Apparently, the decision to invite Rick Warren to give the opening prayer at Barack Obama’s Inauguration has evoked no small degree of controversy:
Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to deliver the invocation at his inauguration is a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November, but it is drawing fierce challenges from a gay rights movement that – in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California – is looking for a fight.
Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.
“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”
Yes, and ?
In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton selected Billy Graham to deliver the opening prayer at his Inauguration. In 2001, it was Franklin Graham.
Does anyone think their views on gay marriage are any different from Warren’s ?
Of course that hasn’t stopped the hyperventilating.
Witness, Andrew Sullivan:
Warren is a man who believes my marriage removes his freedom of speech and cannot say that authorizing torture is a moral failing. Shrewd politics, but if anyone is under any illusion that Obama is interested in advancing gay equality, they should probably sober up now. He won’t be as bad as the Clintons (who, among leading Democrats, could?), but pandering to Christianists at his inauguration is a depressing omen.
To which Ann Althouse responds:
Who needs omens when Obama was always clear that he opposed same-sex marriage? He said so every time he was asked. It’s funny that Sullivan is telling other people to “sober up,” when he was the one who was most unsober about Obama during the campaign season.
Not to mention the fact that it’s hard to see what the selection of the guy who will deliver a single prayer at the Inauguration has to do with the issue of same-sex marriage to begin with.
December 18th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Not to defend Sullivan, but I just finished listening to an Althouse Bloggingheads with Jack Balkin, much of which consisted of her repeatedly saying in essence: “I, not being gay, am perfectly entitled to tell gays what they should and should think and feel about anti-gay bigotry specifically and LGBT issues generally.”
She has no credibility on this or any other gay-related issue. Zero.
December 18th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Well, I generally consider Althouse a bit of an airhead myself, but she is right when she points out that Obama made his position on the marriage issue known a long time ago. Those claiming betrayal now really have nothing to complain about