[COMMENTARY] In all the controversy over Barack Obama’s minister, Jeremiah Wright, one fact seems to have gotten lost: No matter how crazy Wright’s views are on some subjects — and some of those views really are crazy — he doesn’t hold even a fraction of the political influence and power held by a number of conservative Christian ministers who take equally outrageous positions.

Let’s compare the relative influence over public policy held by Jeremiah Wright to that held by Pat Robertson, James Dobson (not a minister, but still a major religious leader), Lou Sheldon, John Hagee, Rod Parsley, the late Jerry Falwell and a number of other prominent religious right leaders. All of these men have said things that were not just equally crazy but things that were far more hateful and destructive than anything Wright has said. They’ve blamed 9/11 on gays and the American Civil Liberties Union, said that Hurricane Katrina happened because New Orleans was a city of sin, said that only Christians should hold public office and many more things that should be condemned by any rational person. Pat Robertson once said in a fundraising letter:

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

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That’s every bit as crazy as anything Jeremiah Wright has said. One could go on all day long listing quotes from all of these men filled with this kind of sheer insanity and vitriol. Yet every one of these men is a major power broker in the Republican Party. Every one of those men wields enormous political influence over one of the primary constituencies of the GOP, which requires every Republican candidate — including John McCain, who once accurately called such men “agents of intolerance” and condemned their influence in his party — to kiss their rings and, more importantly, cater to their policy preferences in order to maintain their political viability.

Frank Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer, a man who is absolutely revered by the evangelical community. He and his father helped found the religious right movement in this country. But Frank makes this same point in an essay at the Huffington Post earlier this week about his own father:

When Senator Obama’s preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father — Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer — denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father’s footsteps) rail against America’s sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the “murder of the unborn,” has become “Sodom” by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, “under the judgment of God.” They call America evil and warn of imminent destruction. By comparison Obama’s minister’s shouted “controversial” comments were mild.

Some of what Wright says really does max out the ridiculous scale. When he says that America invented AIDS to wipe out people of color around the world, that statement is simply insane. No rational person could take it seriously. And yes, he deserves to be condemned for spreading such absurd and poisonous myths. The last thing we need at any time are leaders, religious or otherwise, convincing credulous followers of the validity of such destructive falsehoods. But let’s also recognize that some of what Wright has said that has caused such controversy contains at least a kernel of truth.

By now you’ve all seen the footage of him saying “God damn America.” But have you listened to the context? He is condemning what the war on drugs has done to African-Americans in this country, and he is absolutely right. The war on drugs, and drug prohibition in general, has been immensely destructive of black families and individuals. It has ripped millions of families apart, doomed millions of young black men to lives as criminals. A sane and rational policy toward drug use and distribution would have spared all of that.

You’ve probably also seen the “chickens coming home to roost” footage as well. Again, look at the point he was trying to make. When he says that it’s hypocritical for our government to suddenly discover the horror of human rights abuses by a brutal thug we’ve been supporting for decades with aid and weaponry and declare its convenient moral outrage at those abuses as a justification for war, he is absolutely right. How does a reasonable man react to his own government using Hussein’s genocide toward the Kurds and Iranians — genocides he carried out with biological and chemical agents and under the political cover that we gave him — as a justification for invading Iraq? He reacts with more than a bit of cynical eye-rolling and skepticism.

For decades, our government has supported one brutal dictator after another, from the Shah of Iran to Rios Montt to Noriega, Baptista, Pinochet, Duarte, Somoza and many more. We have been complicit in the oppression of millions, propping up those dictators atop a mountain of American cash and weapons. Is it anti-American to point that out? I would submit that it is the support of those tyrants that is anti-American. It is hard to imagine anything more contrary to the principles found in the Declaration of Independence. It is not anti-American to condemn our government for paying lip service to those principles; indeed, I would argue that it is anti-American not to do so.

So yes, some of what Wright has said that has caused such controversy has a measure of truth in it and we should not allow demagoguery to obscure that point. And yes, some of what he has said is completely unacceptable and worthy of condemnation in the harshest possible terms. But let us not lose sight of the real difference between Wright and all those conservative ministers I mentioned: Their power and influence over public policy exceeds his by orders of magnitude. And the very Bible that all of those men believe in tells us not to point out the splinter in your neighbor’s eye until you’ve removed the log in your own.