-By Warner Todd Huston
Chicago’s activist Catholic Priest, Father Michael Pfleger, took the occasion of the George Zimmerman trial to race to the streets to stir his flock, preparing them for “civil disobedience,” and leading a rally to decry the not guilty verdict reached in the Florida case. Pfleger also claimed that teen Trayvon Martin is somehow just like civil rights icon Emmett Till.
Pfleger, a long-time left-wing activist in the city, took to the streets of Chicago holding a sign that read “I Am Trayvon Martin,” and announced to the media that on Sunday he was going to urge his flock of mostly African Americans at St. Sabina Church to “civil disobedience.”
Before the verdict was announced on July 13, Pfleger took to his Facebook page and in an all caps post asked God for a conviction of Zimmerman.
OKAY……I’M PUTTING OUT A CALL…..I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF PRAYER. NO MATTER YOUR FAITH PRAY TONIGHT FOR THE CONVICTION OF GEORGE ZIMMERMAN. TRAYVON AND THE TRAYVONS THROUGHOUT THIS COUNTRY NEED JUSTICE!!!!!!!!!! SPREAD THE WORD………..
Pfleger followed up his Facebook post with an interview with Chicago media saying, “I believe George Zimmerman was guilty and I believe he should have been convicted. I’m just very sad, disappointed, and angry about it.”
This rather stark outlook caused Chicago commentator William Kelly to ask what role a Catholic Priest should have in these cases.
“Now that the trial is over, we might expect this to be a time for healing and forgiveness. Isn’t that what Catholic teaching would prescribe?” Kelly asked.
In the same interview with CBS 2’s Suzanne Le Mignot, Pfleger fanned the flames of racial strife recounting how one woman from his church told him that her sons’ lives are now “worthless.”
“She called up crying,” Pfleger told the media, “she said ‘America’s sent a message to my two teenage sons, that their life is worthless.’ I just talked to the Emmett Till family a while ago and this is Emmett Till all over again. This is a horrible, horrible day for America.”
Kelly points out that the Emmett Till case is nothing at all like the Trayvon Martin case. 14-year-old African American Emmett Till was murdered and mutilated in Mississippi in 1955 after he was said to have whistled at a white woman, but Trayvon Martin was physically attacking Hispanic George Zimmerman when he was shot.
Pfleger went on to mischaracterize the Zimmerman trial saying, “To see this 17-year-old boy’s life being told it’s worthless… I’m just saddened.”
Such inflammatory rhetoric is quite common for Michael Pfleger. This is the same Catholic Priest who in 2007 called for the life of a gun shop owner to be “snuffed out,” then in 2008 he stirred criticism by screaming from the pulpit that Hillary Clinton was a white racist for daring to face Barack Obama in the Democrat primaries (even cursing during his performance). Pfleger was so troublesome for the Archdiocese of Chicago that in 2011 he was suspended from his church until he apologized for making threats against Church leaders.
Pfleger has even come out in support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. A Chicago Sun-Times article in 1994 reported that the priest said that Farrakhan, “raised serious questions regarding Jewish power, Jewish influence, that people do not want to ask or answer, in particular Jewish power in the media, and with racism and white people and what’s been done.”
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.