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.

There aren’t many examples of the male variant of the human species more repugnant that Joe Francis, the eternal bachelor and frat-dropout wannabe who turned exploiting drunk female co-eds at wet t-shirt contests into an art form, went a step further and convinced them to flash him when they were only half-sloshed, packaged the results, marketed the hell out of them, and made a fortune doing it.

That would be the Girls Gone Wild video franchise to which I am referring. You know, the one that splashes ads all over Comedy Central during the Daily Show and the Colbert Report where the screen flashes an adult content caution disclaimer along with an audio warning, then bombards your eyeballs with images of scantily-clad, glassy-eyed, barely legal, stock pale-skinned women with animated sparkles covering up their genitalia.

Now he’s in jail, and he’s pissed that Access Hollywood reporter Maria Menounos didn’t paint a flattering enough portrait of him in his new pad(ded cell). In a GQ post-Menounos interview interview, Joe Francis calls her some choice sexist slurs, rants a bit more, then compares himself to Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr., and Jesus Christ.

My question is, will more time in the slammer calm his well-concealed inferiority complex, or will it simply lead to Girls Gone Wild: Jailhouse Jailbait Edition?

You’d think after the debacle that was The Open-Source Boob Project, mankind would be physically incapable of spewing more complete and utter idiocy in the direction of the blogosphere this week. But noooo, we have another reminder of how it’s okay to use words like slut, whore and bitch when women don’t behave in a way that men like or dare to have opinions that may spoil men’s fun.

Yes, I am using those words in this post because I have to look at them and hear them all of the time. There are no proper male antonyms for such words in the English language, mind you. Son-of-a-bitch is, after all, more of an insult to someone’s mother than the male someone himself. Joe Francis has been a lost case for some time now; he’s made his livelihood off the skin of young women who are too buzzed at the time to realize that they are signing their reputations away for a few dollars and a ‘free’ tank top.

The price they’ll pay when they discover that DVD videos last forever in the digital age will be immesurable. Society has taught us to think less of women who participate in stripping contests: NOT because they exercised poor judgement in a moment of exhilaration, flattery and peer pressure, but because they were half-dressed or not dressed at all while they were exercising it.

If and when I ever look thin enogh to consider strolling on the beach in a two-piece, will there ever be a time when I can expect to be treated like a human being and not a piece of meat, when I can have a conversation with a man and not wonder if he’s simply talking to me because he likes staring at my chest or wants to get into my pants?

Yeah. I didn’t think so.

Props to Racialicious, where I first saw this.