Lamest. Post title. Ever. Sorry. 

Brian, I think you fail to make a few important distinctions:

Yes, friends may also be "moral and intellectual influences" — along with, well, pretty much everything we encounter in our environment — but they're not sought out and stuck with primarily for that kind of influence. Whereas pastors, teachers, gurus (and Wright has the character of all three) are. Obama's choice of Wright to fill that role in his life, and his ongoing choice to have Wright keep filling that role, is in the first place significant of the type of ideas Obama wanted to be formed in, and in the second place significant of what types of ideas have been filling his head for twenty years.

The first tells us about Obama's predispositions. The second tells us about his influences. (As the old programmer's acronym goes, GIGO: "garbage in, garbage out.") Both are of the utmost importance in judging fitness to be president.

Furthermore, your analogy to being a Dorothy Day fan doesn't stand up to the important distinctions. It's no scandal to say that we admire someone or count him as an influence in some areas or for the bulk of his teachings or life's work, while recognizing that he erred seriously in other, usually less essential (we're not talking on the level of "Mussolini made the trains run on time" here) areas. Indeed, most of our heroes have feet of clay in one respect or another, so this would be the norm, not the exception. We blot out the parts we don't like, or excuse them away — and we can do this because we keep such people at a safe distance.

For this reason I wouldn't come down too hard on Obama for, say, praising Louis Farrakhan for some of the things he has done (I myself think Farrakhan has done and said admirable things) while keeping him at an arm's length otherwise. But the relationship that Obama chose to have with Wright is qualitatively different, of another order entirely, from any "relationship" he (or you or I) might have with a flawed person whose right ideas or laudable achievements he nonetheless approves of. The "safe distance isn't there"; Wright wasn't just another point of light for Obama, but the central spiritual authority and guide.

Last distinction. There's a difference between the cognitive dissonance, or interior moral conflict, or minor social-circle scandal that might arise from a relationship you or I might pursue with, or a distant admiration we express for, someone who said or did unfortunate things in other areas of his life or thought, and the far grander implications for the possible leader of the free world and his like actions.

This "anti-Americanism" business that's evolving in the com box provides a perfect example. Putting our Catholic allegiance first while still remaining essentially patriotic, you or I are free to associate with or admire loud denouncers of America without pinging anybody's sonar. Nobody cares. But I guarantee you that many people care, and are right to care, that the man they're considering putting in the White House has been steadily and voluntarily ingesting a diet of anti-American rhetoric for two decades. Michelle Obama's cryptic remark about being "proud of America for the first time" only throws suspicion about the Wright Effect into sharper relief.

Which brings us back to my original point. It's not about Obama's religion, it's not about his friends or family; it's about his ideas, and his perspective for judgment, and what a) his choice to sit at Wright's feet for 20 years, and b) the effect of having sat at Wright's feet for 20 years, tell us about them.