I will admit that it has taken me a while to get here. My first reaction to the announcement that Warren would give the invocation at the Inauguration was a big "ho-hum". No disrespect meant to those here, escpecially in the LGBT community, who were aghast, but as an agnostic-cum-atheist, I have tended to always ignore prayers at government events. Do they annoy me? Yes, but my standard practice has been to ignore them. So, I was much more exercised to learn that Aretha Franklin would sing at the Inauguration than that Rick Warren would speak. After all, I was going to ignore whoever led the prayer.
Then, I noted the alarm with which this was greeted and, looking beyond Warren's PR factory, discovered that he is truly no diffenent on issues of tolerance and equality than Dobson or Robertson or Perkins. He simply puts a kinder face on his intolerance. If the Fallwells and their ilk were the "pigs" of intolerance, I came to understand that Warren is, to use a phrase now all too popular, a pig with lipstick.
I also get what President-elect Obama was trying to do with this invitation -- reach out to the evangelical community, show that he could move beyond partisanship, try to be the President for all the people, not the 53+% who voted for him. And I think it is time for a government of inclusion and post-partisanship. But this has become a ham-handed attempt at accomplishing that mission.
But, to uninvite Warren at this time would be worse than if he had never invited him for the Obama Administration. Their first outreach beyond the coalition which elected them would have gone down in flames. As much as we want it to happen, I believe it to be pie-in-the-sky to expect that that invitation will be withdrawn. That just is not going to happen.
So what should we do? Should we progressives, both gay and straight, walk away from the Administration which has promised so much before they even have a chance? No, but we need to pressure them. Not so much on the symbols, but on concrete results. We need an end to "Don't ask, don't tell". We need passage of hate crimes legislation and anti-discrimination legislation. And, moving beyond that agenda, we need an Administration which is politically strong enough to get our troops out of Irag, move through a stimulus plan, implement universal health care, and begin the prosecution of those responsible for torture and war crimes. And an Administration hobbled by protests from its base at its initiation will not get through this sort of agenda. The Republican sharks will smell the blood in the water.
Yet, we cannot allow this clear insult to our LGBT brethren to go unnoted. As a Jew by ethnicity, if an anti-Semite were invited to speak at the Inauguration, I would be up in arms about it. Apparently, the gay community is the last community (together with atheists and agnostic) about whom it is apparently OK to show intolerance. How do we show our disapproval without hobbling the Administration.
I would like to suggest a silent protest. When Warren is called to the lecturn, all those who desire to show OUR intolerance towards intolerance should turn our backs, silently, on him, until he has finished. Only after his "Amen", should we turn back and face the podium. Estimates are out there that up to 4 million people will be on the Mall that day to attend the Inauguration. If only 25% of them participate in this silent protest, that would be 1 million people showing President Obama, our government, Rick Warren, and the cournty that we will not countenance intolerance. And, ironically enough, we would be doing so in a most Christian of ways -- by "turning the other cheek".