Brian concludes:

I have plenty of friends and family who hold views I don't particularly care for. So what?

Short answer: your family members are not voluntary associates; you don't choose them. You choose your friends according to (limited categories of) shared interests and/or experiences. Your mechanic and physician are paid to provide services; you choose them based on their professional competence, mostly.

But your pastor is by definition a moral and intellectual influence, one that plays a significant role in forming you into the person you want to be. You choose him (if you're an unaffiliated Protestant like Obama) largely based on his message; in choosing him you indicate that his message is one you approve of and want to be formed by even more.

That's why this "crazy uncle" analogy -- and still less the "doctor's husband" analogy -- doesn't work. It's not about putting up with with Wright's preaching (and all its hateful weirdness) as something tangential to the main point of the relationship: the preaching is the main point of the relationship.

A second reason is less important, but still operative: as a politician (and not a private citizen like you, Brian), all Obama's associations come under greater scrutiny. That's just the way it is. If Hillary Clinton's hairdresser was a neo-Nazi, there'd be a kerfluffle over that too.

So Obama ought rightly to be taken to task, and held there a good long time, over this Wright business. First, simply because of his long habit of consorting with a spewer of anti-Americanism, and second and more importantly, because it can rightly be wondered how much of Obama's political and moral views has been influenced by 20 years of sitting in the guy's pews.