Say a prayer
By Jennifer J. Foster
Published: December 28, 2008
Let’s deal quickly with the furor surrounding the Rev. Rick Warren.
In case you missed it, Obama asked Warren to deliver the invocation at the inaugural ceremony. Warren accepted.
What followed was nothing short of an uprising of outrage that would have made the protestors of the 1960s proud.
Left-wing Americans—especially gay, lesbian, bisexual and transexual Americans—reacted to the announcement with unrestrained fury.
Their anger revolves around Warren’s activism and leadership in passing California’s Proposition 8.
Traditional marriage advocates sought Prop 8 to answer the California Supreme Court, which overturned the state’s gay marriage ban back in May. Warren made no secret about his opposition to gay marriage; in fact, he questioned both Obama and GOP presidential candidate John McCain about their positions on the issue when he hosted them at a newsmaking forum in August.
Gay rights advocates consider Warren’s inclusion in the inauguration as a cutting insult (for one example, watch this AC360 clip wherein Hilary Rosen and Robert Zimmerman did battle with Roland Martin), not only to them but to the politics of inclusion for which they believed Obama stood.
Back to that in a minute.
Obama’s camp responded that Warren’s selection in no way diminishes Obama’s commitment to gay rights issues. Instead, they said, Obama was simply practicing that inclusion he talked about on the campaign trail. Repeating a line we heard often from Obama during the race, he said, “We have to disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.“
It’s important to sidebar here and note that Warren and Obama had a history of working together on other issues before the Saddleback forum. Warren invited Obama to participate in an AIDS forum at Saddleback in 2006 and was absolutely pilloried by the religious right for it.
Come to think of it, the right pilloried Warren for working with Obama pretty much exactly the way the left is pillorying Obama for including Warren in the inauguration.
I wrote about this on my blog last year in a post called, “Stoning Obama.“ It’s lengthy, but if you’re interested and you have time, it’s worth a read.
Back to the politics of inclusion.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that folks who preach inclusion have trouble being inclusive themselves?
Oh, wait; that’s true of both groups.
But there is another irony here.
Religious figures, especially evangelical figures, are roundly criticized when their walk doesn’t match their talk.
And it is right that this is so.
But here we have a case where a religious figure not only stands by his views, but takes action to support them—and he is being criticized anyway.
So, if being a hypocrite about your views is grounds for criticism, but being an honest broker of your views is also grounds for criticism, you have to ask yourself: Is there really a case when those views are tolerated?
Perhaps it’s the Christians who should be undertaking a tolerance campaign.
I respect that Obama is standing by his decision to invite Warren to participate in the inauguration. The left wing of his party may not like it. But no matter how much they hate it, Warren represents part of America—and Obama will be their president, too.
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