The firestorm continues five days after President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration party planners announced that anti-gay Rev Rick Warren, pastor of California's Saddleback Church, had been invited to give the symbolic invocation -- a prayer that opens the inauguration ceremony.
As USA Today's Faith & Reason blog puts it, "Warren looms over religion news and blogs right now like a balloon over the Macy's parade."
Dismay at the choice is also widespread in the LGBT blogosphere.
It was stoked in the national press this weekend with a superb summary of the anti-Warren position in column in this week's Time by John Cloud, who also shifts the argument back around to Obama more forcefully than most have been willing to do.
"Obama has proved himself repeatedly to be a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot," Cloud writes.
Rick Warren may occasionally sound more open-minded than Jerry Falwell, another plump Evangelical who once played a prominent role in U.S. politics. But he's not.
Cloud summarizes the many reasons that Warren shouldn't be considered open-minded on gay issues, but there's been at least one positive development from the controversy.
Pam Spaulding, at Pam's House Blend highlights another excellent explanation of the problem with the Warren invitation, this one from Sylvia Rhue, director of religious affairs at National Black Justice Coalition:
[T]here is a difference in engaging people in dialogue about poverty and AIDS and elevating Rick Warren, a rigorous opponent of LGBT rights to the position of the nation's pastor in the inaugural prayer. He does not represent change but a status quo of discrimination. He is symbolic of a tone setting circumstance that does not bring us together in spiritual terms.
Barney Frank also explained the issue well Sunday on CNN's Late Edition:
Mr. Warren compared same-sex couples to incest. I found that deeply offensive and unfair. If he was inviting the Rev. Warren to participate in a forum and to make a speech, that would be a good thing. But being singled out to give the prayer at the inauguration is a high honor. It has traditionally given as a mark of great respect. And, yes, I think it was wrong to single him out for this mark of respect.
Despite dozens of reasonable explanations like that, several recent articles and posts have tried to dial back the heat about Warren's selection. One might conclude that there's an behind-the-scenes effort underway to change the focus of the discussion.
But whether it's an actual campaign or just the natural result of media dialectics,an Associated Press analysis that ran on the news service's wire today, expresses the underlying themes or those arguments well.
The article was written by AP religion writer Rachel Zoll along with Lisa Leff, the AP writer whose beat included the Proposition 8 campaign this fall.
Zoll argues that Warren's views weren't all that important to the campaign to pass the anti-gay measure.
She writes:
When other conservative Christians held stadium rallies and raised tens of millions of dollars for the ballot effort, there was no sign of Warren. Neither he nor his wife, Kay, donated any of their considerable fortune to the campaign, according to public records and the Warrens' spokesman.
In fact, his endorsement seemed calculated for minimal impact. It was announced late on a Friday, just 10 days before Election Day, on a Web site geared for members of his Saddleback Community Church, not the general public.
But, while the number of 'let's all just get along' approaches to the issue have increased in the past few days, it has been part of the response to the choice from the start.
Writing on the his religious news and commentary site BeliefNet, editor Steve Waldman said on the day Obama's invitation was announced, "The move helps to depoliticize prayer -- which, of course, is very politically shrewd."
It's an approach to the controversy that was has been echoed by a few LGBT bloggers, including Bil Browning of Bilerico, Chris Crain of Citizen Crain here, here, and here (Crain was given a bigger megaphone for his contrarian views in the current issue of Newsweek), and Andrew Sullivan of Daily Dish.
Another echo of the theme comes today from a surprising source -- out lesbian singer and activist Melissa Etheridge, or rather from her wife Tammy Lynn Michaels who writes about an audience that Warren granted to Etheridge last week:
rick warren was humble and kind. honey and i are to go to his church sometime soon. and honey invited him to our house for an afternoon, to be with our family.
Michaels now apparently thinks that the whole decades-long legal fight for marriage rights in California might have been misguided because she figures the right wing pastors who promoted Prop. 8 and Warren were right, while the state's judges were wrong. Michaels now appears to be happy to let Warren and religious activists define the civil contract of marriage because they really really believe what they're saying:
some well-meaning and loving people... who are not at all ANTI-GAY, that's not why they don't want the word marriage used... they are merely RELIGIOUS. and for religious (archaic) reasons, they want to stay safe and respectful to WHAT THEY'VE BEEN TAUGHT.
Vice President-elect Joe Biden also defended Obama's choice of Warren tonight on CNN's Larry King Live, using similar themes.
Barack Obama said you've got to reach out. You've got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.
We can't continue to be a red and blue country. We can't be divided like we have been. And he's made good on his promise.
Unfortunately, however, the message of inclusiveness is lost not only on LGBT bloggers and activists, and other progressives. It's also lost on those who seek to keep us "divided like we have been."
That was nowhere more obvious than in the response of a New York Democrat who has prevented his party from taking control of the state Senate, even after Democrats won a majority in the chamber.
Sen. (and Rev.) Ruben Diaz, Sr. has refused to vote for the party's choice of senate leader unless the party will agree not to vote for marriage equality.
In a public statement, Diaz celebrated the choice of Warren as a kind of affirmation of his own policies of exclusion:
"To some people, if you oppose homosexual marriage and abortion, you are not a Democrat and you are certainly not be invited to deliver an inaugural invocation."
"By rejecting the call to dis-invite Reverend Warren and by welcoming him to deliver the inauguration ceremony’s invocation in Washington, DC, Barack Obama has sent a message of inclusion...that we should be welcome all the time, not only to be used when they want our votes, support and participation in coalitions to benefit others."
In other words, Diaz interprets the "message of inclusion" as one that reinforces and affirms his campaign for exclusion.
But the firestorm over the invitation to Warren has, apparently, prompted him to make one minor public-relations concession. Over the weekend, his church took down and modified an anti-gay section of the the official Saddleback website.
In an oft-re-blogged post, John Arovosis of AmericaBlog noticed Friday that Saddleback declared LGBT people to be unworthy of membership in the church.
The website declared then:
Because membership in a church is an outgrowth of accepting the Lordship and leadership of Jesus in one’s life, someone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted at a member at Saddleback Church. That does not mean they cannot attend church – we hope they do! God’s Word has the power to change our lives.
That's part of what was an extended answer in a FAQ to the question, "What does the Bible say about homosexuality." Arovosis reported today that the question, and the answer has now been removed from the FAQ, along with a few others, including "Christianity v. Catholicism"
New York Sen. Diaz, Sr, on the other hand, has shown no such willingness to moderate his stance, even though he admitted that his own high-profile opposition to marriage equality is hurting his son, Rep. Ruben Diaz, Jr. who hopes to run for a soon-to-be open position as the Bronx borough president. "My position is hurting him," Diaz, Sr. admitted.
But he's not ready to change it, according to Albany Times-Union, even for his son:
"My plan is to oppose gay marriage. I love my son. He has a great future. People are saying that I am ruining his future. But I’m a minister, I'm a preacher. I cannot change my belief. I'm in pain for my son. But I cannot change my beliefs," he said.