AND SOMETIMES, THERE ARE MOMENTS WHEN I LOVE AL SHARPTON.

Al speaks the truth to those who claim to speak for G-d:

"I am tired," he went on, "of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they're preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade...We know you're not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California--when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When [accused Ponzi scammer] Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren't there you had nothing to say.

"But all of a sudden, when Proposition 8 came out, you had so much to say, but since you stepped in the rain, we gonna step in the rain with you."

"There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people's bedrooms and claim that God sent you. It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being [relegated] into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners."

When the man's good, he's good. One of the reasons no one has ever been able to marginalize Al Sharpton is that no matter how frustrated people around the country get, his political power base is regional, and it's located in New York. Harlem will always have his back, and he will always have theirs. It takes some courage not to take that for granted and to challenge people, knowing how many of them will disagree with you.

-- A. Serwer