Rick Warren: "Certain body parts are meant to fit together"

The Problem for Gays with Rick Warren — and Obama
By John Cloud   |   Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008

About three years ago, a reporter at Fortune asked Rick Warren — the successful pastor whom the President-elect has asked to pray at his inauguration — about homosexuality. "I'm no homophobic guy," Warren said. His proof? He had dined with gays; he has a church "full of people who are caring for gays who are dying of AIDS"; he believes that "in the hierarchy of evil... homosexuality is not the worst sin." So gays get to eat — sometimes even with Rick Warren! Then they get to die of AIDS — possibly under the care of Rick Warren's congregants. And when they go to hell, they won't be quite as far down in Satan's pit as other evildoers.

But Warren did have a message of hope for gays: they can magically become heterosexuals. (He didn't explain how, but I suspect he thinks praying really hard would do it, as though most of us who grew up gay and evangelical hadn't tried that every night as teenagers.) Homosexuality, Pastor Warren explained in the virtually content-free language of the dogmatist, is "not the natural way." And then he went right for the ick factor, the way middle-school boys do: "Certain body parts are meant to fit together."

More recently, Warren told beliefnet that he thinks allowing a gay couple to marry is similar to allowing "a brother and sister be together and call that marriage." He then helpfully added that he's also "opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage." The reporter, who may have been a little surprised, asked, "Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?" "Oh, I do," Warren immediately answered. I wish the reporter had asked the next logical follow-up: if gays are like child sexual abusers, shouldn't we incarcerate them?