I hate Rick Warren. I started hating him back when I still went to a Southern Baptist church, because my Sunday School teacher based months worth of lessons off his book
The Purpose Driven Life, thus giving me the opportunity to observe that it's so much bound patriarchy and drivel.
And now he's been invited to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration. Well isn't that special. I'm not even going to get into why there's even any sort of religious leader
at all reciting a
prayer at a secular inauguration. I understand that this is a tradition that Obama couldn't just dispense with very easily. But it is NOT traditional to invite someone who holds views that are diametrically opposed to the views of a large number of your own supporters, thus fucking them over while trying to suck up to people who will
never ever support you.
As Steve Benen
points out in The Washington Monthly:
Warren is opposed, on religious grounds, to abortion rights, gay rights, stem-cell research, and euthanasia. In 2004, he described these issues as "nonnegotiable" and "not even debatable."
He also supported California's Proposition 8 for what Benen simply says are "absurd reasons." Melissa McEwan
expands on that:
Those "absurd reasons," by the way, entailed Warren conflating same-sex marriage with polygamy, incest, and rape.
Melissa's rant on this is perfect, so I'm going to quote some more of it here as a stand-in for what I'm able to produce, which is mostly just spluttering indignation.
I understand that Warren isn't going to be driving policy, that he's only leading a prayer at the inauguration (and why there is a prayer at the presidential inauguration is a whole other post), but I also know that there are, literally, thousands of other religious leaders from multiple religions and Christian denominations, who aren't anti-choice, anti-gay, and anti-science, whose presence at the inauguration wouldn't be a sharp stick in the eye to progressive women and GBTQ men, and all their allies, so it would have been really fucking nice if any one of them could have been selected for this prominent opportunity instead of Rick bloody Warren.
WORD. If you say you're on our side, you have to actually, you know,
be on our side. To use a reference Obama's esteemed friend Rick Warren might recognize, if you're going to talk the talk, you should walk the walk. Put very simply: We are tired of getting fucked around. I want my goddamn hope and change right the fuck now. I don't want another president like Clinton who
says he supports us, then goes and
does everything he can to placate religious nutjobs while ignoring us entirely.
angry