Even by the nut case standard of the assorted pack of neo-Nazi unreconstructed Klan members, Aryan Nation haters, and the legion of loose screw religious cranks and loonies, the Reverend Wiley S. Drake's public prayer for the death of President Obama stretched far past the outer limit of credulity. The unrepentant Drake did not back away from the prayer when asked about it by Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio on June 2. He pleaded that he didn't understand why people were upset with his comments.

Drake is not just a garden variety religious crank. In 2006, he reigned as the second vice president of the nearly 20 million strong Southern Baptist Convention. The group is by far the nation's biggest evangelical denomination. He pastors a bonafide church, the First Southern Baptist Church in the middle-class bedroom city of Buena Park, California. Drake has his own popular radio show on the Crusade Radio Network. In April, Southern Baptist Convention spokesperson Richard Land even had kind words for Obama for his family values emphasis.

Convention officials, though, were far less forthright about Wiley's death prayer death for Obama. It issued a perfunctory statement saying that his views were his and his alone. It did not vigorously denounce those views, especially his Obama death prayer.

This writer, however, couldn't let Drake's purported death prayer on Obama lightly pass. So I had a little talk with him mostly to give him another chance to back off his prayer.
Here's an excerpt from the June 19 talk with Drake:

"Did you actually pray for President Obama's death?"
"No, I was merely citing an imprecatory prayer which in scripture is a prayer mandated by God to smite down the enemies....those that do evil."

"So you're saying that you did not actually call for Obama's death?"
"I was asked in an interview about the murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller and I said in an imprecatory prayer that Tiller who was responsible for the murder of thousands of children was given a chance at salvation and that didn't happen so he was condemned in prayer to die. I had no regrets about his death. I was then asked if the imprecatory prayer for the death of evil doers could even extend to the president. I said yes. I was merely citing a prayer."

"Do you stand by that?"
"Unfortunately in the interview I said Obama. I'm not wanting (sic) the president dead. The prayer for his death is not my prayer but comes from God."