So far, Barack Obama hasn't done a lot to hack me off. I'm not in the Obamabot camp, and I don't believe for a moment that he's going to become a conservative, but his choices for cabinet posts have been tolerable.
Today's announcement was golden.
President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony will feature big names like minister Rick Warren and legendary singer Aretha Franklin, the Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies announced Wednesday.
Warren, the prominent evangelical and founder of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, will deliver the ceremony's invocation. The minister hosted a presidential forum at his church last summer that challenged both Obama and Arizona Sen. John McCain on a host of faith-related issues. Warren did not endorse either presidential candidate.
His public support for California's Proposition 8 — the measure that successfully passed and called for outlawing gay marriage in the state — sparked the ire of many gay rights proponents, who seized on a comment in an October newsletter to his congregation: "This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about."
The reason Obama is interested in Warren is clear from the next paragraph.
But Warren has long sought to broaden the focus of the evangelical agenda to include issues like the reduction of global poverty, human rights abuses, and the AIDS epidemic.
Obama's economic justice philosophy dovetails nicely with issues like global poverty, human rights abuses and the AIDS epidemic, which probably has a lot to do with why Obama wants to be publicly aligned with the Saddleback Church crowd. Not to mention the sort of religious left crowd Warren represents.
But picking Warren has the moonbats screaming and frothing in such a delightful manner.
I understand that Warren isn't going to be driving policy, that he's only leading a prayer at the inauguration (and why there is a prayer at the presidential inauguration is a whole other post), but I also know that there are, literally, thousands of other religious leaders from multiple religions and Christian denominations, who aren't anti-choice, anti-gay, and anti-science, whose presence at the inauguration wouldn't be a sharp stick in the eye to progressive women and GBTQ men, and all their allies, so it would have been really f*cking nice if any one of them could have been selected for this prominent opportunity instead of Rick bloody Warren.
I wish we had the list of approved ministers!
More harrumphing here and here, including the first official call for Obama's impeachment.
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