Update: Percentage of Americans who believe that God created man pretty much in his present form in one instance within the last 10,000 years: 47 percent. ... Rick Warren is one of these people.Most here have heard the indictment that Barack Obama's inauguration will include a "humiliating" (Maddow) slap at the LGBT community for the incoming administration's political benefit.
Rick Warren, pastor and author (at right), will deliver the invocation at Obama's swearing-in ceremony on the Capitol steps.
Warren possesses a bright mind, and happens to hold benighted and bigoted views on gays perforce making the man an ignoramus popular in rightwing circles.
Warren's delivery of the Obama invocation has brought down a shower of condemnation from the civil rights community summed up by Rachel Maddow and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog [wouldn't bother reading Andrew Sullivan ...—"[It's] shrewd politics, but if anyone is under any illusion that Obama is interested in advancing gay equality, they should probably sober up now... ."—Sullivan is of the couldn't-make-of-his-mind-to-support-Bush-or-Kerry fame in 2004; and Sullivan's a disingenuous showboat anyway].
Include Warren
Before arguing here for Obama's choice of Warren's inclusion in the inauguration, let's add that Aravosis found this gem at TNR by Alan Wolfe in which "Rick Warren outright told a Jewish woman, in front of a large gasping crowd, that she was going to hell because she hasn't converted to Christianity." Hey, Happy Hanukkah.
But such idiocies that Warren professes as consigning world Jewry to eternal damnation [or whatever fate in hell awaits our functionally fellow heathens, that's going to be some party] is a good place to begin.
Over the 2008 campaign, I wrote 10,000s of words on Barack Obama since I first heard about the man's candidacy, in any length anyway, from my Georgia-bred-and-raised Irish mother—[a greater foe of racism and bigotry I have not met than she, and I have been fortunate to meet many incredible people].
It's difficult to apprehend the American mind when, for instance, in knocking on 100s of doors on the south side of Milwaukee this summer and engaging charming people, a nice elderly house-bound woman proceeds to tell me that yeah, she's voting Democratic this year, things need changing, but it's just too damn bad the Mexicans and Blacks have "taken over" what in the past were largely Polish-white neighborhoods. [A joke among some political circles in Wisconsin is that the 27th street viaduct crossing I-94 in Milwaukee is the "longest bridge in the world" because it connects Africa (a very Black area) with Mexico (a mixed but quite Mexican and other Hispanic-populated area on the south side). The joke used to be Africa to Poland.] By the way, check out Gare-Bear's bar just on the Africa side: Cool people.
The 2008 race was historic. I felt more personally involved this year than in any race that I have worked in, in any manner. But I knew all through this Fall that some 41 percent (in a best-case scenario) of the vote would still go to the John McCain-Palin ticket and the self-conscious ignorance and bigotry this ugly reality of our political culture represents in the modern Republican Party.
Casting Jews to hell. The state controlling a woman's body. Disenfranchising LGBT folks by denying them equal protection under the law. Massive lies and mass murder (aka war). Jailing millions. Starving millions. Preventing the dreams and happiness of millions. An industrial policy that seemingly aims at restoring feudalism.
This is the reality of contemporary American society sustained by ignorance, isolation and depolicalization consonant with broadcast networks dedicating an untold number of hours on the personal lives of hot, blond woman [nothing wrong with hot, blond women mind you] vis a vis discussions of the continuing wars America is waging over the world to catastrophic results.
If one were to exclude from the inauguration and other official functions the imbecilic Americans who fervently believe that those unperfected Christians, aka Jews, are headed for damnation, then many mainline Christians would find themselves thinking, well, who knows what they think. But 10s of millions of Americans (many of them wonderful human beings not withstanding their array of anti-human sentiments) would be told in a message to get lost: All that Obama unity talk was crap.
But the 43 percent of voting Americans who did vote for McCain, or think that dinosaurs frolicked with early man and that biological evolution is a liberal plot are as American as we are.
So, does Obama who campaigned on unity and a presidency representing all American exclude these American among us who hold idiotic views?
And I don't know about you, but I'm into public policy and not the substance of an inaugural invocation. [My sister Joan, Brucie and my crazy nieces are going to the inauguration, but I doubt seriously that the invocation will stay etched into their minds.]
What is an invocation anyway other a banal, insipid address to an imaginary friend? Warren will intend well and I doubt that he'll use the occasion to cast down spells (prayers, whatever) on gays, Jews, and the rational among us.
Warren's just a guy, a fool to be sure, talking. So, lighten up.
Personally, I do without religion and its artifacts remaining in political ceremony, and the other foolish fare to ill-formulated questions from which the religious-minded among us run without apparently caring what precisely so frightens then.
But hey, people believe what they want to believe and they are our fellow citizens, finally being called by a president to engage in a common effort.
Our president is their president.
So to all of my fellow LGBT civil rights workers and political analysts outraged by the soon-to-be-forgotten address by Rick Warren: Forget about this silly exercise of the invocation, enjoy Obama's address, party down, and then get your asses back to work on public policy
All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
- H.L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny, (1918)
