Good Timing

Somebody knows how to pull off a news dump.

(CNN) — Barack Obama resigned Saturday from his Chicago church — where controversial sermons by his former pastor and other ministers had created repeated political headaches for the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination — his campaign confirmed.

The resignation comes days after the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest, mocked Obama's Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for crying in New Hampshire during the runup to the primary there.

I hope this starts to spell the demise of this messy marriage between religion and politics. So far we've had four pastors and one church renounced and rejected between the top two candidates. Maybe the rhetorical flourish of religion doesn't match with politics, and maybe we should keep rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and maybe the "your pastor is more radical than my pastor" stuff is extremely unhelpful and irrelevant at a time of soaring commodity prices, health care costs, multiple wars of occupation and a planet in peril. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea for Democrats to ape Republicans by wearing their religion on their sleeve. Maybe it's time to keep the two separate. Can we?