Christian Leftist

Our President-Elect has decided to try to appease the Religious Right (an impossible task for someone who is pro-choice, as most experienced politicians will tell you) by inviting the bigot Rick Warren to speak the invocation at his presidential inauguration ceremony.

So, so Not Cool.

The media really has done a bang-up job on making Rick Warren seem more moderate than he really is, or at least they did until he openly supported Proposition 8, that horrible and unconstitutional referendum in California that made equality marriage illegal.

GBLT groups and gay right advocates and allies are furious about Obama’s conscious decision to hurt GBLT people by selecting a man who has equated them with child abusers, incestuous couples and pedophiles for wanting to marry and have the same rights as the rest of us. He falsely claimed that religious officials would be prosecuted for hate speech if Prop. 8 was defeated, even though no one was seeking to prosecute religious officials for saying that homosexuality is a sin while 20,000 GBLT couples married in California before the ban.

Among the other choice beliefs that Rick Warren will be representing by his presence at the Inauguration — and that, by extension, P-E Barack Obama will be condoning — are, in no particular order:

· Women do not have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. Instead, men in religious robes and in courts and legislatures will choose what health care is ‘moral’ or ‘immoral.’
· The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be assassinated.
· Embryonic stem-cell research, even research done on embryos that would otherwise be destroyed, is evil and wrong and should be banned, no matter how many lives it might save.

To be sure, Mr. Warren has done much for the causes of poverty in Africa, AIDS prevention, and environmental protection within the evangelical community. That is commendable. His good deeds, however, do not erase the harms he has done in the name of God against people who only want to live their lives in peace and comfort.

Obama contends that he is merely returning the favor that Warren paid him when he invited Obama to speak at his Global AIDS Initiative Conference.

But Obama is not inviting Warren to be a guest speaker at his church. He is not extending an invitation for tea at his Chicago home. He is picking someone who fundamentally believes that one in ten people on the planet (and all of the non-evangelical people besides those) have flaws that make them inferior to him, a lower class of species, second-class citizens, and inviting him to be the representative of all people of faith during one of the most profound events in modern history.

There are plenty of pastors who do not believe all of the prejudice crap Rick Warren does who are ready, willing and able to speak instead of him. Obam chose Warren, knowing full well that it would be the second in a series of slaps in the faces of gay people that they’ve had to and are going to face this year from Washington, D.C.

How are we supposed to believe that intersectionality, this promise to address all areas of inequality, if progressives are marginalized? This is not a ’social issue.’ This is a HUMAN RIGHTS issue.

Remember that if interracial marriage had been put to a vote in the sixties when the Supreme Court ruled on the Loving case, California would have banned interracial marriage, too. What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.

Old (Bible) verse, same as the first.