  He's calling attention to the inappropriateness of complacent piety about this country when it's screwing its citizens over so badly.  He's expressing some fairly widely shared progressive sentiments, in words that may be jarring but that most certainly have their place in the tradition in which he's grounded.  He's making a connection between Jesus's teachings and the life we actually live, a connection that black churches have emphasized ever since their inception, when they were militant in rejecting the ways in which southern clergy were using the Bible to justify slavery and counsel "submission."  I've heard, explicitly and implicitly, an assumption on the part of commenters that religious services should be apolitical.  Black churches have never been apolitical.  They never had that option; their existence was political in itself.

I don't imagine that the general public does or should know that tradition; I don't really care if it's interested.  But there's a problem with excerpting the words of a sermon from their context and interpreting them as, say, a campaign press release.  Those words have a place, and in that church, to that congregation, they mean something that you can't necessarily read correctly outside of it.  There's also a problem with excerpting one snippet from one sermon from the entire spiritual life of a faith community and making it representative.  Wright's anger is the flip side of his lifelong work for social justice, and Wright is just one pastor among an entire community of people committed to that goal.

So could we come up with just a little outrage about the religious policing that's going on here to go along with our tortured forecasts of what the GOP is going to do with Wright in the fall?