Which is what I was trying to say in the GD thread on this. If this makes you so upset that you feel completely betrayed and drama-driven, you were in for 4 rough years no matter who got elected.
warren is only getting attention from this, so people that disagree with him are only helping him out, even if its in a slight way. Stop whining. Geez…not everything Obama does is gonna suit your fancy. Making this a big deal before he even hits the Oval Office is in some ways being as close minded and “if ya ain’t with us you’re against us” as the ones you rail against.
In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think it’s a huge deal that Warren will be giving the invocation. I think it’s likely to backfire on Obama, but no risk, no gain, I supposed.
But this…
As I explained to you in the GD thread, Warren lied in order to deprive gay people of their rights. For you, and others in this thread, to keep trivializing his unctuous behavior–not just his views, but his behavior as well–is simply disgusting. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Again; how would you people making apologies for him react if it was a leader of the KKK instead ? Would you tell the people who were offended to stop making a big deal about it, and how it was great that Obama was reaching out to the opposition ?
I notice that when I and others make that comparison it tends to be ignored.
Speaking for myself, I’m not trying to defend or trivialize Warren. I think he’s a smarmy bigot and a shameless self-promoter. I’ll take ten Jeremiah Wrights and Father Pflagers over this guy any day. My position is not that Warren isn’t sleazy, only that he can’t do any harm to the gay rights cause by giving a silly prayer that no one cares about. What’s going to count is what kind of actual policy Obama supports, what legislation he signs and who he appoints to his administration and to the bench. That’s where GLBT people are going to find a much better friend than they’ve ever had before.
I wasn’t including you in the group I was admonishing, but thanks for the post. I agree that it’s far more important what Obama’s actual policies are. Taken by itself, I wouldn’t worry, and I’m still not really worried. But he’s been steadily doing things that cause me to raise my eyebrows, such as his cave on telecom immunity and his support for Lieberman’s retention of the Homeland Security committee. This is just one more behavior I’ll add to the eyebrow raising list.
Uh, doesn’t anyone get it? Obama will probably reverse the stem cell and abortion polices. Obama is getting the religious right worked up about one of 'their" guys speaking at his inauguration that they won’t have the energy to start challenging Obama on his first few days in office.
Obama does not want his first few days in office to be about gays in the military or nominees who paid their nanny illegally. By diverting attention to the pastor giving the invocation, he’s giving himself some breathing room.
Or, by giving Warren such a prominent platform, he is making it easier for Warren to rally others against any move on stem cell and abortion policies. This could easily backfire on Obama. He’s shown himself to be fairly politically savvy, so maybe that won’t happen, but there’s no reason to assume that the outcome you predict will happen. So, no, I don’t get it. It’s one possible outcome, but it’s by no means a certainty.
I’m not worried. I’m not frothed. Warren can say his little prayer and then he can go back to sucking my strap-on.
I empathize with my worried and frothy queer brethren, but I just can’t get worked up about this myself. I have never expected Obama to be a knight in shining armor for LGBT rights. His statements about Prop 8 were a pleasant surprise. We need a lot more than one shining knight regardless, if we are going to win our fight.
One thing appears certain, this may well be the single most important and significant Presidential Inauguration Invocation ever. I frankly cannot recall another that measures up, in terms of being fraught with significance. In the future, when historians solemnly discuss the most important Inaugural Invocations, I have no doubt that this will have a prominent place in the footnotes.
If there’s anything this thread (and the GD one on the same topic) has confirmed for me, it’s this:
Some people think homosexuality is chosen - that gay people choose to be so to thumb their noses at traditional society or so they can be free of sexual mores and just have “mindblowing anal sex” (to quote an infamous Onion article) all day long, and that they could just as easily “not be gay.”
Others think all of the above is complete and utter nonsense.
Just about every contentious issue, thought, feeling, and argument comes out of this basic divide (marriage, conversion, adoption, whether gay people marrying is a basic human right, etc). As long as it exists, I don’t think the two sides will get anywhere. The best either can hope for is that their side gets bigger at the expense of the other.
I agree that this divide exists, but we protect the rights of religious minorities (including their right to marry), and religion is most definitely a choice. I just think some people are bigoted, and they like being bigoted, and they think that the government should enforce their bigotry on everyone, and so they pick whatever argument is most convenient to justify their bigotry.
Edit: Had a response here, but I thought it could be sort of missing the point of the post I was replying to. I think I still had a valid one there somewhere, though. I’ll have to come back to this when my brain is working better.
I think you’ve hit on the crux of the issue, at least as I see it.
RT intimated earlier that people who agree with Warren aren’t worth trying to reason with, and should just be marginalized. The problem with that is twofold: (1) those who oppose gay marriage are the majority, and therefore marginalizing them is really only marginalizing yourself; and (2) if we can never get past the “You’re a monster!” “No, YOU’RE a monster!” stage, no progress is going to be made. I think that bears repeating. So long as people dehumanize one another, they are never going to reconcile. That’s what’s so wonderful (and in my opinion, so Christian) about Obama — he is willing to “go first”. In doing so, and in declaring his own steadfast support for the rights of gay Americans, he has started the machinery of reconciliation. All that’s left for us to decide is whether we will toss monkey wrenches into the gears or get on and ride.
I’m among those gay folk who have come to some sort of peace with this decision, but I have to say that the comparison you object to at least approaches accuracy. If Rick Warren went on the political talk shows and said the kind of things he says about gays and gay marriage, except he said them about African-Americans or Jews, there would be a huge uproar, much larger than what we’re currently seeing. Because he says it about gays and lesbians, most people aren’t reading it that way. Which says a lot about how far we have to go on this issue, despite the huge amount of progress that’s been made in the last 30 years.
Forgive some of us, though, for looking back over the last sixteen years of GOP ascendance (in Congress and then the presidency) and recognizing that it IS a gamble to try to reason with the Republican Party at the highest level. The average GOPer on the street may be as reasonable as any average person, but the upper echelons have proven their venality and addiction to exploiting fear and hate.
