After I accepted a job at National Review Online, several guys I considered to be good friends gradually became less so. These were liberal guys, and we had argued in the past about politics over beers. But something changed when I started to publish my opinions. Some stopped calling me. One, who had been a groomsman in my wedding, told me I just wasn’t someone he was interested in talking to anymore.

This was painful to me at the time, but I accepted it. There was nothing about the expression of mainstream conservative views in a mainstream conservative publication that I thought merited this kind of shunning, but if my friends felt they could not in good conscience remain friends with an outspoken conservative, there was nothing I could do about it.

At the same time, I resolved never to end a friendship over a political disagreement. Life is too short, and friendship too important, to go turning your back on a friend because the two of you no longer see eye to eye on certain political abstractions or even on questions as profound as whether the country should go to war. As William F. Buckley Jr. was fond of saying, “Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them.”

Perhaps because I write about politics professionally, I find it is important to separate the political from the personal. It’s not just that I have liberal friends. I have friends who are in the business of advocating policies that I am in the business of opposing, and vice versa. In fact, my brother works for a Democratic member of Congress, and while I wrack my brain wondering what went wrong, I don’t hold it against him. He’s the same guy who’s always been there for me, and so what if we disagree about FISA reform?

That said, some political beliefs really are beyond the pale, and my resolution was put to the test a few months ago when a close friend of mine told me that he had read some things that made him doubt the “official theory” behind the Sept. 11th attacks. While I found my friend’s admission troubling, I never seriously considered it grounds for ending our friendship, which dates back almost 12 years.

Instead, I tried to convince him that he had been misled. We argued about it for while, and then we put it behind us. I don’t know if I was able to persuade him, because we haven’t discussed the matter since. If he brings it up again, then I’ll reiterate the many reasons why I find 9/11 conspiracy theories pernicious and disgusting. But I’m not going to go out of my way to pick a fight with him.

Close friendships are a scarce commodity, not to be jettisoned lightly. I’m not sure what offense short of outright betrayal would cause me to turn my back on this friend, but it would have to be something more grievous than his susceptibility to artfully constructed conspiracy theories, as offensive as I may find them to be.

This brings us to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., Barack Obama’s pastor, his spiritual adviser and, if we are to take Obama at his word, his friend. In a sermon he delivered the Sunday after 9/11, Wright claimed that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus “as a means of genocide against people of color,” accused the U.S. of supporting “state terrorism” against the Palestinians, and said of the attacks, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” In a sermon he delivered in 2003, Wright said, “God damn America” for committing a long list of alleged crimes.

Obama has been less than candid about his knowledge of Wright’s political views. He used the occasion of a high-profile speech on race relations this week to concede that over the course of their 20-year relationship, he heard Wright say “controversial” things and express political views that Obama “strongly disagree[d]” with. But he has denied ever hearing the aforementioned statements. Of those, he said:

[T]he remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Later in the speech, Obama offered this to those “for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough”:

Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth — by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Obama wants us to believe that he did not turn his back on Wright, leave Wright’s church or “disown” him because for the past 20 years, Wright has been “like family” to him. But Obama wants us simultaneously to believe that he was not aware that his close friend held such a “profoundly distorted view of this country” — a view that encompassed Wright’s beliefs that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus, introduced crack to the ghettos, invited the 9/11 attacks through acts of wanton violence throughout the world and therefore ought to be damned.

I don’t believe it. Obama’s friendship with Wright is probably genuine, and I do not blame Obama for refusing to abandon his friend over what amounts to a political disagreement. But it’s highly unlikely that Obama did not know about his close friend’s very public and “profoundly distorted” beliefs about America.

What bothers me is that we don’t have any evidence — either an old letter or a statement from the campaign — that Obama ever confronted his friend and tried to change his mind. Such confrontations can grate on friendships, if they happen frequently enough, and especially if they concern trivial matters. But here we have a situation where a friend of Obama’s was spreading poisonous beliefs to a congregation that included Obama’s own daughters. Obama was in a unique position to lead by asking his friend to reconsider some of his hateful and paranoid ideas.

Evidently, he didn’t, and what might have been silent disagreement now looks like passive acceptance. No one should ask Obama to turn his back on his friend. But we have a right to ask those who wish to lead us: If they can’t confront their friends, how will they confront our enemies?

— Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter.