One of the reasons the civil rights movement has come to a screeching halt is the low quality and gullibility of far too many African-American leaders, politicians and preachers.

I'm not going to do a "Cosby" and blame urban preachers as a class for the loss of the black church's moral authority in recent decades, but, damn, can't one black minister step to the plate and denounce the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, of the Unification Church, as the wack job he clearly is?

There will never be a shortage of black preachers mopping their brows and calling down God's wrath on gay marriage and other "abominations." But I think I would tear my eyes out in shock at the first sign of a jeremiad by a black preacher about the pernicious influence of the Unification Church on congregations in urban America.

My June 22 column that touched briefly on Moon's infamous "Tear Down the Cross" tour was too subtle for its own good. What I should've reported, but didn't, was that Unification Church representatives have been "dialoguing" with black religious leaders in 300 churches nationwide about the efficacy of removing crosses from urban sanctuary walls and replacing them with crowns. The Rev. Moon's symbol of spiritual and temporal authority on Earth just happens to be a crown, but that's just a coincidence, I'm sure.

Judging by the e-mail and phone calls that poured in from Moon sympathizers seeking "clarification" of my views, I'm now compelled to state bluntly what should have been obvious from an honest reading of the last column: Sun Myung Moon is a scoundrel, a fraud, a convicted tax cheat and a gun-running opportunist whose right-wing authoritarian agenda is an affront to democracy and the separation of church and state.

Moon's claim that he is the messiah, "King of Peace" and "Father" is delusional. Why it hasn't become a scandal for theologically conservative preachers who never miss an opportunity to denounce "heresies" from the left should be a source of shame for the Rev. Jerry Falwell on down.

If not for the willful stupidity and corruption of the elected officials who patronize Moon and the religious leaders who give him ecumenical cover in exchange for extra cash in the collection plate, the 84-year-old billionaire would be considered one of the most dangerous demagogues in America.

Instead of being excoriated for a series of scams stretching back 30 years, Moon was recently feted by congressmen and "crowned" in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington as the world's "True Parent."

U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis, of Illinois, handed Moon a crown in an elaborate ceremony he claimed not to understand. From Moon's perspective, receiving the crown in the Senate Office Building was a symbol of America's spiritual subordination to his rule.

In the real world it was just one more capitulation to a wealthy eccentric's dream of raw power.

When I asked Davis about it, he quickly trotted out his credentials as a Baptist as if that meant anything in a world in which preachers are routinely snookered by wannabe messiahs.

Continuing in their quest to fool all of the people all of the time, representatives of the Unification Church have stepped up their defense of Moon's bona fides as a spiritual leader by drawing comparisons between the Korean messiah and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As expected, the years Moon spent in the pokey as a tax cheat are analogized as the moral equivalent of the time King spent in prison as a result of his fight against American apartheid.

I'm not surprised that Archbishop George A. Stallings Jr. of the independent African-American Catholic congregation has bought into Moon's zany logic, but U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and the Rev. Walter Fauntroy? Even Attorney General John Ashcroft sang at a Moon-sponsored event.

Thanks to the superb reporting of John Gorenfeld on salon.com and his indispensable Web page www.gorenfeld.net/blog, Moon's shenanigans are routinely scrutinized. Maybe some of Gorenfeld's discernment will rub off on preachers and politicians.