The controversial Reverand Wright was uninvited on account of his inflammatory sermons. Pam Spaulding wonders why Rick Warren won’t be:
So apparently Wright can be given the hook when Obama’s doing political risk assessment, but not Rick Warren. You can draw your own conclusions as to why it’s now possible, even in light of the incredible mother lode of evidence of the extreme anti-gay views of Rick Warren, that Barack Obama doesn’t feel politically inconvenienced enough to dump the Saddleback bigot.
Two reasons jump out at me. One, that team Obama expects Warren to behave during the inauguration. The idea is for a voice of the religious right to champion causes he shares with the incoming administration. Obama is consensus building. Which leads us into the second reason. Obama isn’t a liberal, no matter how fiercely he was championed by liberals (myself included) and vilified by conservatives. He is a centrist (albeit an unusually pragmatic one with definite liberal leanings). As such he has a much wider and more optimistic view of “his base”. Barack Obama wants to bring evangelicals to the table. By bringing one of their own to the stage and emphasizing where they are natural allies, perhaps he believes he’ll be able to bridge the many gaps between religious conservatives and the political mainstream.
Since there isn’t likely to be an uninvite with all that at stake, time will tell how well this move plays out. From the painful experience of being a Democratic, Obama is supremely unlikely to mollify the religious conservative leadership no matter how much he reaches out. But perhaps this one symbolic act in January will speak the rank and file faithful louder than their conservative religious leadership’s weekly sermons and daily rants. Perhaps it will be worth the alienating the people who worked so hard to get him into office.
Posted under Politics, Religion
This post was written by Dan on December 20, 2008
I, like so many of my gay friends, gave a lot of money to Obama’s campaign. We worked tirelessly to get him elected. Now Obama decides to invite Rick Warren, who equates gays to rapists and child molesters; and who excludes gays from being members of his church to do the invocation? How many of Warren’s followers do you think gave as much to the campaign as gays did? How many of Warren’s followers worked as hard to get Obama elected as gays did? Warren is to gays what a Grand Wizard of the KKK is to African Americans. Obama has made it perfectly clear with this invitation how he feels about the gay community.
Do you think Obama would have had as much of a landslide if it wasn’t for the gay community? I don’t think so. I hope for his sake that all the evangelicals he is pandering to move over to his camp come reelection time; gays will be voting for a third party candidate from now on. It’s been made perfectly clear that the Democrats don’t want us. Good luck to Obama with his presidency. I don’t support him any longer. I, like so many fell utterly betrayed.
mrclmind,
He was never fully in the right place on Gay rights. Taking the position he has taken on marriage has won him no support from the right and cost him on the left. I don’t think third party candidates will benefit from this, since in 4 years the prospect of President Palin will once again spur liberals to unite and fight under one banner (even if it is a centrist one).
The question becomes, how do we attach a sharp political cost to this move? And how do we systematically lesson the political desirability of pandering to the religious right?
Obama having Warren at the inauguration is akin to John F. Kennedy (whom Obama has openly admired and aspired to) having George Wallace at his inauguration; both men were bigots, both men wrong on the key civil rights issue of the day, both had significant popular followings.
We know what to think of JFK and the message he would have sent to his Black supporters if he had made Wallace a key part of his inauguration. We should think the same of Obama (particularly in light of Obama’s own distasteful anti-gay marriage stance).
Obama apologists refer to the political advantages to having Warren involved in such a symbolic event. I have not seen or heard these apologists refer to the morality or principle involved, short-term political gains aside. Perhaps it takes being a member of the queer community to realize the harm and shame this brings to an administration that has not already begun.
Jeff,
It isn’t exactly the same thing, its a bit worse. Rick Warren isn’t just a bigot, he’s a bigot who is trying to mainstream bigotry and religious extremism. Obama’s move is legitimizing it.
When I refer to the unlikelihood of voters turning against Obama over this I am not apologizing for his choice, I am simply indulging in cynicism and pragmatism. One should always look at the political cost and benefit of an act (and what that tells us about the state of our country).
When I look at Obama apologists I see a very understandable desperation to cling to the victory and the surrounding myth that we’ve finally cleared woods and left the suffering of the past 8 years behind us. To effectively counter, we need to understand that need.
The harm and shame of this action is immediately clear. It is compounded by the actions around this nation restricting gay rights, women’s rights (Warren is just a peach on abortion) and separation of church and state. What isn’t as clear but is supremely important, is how do we make this politically costly?