Throwing Stones - Rick Warren And The Inauguration

President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the inaugural invocation is none other than Saddleback Church's Pastor Rick Warren, an evangelical who is pro-life and opposes gay marriage.

As you can imagine, that announcement infuriated homosexual lobby groups throughout the country, who strongly supported the Chosen one during the campaign an dare now wailing about feeling abandoned:

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote to Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination. {...}

“It’s a huge mistake,” said California gay rights activist Rick Jacobs, who chairs {California's} Courage Campaign. “He’s really the wrong person to lead the president into office.

Can you imagine if he had a man of God doing the invocation who had deliberately said that Jews are not going to be saved and therefore should be excluded from what’s going on in America? People would be up in arms,” he said.

(Having heard how evil the Jooos were from Reverend Wright for twenty years, Obama probably has had his fill of that particular message by now...ff)

The editor of the Washington Blade, Kevin Naff, called the choice “Obama’s first big mistake.”

“His presence on the inauguration stand is a slap in the faces of the millions of GLBT voters who so enthusiastically supported him,” Naff wrote, referring to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. “This tone-deafness to our concerns must not be tolerated. We have just endured eight years of endless assaults on our dignity and equality from a president beholden to bigoted conservative Christians. The election was supposed to have ended that era. It appears otherwise.”

Even more interesting to me was the opposition by a number of conservatives, some of whom felt it was hypocritical for a pro-Life Pastor to appear at the inauguration of a pro-abortion politician.

Given that Obama's stance on this issue is essentially infanticide on demand even if the kid manages to survive the attempt, I can certainly see their side of things.

HOWEVER....let's take a breath and calm down, shall we?

Obama made a commendable political decision to appear to reach out to Evangelicals. Notice I said 'appear to' as I doubt the Obama administration will actually do anything or pass any legislation along those lines...but it's nice that he decided to try a little fencemending. This may be a message to the gay lobby that a great many people don't hate you but are not at all happy with your agenda and endless self-victimization. Perhaps a little less stridency and a bit more listening might be beneficial.

And for the Right here's something .The inaugural invocation is a prayer for the well-being of the country and the success of the incoming president. For various reasons, I have very little respect for Obama the man, but a great deal of respect for Obama as president..and seriously, is there any one of you who doesn't hope he surprises all of us and does superbly well as president?

As they say in the military, you salute the uniform, not the man.

Take the inauguration for what it is... our four-year ritual that celebrates that once again in America, we have managed to survive as a democracy. That's all it is, so let Obama ask whomever he wants to his particular party.

The more important stuff will come afterwards.