Let me begin by saying I'm EXTREMELY dissappointed by Obama's decision to have Rick Warren do the invocation at the inauguration. While I don't think this will have any longterm significane in the fight for marriage equality, it does have short term symbolic value, and a decision Obama should've known better to make. We all know why he did it, he's trying to present an image as a "unifier in chief", as a post-partisan democrat. Although I despise this whole "govern from the center" notion we've been hearing since the democrats took power back, I also believe using the republican party as "allies" to get progressive policies passed is the best way to completely discredit their bankrupt philosophy once and for all. There is common ground to be found in politics and policy, and there are the right people in the opposition party where that common ground can be found.
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HOWEVER, when the stretched out hand reaches out to someone whose intention is the antithesis of unity, whose belief system is so quick to seperate one group of people from another, then the post-partisan schtick has gone too far and completely defeats its purpose. Obama has always said that his desire to bring people together is guided by his belief that people have more in common than what seperates them, that the differences are not so huge that they exasperate the ability to come together on other issues. Well, using Obama's own reasoning , Rick Warren doesn't pass that test. You see, the differences ARE so huge that no purpose is being served when Obama reaches out. You cannot sit across a table and work with someone when they don't think all people have the same rights, when they think YOU don't have the same rights they have for themselves. It's why Obama cannot say with a straight face that he's reaching out to Klan members or radical Muslims sheiks, with the latter being not all that different than Rick Warren.
Now with all that said, I've also been reading some disappointing comments from many on the progressive blogosphere questioning Obama's committment to gay rights and many mentioning that Hillary Clinton was better on this issue, something I completely disagree with. I've also read multiple posts claiming he's tepidly supported gay rights as an issue, that he has never stuck his head out on the line for support of gay rights and that Rick Warren doing the invocation is a clear signal that he's not serious on issues like DOMA and Dont Ask, Don't Tell and their eventual repeal. I could not disagree more strongly with these notions. Obama's stances on DOMA were strong with no parsing of words, he put his belief on the complete rejection of DOMA and its repeal as one of his main initiatives.
Of course, we're still in an environment where a full fledged endorsement for gay marriage may not be realistic from a presidential candidate. But Obama has been more pro gay rights than any other democratic president or even democratic nominee in our history. I remember in January of this year when Obama said the following in a speech:
"The African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man…. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community. We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them."
Those words were poignant because where Obama said them, and when he said them. To say a politically risky critique of the black community and by extension the black church, was a bold and risky step. But doing it Ebenezer Baptist and to boldly put the gay rights struggle under MLKs "beloved community" tent was risky to the point of being bad politics. What made it riskier was he said this in January, when he didn't have 90% of the black vote, when there were many in black community who were more comfortable with the Clintons, and with the South Carolina primary looming as the next big contest. I have a black friend who's my age (28) and HE was offended, so you can imagine what the older black generation was thinking. To say he didn't stick out his head by talking to African Americans on their homophobic tendencies, and then to basically challenge black pastors by saying that MLK would not approve, was huge. Trust me, I saw Bill and Hillary Clinton act around the black community when it came to this issue, let me just say they knew who their audience was. Anyway, to sum up, when you add Obama appointing an openly gay person to his cabinet, and his open endorsement of the LGBT community at the Democratic convention, it's hard to say that having Warren do an invocation no one will remember a year from now show's Obama's true colors on gay rights as a civil rigths issue. To take take Warren giving the invocation and extrapolating the most extreme definition of what it could say about Obama, when there's clear evidence to the contraty, is ironically something we see from the religous right.