From The Nation, January 12, 2009 issue, opinion by Richard Kim entitled Good God, Bad God. The piece concerns the outpouring lately from the progressive left, especially from the gay and lesbian community over the choice Barack Obama made having Pastor Rick Warren deliver the inaugural invocation.
I blogged about it in Daily Kos, you blogged it up there and elsewhere, but when I read this op-ed in The Nation, I knew it deserved A Second Look.
The op-ed piece begins,
Barack Obama’s choice of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration has provoked outrage from progressives, who have condemned it as a slap at his base and at gay and lesbian supporters in particular. Wasn’t Obama’s election a repudiation of the religious right? Couldn’t he have picked a more progressive figure–like civil rights leader Joseph Lowery, who supports same-sex marriage and is giving the closing benediction? Why won’t Democrats behave like Republicans, who reward their religious base with state spoils both symbolic and monetary?
Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddledback Church
The key point he’s trying to make is this; was the election of Barack Obama actually about ridding ourselves of the religious right and proving that their meddling in government a violation of the separation clause? No. Mr. Kim’s point is that we elected a man who sees the new evangelicals as a helping hand instead of a hindrance. Obama has stated all along that he favors faith-based initiatives, that the programs can do for the poor what government cannot. Obama reached out to evangelicals throughout the campaign.
In this culture war calculus, Obama’s decision to split the difference–Warren at the top, Lowery at the close (benediction)–makes perfect sense. After all, Warren and Obama are not as unlike as progressives would like to believe. They disagree about abortion, but both want to expand faith-based initiatives for social services. Indeed, Warren has earned accolades from many Democrats (including Obama) as a new breed of evangelical interested in poverty reduction and climate change. They cheered as he and his wife, Kay, became major players in the AIDS world even though Warren’s programs, some funded by Bush’s global AIDS plan, advocated abstinence-only education and Christian conversion. Obama and the Democrats may now limit cases of evangelizing on the federal dime and inject science into the mix, but the door to proselytizing and privatization remains wide open.
So why not pick Warren? He has proved to be a champion of many of the same issues that we on the progressive left are also supporting. I think this is a politically good pick. Obama disagrees with Proposition 8 on a constitutional level but at the same time says that he does not support same sex marriages on a religious level. Obama has said as a matter of policy that he wants equal rights for same sex marriages, and so does Rick Warren. What we need now is legislation to give civil unions the rights that they deserve. As Mr. Kim says, let’s press forward with a federal civil union bill that guarantees the same civil rights as marriages.
Follow me on Twitter!
