Rick Warren, Obama Invocation Choice, Causing First Real Rift With Progressives

Rick Warren, Obama Invocation Choice, Causing First Real Rift With Progressives

Sam Stein

On Wednesday, the transition team announced that Rick Warren, pastor of the powerful Saddleback Church, would give the invocation on January 20th. The selection may not have been incredibly surprising. Obama and Warren are reportedly close -- Obama praised the Megachurch leader in his second book "The Audacity of Hope." Warren, meanwhile, hosted a values forum between Obama and McCain during the general election. Nevertheless, the announcement is being greeted with deep skepticism in progressive religious and political circles.

"My blood pressure is really high right now," said Rev. Chuck Currie, minister at Parkrose Community United Church of Christ in Portland, Oregon. "Rick Warren does some really good stuff and there are some areas that I have admired his ability to build bridges between evangelicals and mainline religious and political figures... but he is also very established in the religious right and his position on social issues like gay rights, stem cell research and women's rights are all out of the mainstream and are very much opposed to the progressive agenda that Obama ran on. I think that he is very much the wrong person to put on the stage with the president that day."

Warren does have a rather peculiar relationship with the incoming president. The two share a general ethos that political differences should not serve as impediments to progress. On topics like AIDS and poverty relief, they see eye-to-eye. But Warren's domestic and social agendas are at odds with Obama's. And for the gay and lesbian community in particular, the choice is a bitter pill to swallow.

"Pastor Warren, while enjoying a reputation as a moderate based on his affable personality and his church's engagement on issues like AIDS in Africa, has said that the real difference between James Dobson and himself is one of tone rather than substance," read a statement from People For the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert. "He has repeated the Religious Right's big lie that supporters of equality for gay Americans are out to silence pastors. He has called Christians who advance a social gospel Marxists. He is adamantly opposed to women having a legal right to choose an abortion."

"Picking Rick Warren to give THE invocation," wrote John Aravosis on AmericaBlog, "is abominable."

"Let me get right to the point," Joe Solomnese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, wrote in a harsh letter to the president-elect, "Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/17/rick-warren-obama-invocat_n_151877.html

Has that ever been done?

and they would marry gay couples were it not for Indiana not issuing marriage license to same sex couples.

Now I understand. I was a fool.