So, more on this from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28354114/

Rick Warren is in a place he never expected to be: at the center of a culture war.

The pastor chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to give the inaugural invocation backed Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in his home state of California. But he did so belatedly, with none of the enthusiasm he brings to fighting AIDS and illiteracy.

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.

n 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.

For gay rights advocates, that strategy was nothing more than an attempt to mask Warren's prejudice. They were outraged that Obama decided last week to give a place of honor to a pastor they consider a general for the Christian right.

Lost in the uproar was the irony of Warren's plight. Ever since he began his climb to prominence in the 1980s, he has battled complaints from fellow evangelicals that he isn't nearly conservative enough.

"The comments from many of the evangelicals further to the right of him are often critical for his lax stance on their passionate issues," said Scott Thumma, a professor at Connecticut's Hartford Seminary who researches megachurches and writes about the challenges for gay and lesbian Christians.

On paper, Warren might look like any other religious traditionalist. He is the son of a Southern Baptist pastor, graduate of a Southern Baptist seminary, and his megachurch in Orange County is part of the conservative denomination.

More liberal on some issues
But Warren holds a different worldview than his roots suggest.

He has spoken out against the use of torture to combat terrorism. He has joined the fight against global warming and, encouraged by his wife, has put his prestige and money behind helping people with AIDS. The Warrens have done so at a time when a notable number of conservative Christians still consider the virus a punishment from God.

"If you want to save a life, I don't care what your background is and I don't care what your political party is," Warren said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "I think some of these humanitarian issues transcend politics, or ethnic or religious beliefs."

While many religious conservatives openly condemn Islam as inherently evil, Warren reaches out to the American Muslim community. This past Saturday, he gave the keynote address at the convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, based in Los Angeles.

"His social consciousness is somewhat left of center, but his theological, ethical stance is right of center," said the Rev. William Leonard, a critic of the Southern Baptist Convention and dean of Wake Forest Divinity School in North Carolina. "That's the thing that makes him potentially a bridge person."

Warren's outlook has come at a price. Many from the Christian right don't trust him.

A registered independent who does not endorse candidates, he has called old guard evangelical activists too partisan and overly focused on gay marriage and abortion.

BECAUSE OBAMA BENDS OVER FOR GAYS.............

http://www.juancole.com/2008/12/rick-warren-i-love-muslims-i-happen-to.html

This link is about this speach at the Muslim public affairs counsel, and comments from readers.

35TOO, thanks for being a daily reminder of how so many people feel about others in our society. Always nice to wake up to your comments.

BEND OBAMA OVER ,BEFORE HE MAKES THIS COUNTRY BEND OVER TO FORIEGN POWERS.......

Some news on this subject that I thought might add to the conversation.

Rocker and out lesbian Melissa Etheridge is playing nice with one of her fans, the notoriously anti-gay Rev. Rick Warren, whom Barack Obama has chosen to deliver the invocation at his inauguration Jan. 20.

The unlikely pair met because she was slated to perform at an inter-faith event organized by a Muslim advocacy group where he was scheduled to deliver the keynote address, Reuters reported.

Etheridge blogged on The Huffington Post about how she initially believed he was likely a typical hate-monger but she opened her heart and mind once she spoke with him. “This Pastor Rick must surely be one hate spouting, money grabbing, bad hair televangelist like all the others,” Etheridge wrote. “He probably has his own gay little secret bathroom stall somewhere, you know.”

Despite her preconceived notions of Warren, based on public opinion, Etheridge discovered that the pastor is a fan of her music. “This didn't sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher,” Etheridge wrote.

“He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection. He struggled with proposition 8 because he didn't want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman,” Etheridge wrote.

Just last week Etheridge faced off with The View’s conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck over gay marriage, but Etheridge --who’s married to Tammy Lynn Michaels, with whom she's raising a family -- listened to Warren when he told her he regretted a sermon he delivered to his congregation in which he mentioned the anti-gay marriage measure Prop. 8, incest and pedophiles in the same breath.

The sermon later wound up on video on the Web.

Warren invited her to his church and she invited him to visit her home and family, Etheridge blogged.

The lesbian icon went on to suggest that gay marriage supporters reach out and open up to the likes of Warren rather than protesting and marching.

“Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands,” she wrote. “Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.”

Thing is the media refuses to aknowledge that the people have spoken and the election is over. It's just more mud slinging after the fact.

Our votes do count and mean something. It's just that us voters as a whole keep putting the wrong and many times same old people in office. Some of our elected officials have been in office for ..... well too long, I think Methuselah was a young man when some entered office

Last time I was at an Inauguration, it was Carter, I was a Guard and I froze my @ss of, as did most in attendance, and well, I and probably a lot of others didn't care at that time who was giving the invocation, just do it and lets get the show on the road is what is going through most minds at that time. I personally don't know anything about the man, but it is the presidents choice and shindig. not much we can do about it.

I was actually shocked that California, of all places voted against it. Just goes to show you, ya never know about voting, how it's going to go.

Ahh...brilliant observation. By next week this issue will be forgotten.

UNTIL OBAMA BENDS OVER NEXT TIME.......

UNTIL OBAMA BENDS OVER NEXT TIME.......

It seems there are quiet a few articles:

Rick Warren is an insulting choice
Preacher Rick Warren's views are simply too extreme for Obama's supporters.
By Katha Pollitt
December 22, 2008


To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton -- or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it's hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain's case, it doesn't really return the favor.

Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters -- feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community -- by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead.


Most Americans who've heard of Warren know him as the teddy-bearish, Hawaiian-shirted head of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County and the author of "The Purpose Driven Life." Perhaps they also know he's the rare right-wing Christian pastor who sometimes talks about poverty and global warming and HIV. His concern for those issues has given him a reputation as a moderate and has made him the darling of Democratic Party think tanks, ever hoping to break the Republican lock on the white evangelical vote.

But on the signal issues of the religious right he is, as he himself has said, as orthodox as James Dobson.

And as inflammatory. Warren doesn't just oppose gay marriage, he's compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn't just want to ban abortion, he's compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial. (Hmmm ... If a fertilized egg is as precious as a born Jewish human being, does that mean a born Jewish human being is only as valuable as a fertilized egg?)


Speaking of Jews, Warren has publicly stated his belief that they will burn in hell, presumably along with everyone else who hasn't accepted his particular brand of Christianity (i.e., the vast majority of people in the world). And forget about evolution -- the existence of homosexuals, he's argued, disproves Darwin. And while we may not know how old the Earth is, the Saddleback website assures us that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

Warren claims that his views are mainstream, pointing out that in 30 states, the majority of voters have banned gay marriage. Popular doesn't mean right, of course, but regardless of what Americans think about gay marriage, on other so-called social issues, he's way out in far-right field.

Take abortion. Most Americans, whatever their personal feelings, are pro-choice. On election day, anti-choice initiatives went down to defeat in all three states where they were on the ballot. Most Americans do not think the one-third of American women who terminate a pregnancy are running a concentration camp in their wombs, and would have no trouble choosing between saving a Jew from a gas chamber and a fertilized egg from a fire at the clinic.

Or take marriage. At his Saddleback Church, wifely submission is official doctrine: The church website tells women to defer to their husband's "leadership" even when he's wrong on important issues, such as finances. Never mind if she's an accountant and he flunked long division, or if she wants to beef up the kids' college fund and he wants to buy shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The godly answer is supposed to be "yes, dear." Is elevating this male chauvinist how President-elect Obama thanks women, who gave him more than half his votes?

Or take foreign policy. In electing Obama, Americans overwhelmingly rejected President Bush's Wild West approach to foreign policy. Apparently Warren didn't get that memo either. Unlike many evangelical preachers, he issued a statement against torture, but despite his access to Bush, he told Beliefnet.com that he never raised the subject of torture with him. ("I just didn't have the opportunity," he said -- although he apparently found plenty of time to lecture Obama about abortion.)

On "Hannity & Colmes," he agreed that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be killed because "the Bible says God puts government on Earth to punish evildoers." Really? The Bible says the United States should murder the leaders of other sovereign states? How many other heads of state does Warren want to do away with? If Ahmadinejad, who is, after all, a more-or-less democratically elected leader, had shared his inauguration with an imam who had called on national television for the assassination of President Bush, Americans would be calling for the nuking of Tehran.

In a news conference Thursday, Obama defended the choice of Warren: "It is important for the country to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues." That's all very well, but excuse me if I don't feel all warm and fuzzy. Obama won thanks to the strenuous efforts of people who've spent the last eight years appalled by the Bush administration's wars and violations of human rights, its attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God.

I'm all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama's base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far.

Katha Pollitt, a poet, essayist and critic, writes the "Subject to Debate" column in the Nation. She is the author, most recently, of "Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories."

Stop that.

Would you act this way if you had a photo? Or are you just hiding behind "no picture"?