But people shouldn't let Rick Warren ruin their inauguration celebrations. He's one guy of many and Joseph Lowery, who contrasts with Warren, will give the benediction. Forget about Warren, for now. Continue the fight after the party. There is so much else to celebrate.
WaPo: Not that he was planning to attend, but Barack Obama should know that my sister's inauguration night party -- the one for which she was preparing Obama Punch -- has been canceled. The notice went out over the weekend, by e-mail and word of mouth, that Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation had simply ruined the party. Warren is anti-gay, and my sister, not to put too fine a point on it, is not. She's gay.
She is -- or was -- a committed Obama supporter. On the weekend before the presidential election, my sister and my mother drove from the Boston area, where they both live, to Obama's New Hampshire headquarters in Manchester. There my mother made 76 phone calls for Obama, which is not bad for someone who is 96, and gives you an idea of the level of commitment to Obama in certain precincts of my family.
I should say right off that my mother feels less strongly about Warren than my sister does. But I should add immediately that my sister feels very strongly, indeed. She's been in a relationship with another woman, the quite wonderful Nancy, for 19 years, and she resents the fact that Warren has likened same-sex marriage to incest, pederasty and polygamy.
"I'm opposed to redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage," Warren told Beliefnet.com's Steve Waldman. "I'm opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I'm opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I'm opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage."
Waldman asked, "Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?"
"Oh, I do," said Warren.
Another viewpoint from 538:
That's beside the point, though; what I think the Warren dust-up reveals is that the left is now willing to raise at least as much ruckus about the issue as the right. The left, of course, has always had its own moral compass, but it's now beginning to convert that into more focused, overtly political action. If John Kerry had won four years ago, and invited Warren or some analogous pastor to give his invocation, would there have been this much debate about it? It's hard to say for sure, but I don't think we would have heard very much about it at all. This all feels very recent, stemming from a renewed self-confidence on the part of the left, coupled in this particular instance with the aftermath of Proposition 8.More stories on Warren:
I say this as someone, by the way, who buys into the "Can't we all just get along?" side of the argument. There's a difference between feeling as though you have superior morals and feeling morally superior, and some of the discussion has veered toward the wrong side of that equation. Nevertheless, I think the passion aroused among the left on the issue has been fairly impressive, and is potentially fairly consequential.
Will Warren be worth it?
Why Warren?
Muzzling of Warren
