Changing people or changing government?

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It depends on the nature of the political system. Certain political systems prevent individual action/trends from being very powerful, others give individuals a lot of power to their goals. If a political system does the latter then changing people is more important, if the former, then the government is more important. There are feedback mechanisms between the 2 parties though, but enough distinction to see their separation.

I never said "no influence" (as it was a significant part of the past in the popular view, it influences the present). What I said was, I don't think most people like and vote for Obama because of those past laws. Let's say you are a Nazi and the government passes a law that says you must like Jews. You probably aren't going to suddenly start liking Jews because the law says so. In this country it is still fairly easy to discriminate against people in areas like jobs, who you associate with, etc. For example, you can be sued for firing someone, but you can't be sued for not hiring someone (and in a job interview, you can learn all sorts of discriminative things about a person). People would not realistically be fired because they are black, rather, they would not be hired in the 1st place (but no one would know that part). Outside the South, the Civil Rights laws were fairly popular, to this day in the South, they still aren't particularly. Obama may have one the nomination because he was black, but I doubt the laws themselves actually had a significant change on most people's views over time considering their effectiveness.

I thought that most countries in medieval europe kept a certain amount of independence from the Church. Most countries were Christian, I wouldn't call them theocracies. Supreme monarchs have a tendency to do whatever they want, but states like the Vatican would never accept any threats to its core beliefs. Look at the way the Popes responded to the various Gnostics.

Only in political matters did they care much about independence from the Church. The Catholic Church more or less tolerated various immoralities, which was a large part of the impetus for the Protestant Reformation. The Church had a great deal of power and influence in this time, but they did not put an end to prostitution, Carnival, or other assorted practices that would typically be considered immoral under Christian ideals. And as I also mentioned, immorality is by no means abolished in Islamic states, even among the religious leaders.

And as to the "core beliefs," the most heated debates tend to be over fairly peripheral issues: salvation by faith or works, heliocentrism or geocentrism, etc.

I'm not saying that the Catholic Church or the Islamic states had no immorality or hypocrisy, in fact they were full of it. I'm saying that that when it came to such issues as the nature of Jesus or similar matters they were extremely firm. Have sex with a prostitute, fine, claim that Jesus was not a physical being, you're screwed.

Sorry, I edited my response a bit to address that issue.

Or if Muhammad was a prophet? Whether the Church held ultimate power?

No problem

Although people with firm cultural values, such as racism may not change to any large extent as the result of legal restrictions the financial release of persecuted minorities due to prosecution of discrimination gives minorities a social lever that permits free mingling of peoples into mixed communities and children acquire more progressive values over time to change basic perceptions.
To claim Obama won (not "one") his nomination through race betrays a rather strange and highly distorted prejudicial misunderstanding of what really happened. For all practical purposes black people lived in a totalitarian state in the south and parts of the north before federal laws were passed against this. This is not true today.

Because you know about American Civil Rights history being in Finland and all? Still, depends on the era you are talking about; sure just after the Civil War blacks lived in a more oppressed state. However, during the mid twentieth century, this was hardly the case. During this time before civil rights laws, blacks could pretty much succeeded based on their ability, and many went to top colleges and become top in their fields(again before affirmative action). Under the "separate but equal doctrine" (while not being quite equal in terms of quality), blacks were not legally discriminated against by the federal government. The same is mostly true for certain levels of employment because it simply isn't economical to be racists (and firms are far more likely to care about profits, not race). In the U.S., people have the advantage of voting with their feet, so if blacks were so heavily oppressed in the modern era before civil rights as you claim, it wouldn't have been too difficult to move up north. To say that in 1950 for example, blacks essentially lived in a totalitarian state either is intended as a gross exaggeration or indicates a lack of knowledge of that era in U.S. history.

As an American born and grown up in New York I am well aware of the totalitarian quality of US culture in regard to black people. Before the anti-discrimination laws were passed and enforced it required government troops to permit a small group of black kids to get into a white school. I worked in Tennessee in the 1960´s and had a cross burnt on my lawn by the KKK because I participated in a civil rights protest. Four young men at the time were brutally murdered in Mississippi for trying to get black voting rights respected. A young kid was beaten and murdered and thrown in the river because some one suspected his speech defect was whistling at a white woman. Dogs were set at black marchers by the local police for peacefully protesting the lack of decent rights. Black people traveling in the south and many other areas of the USA were not permitted to stay in hotels or eat in restaurants or find latrine facilities. Please do not give me any of your reactionary crap about how well black people were treated and how economics was the reason. You could only have to see the vicious distorted spitting faces of the whites on the sidelines to understand how little economics was involved. It's bad enough you are too stupid to face current facts but your Orwellian violence in distorting history is nauseating.

There are stories of those sorts of things occurring in the deep south, yes. My point was, with that level of racism, government laws did not change those people's views. You have examples of racism and violence, while there are other examples of increasing prosperity for blacks in that era which cannot be ignored (plus, your examples are pretty much exclusively occurred in the South, whereas the increasing prosperity and acceptance occurred across the U.S. on a much larger scale than just a few states). If you wanted to murder a black person, and the government says "You shouldn't kill a black person", are you really going to say, "Oh, ok, I guess I won't believe I should kill black people know since the government said so"? Irrational and uneconomic activity was practiced by some of those foolish individuals, but government laws have no effect on them, and the market did assist in correcting them for their stupidity (also the government, as many murders were prosecuted; although there are still a few examples where the person managed to get away with it). Still, you haven't explained how the new government laws really changed anything. The behaviors you described are mostly personal, something the government has no power over (they can't tell you what to think, although overtime, laws can influence your behavior). Do you honestly believe that these lynching rednecks are A. not racist today and B. like blacks now because the government passed some laws?

First of all, there are less rednecks who feel they can get away with murder with the support of the local populace. Secondly the accession of blacks into political power has changed law enforcement to a great degree so it doesn't matter what rednecks think, it's what they do that is important and a stiff prison sentence for murder and rape helps things considerably. The federal government is now involved in racial prejudice affairs and that is vital. Cultural attitudes shift slowly but they do shift. Obama's candidacy was not only not possible before the civil rights laws were passed, it was totally inconceivable. The poll tax is gone and the Republicans are having a very difficult time re-installing it under the false issue of voting fraud (which has no cases to substantiate it) and photo ID requirements. Lyndon Johnson got the civil rights laws passed with great reluctance because of his full understanding that it would destroy southern support for the Democratic Party and sure enough the reactionary black hating southern Democrats moved en masse to the Republican Party and were most useful in getting Nixon elected in his "southern strategy"

Were they also the ones who dished dirt on Nixon's opponents?

Nixon had a long record of dirty politics. His contest with Helen Gahagan Douglas was exceedingly dirty and no doubt Nixon was one of Carl Rove's idols.