Warren stirs protest at MLK's church

http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/religion_theseeker/2009/01/warren-stirs-pr.html

Originally posted: January 19, 2009

Warren stirs protest at MLK's church

Rev. Rick Warren’s inaugural prayer isn’t the only public appearance causing a stir. Some also took issue with his starring role on Monday at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church to commemorate Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One activist said Warren’s intolerance regarding homosexuality does not honor King’s legacy. Others just think he’s clueless about the struggles that King and African-Americans have fought to overcome.

In an open letter to the California megachurch pastor, Dr. Rodney Powell, a board member of Faith In America, an advocacy group that targets religion-based bigotry against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, warned Warren that, in Powell’s view, his religion-based bigotry toward gay Americans is the same kind of faith-based bigotry toward African Americans that King so adamantly opposed and which ultimately cost him his life.

quot;Your religious beliefs do not give you the right to oppress gay Americans and encode your religious beliefs into customs and codify them into laws that deny equal civil rights and first-class citizenship to other Americans," Powell said in the letter, which he reads aloud on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHmFhTuMpVU

"When you seek to enforce your views of intolerance on others, you are no different from racists, segregationists, sexists, anti-Semites and other bigots throughout America’s history of religion-based bigotry."

quot;Your religious beliefs do not give you the right to oppress gay Americans and encode your religious beliefs into customs and codify them into laws that deny equal civil rights and first-class citizenship to other Americans," Powell said in the letter,