I can listen to neo-Christers criticize gay Episcopal bishop Eugene Robinson all day long...as long as they don't call him "divisive."
Over the past few weeks I've mostly felt pretty positive about the direction the culture seems to be headed in. There was a blip on the screen there for a moment when Obama picked conservative pastor and homophobe Rick Warren to deliver the Inaugural invocation. But Obama seems to have responded to pressure (sort of). Now gay Episcopal bishop Eugene Robinson is also on the Inaugural roster (sort of). He's praying over the Inaugural festivities (the party), but not at the Inauguration itself.
To understand the logic here, look at the comment below by Tony Perkins. For those who don't know him, he's the fresh-faced, milder-sounding alternative to hot-headed Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. Perkins heads the Family Research Council, another anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-feminist organization only slightly veneered by so-called "traditional" Christian values. As we've learned to expect over the last decade or so, those values are only nominally Christian, if by that term we mean something approaching the gospel message. Rather, they mostly reflect the non-inclusive values of 1950s America and the unwillingness by a certain segment of the population to have those values modified or updated. Anyway, this is what Perkins says:
"I find it kind of ironic that some were adamantly opposed to Rick Warren because he was ’divisive.' If you want to talk about somebody that is divisive, look at Gene Robinson. He essentially split one of the oldest Christian denominations in this country."
This is the kind of warped logic for which Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council are famous. Because the simple truth of the matter is that Robinson is not divisive in the least.
This is a profoundly simple point, but one worth making over and over again. Gay and lesbian people who insist on their rights as human beings and as citizens of the United States are not being divisive any more than Martin Luther King, Jr. was being divisive in fighting for Civil Rights for African Americans. The issue of Civil Rights may well have been a divisive one in mid-20th century America, but Civil Rights advocates were not being divisive in their protests, boycotts, or demonstrations. To blame Civil Rights advocates for dividing a nation is a little like blaming slaves for the Civil War. The same logic holds true for Gay Rights.
Perkins would like for us to think that Robinson is a divisive figure, but Robinson isn't trying to divide anyone or anything. Quite the opposite. He wants to be included. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., he wants the society he lives in to become whole.
It is, of course, the oldest trick in the book projecting one's own motives onto another person in order to deflect attention from oneself. Perkins and Warren are deeply divisive figures...simply because they want division rather than inclusion. There are no gay or lesbian members in Warren's church (or not openly so, in any case), and he wants to keep it that way. We can probably assume the same for Perkins. Naturally, they are within their rights on that point, churches not being state or federally funded organizations. What they don't have the right to do, however, is to project their own desire for a divided America onto those who are trying at last to unite it. Last time I checked, that was divisive.
Let me be clear. It is NOT divisive to belong to a church that doesn't allow gay or lesbian members. It IS divisive to try to legislate the entire body politic along those lines, as both Warren and Perkins have tried to do. I'm still not sure why we're having so divisive a figure as Warren deliver the invocation at the Inauguration of America's 44th President, but wonders never cease.