ShareThisRick Warren and the Prop 8 Revolt
I think it's safe to say that no decision by Barack Obama since his vote for FISA legislation much earlier this year has aroused as much authentic anger among progressives as his invitation to evangelical superstar Rick Warren to provide the invocation at his inauguration next month.
Some of the backlash over Warren reflects broad-based concerns that Obama's style of religious outreach has, well, overreached by embracing a religious leader who considers homosexuality a sin, evolution a hoax, legalized abortion a holocaust, and "evildoers" like the elected president of Iran a target for a righteous assassination. Sarah Posner has articulated these concerns in a typically thorough piece at The Nation:
Warren represents the absolute worst of the Democrats' religious outreach, a right-winger masquerading as a do-gooder anointed as the arbiter of what it means to be faithful. Obama's religious outreach was intended, supposedly, to make religious voters more comfortable with him and feel included in the Democratic Party. But that outreach now has come at the expense of other people's comfort and inclusion, at an event meant to mark a turning point away from divisive politics.
Damon Linker, known mainly for his aggressive and informed criticism of the Religious Right, offers publicly what I've privately heard a fair number of Democrats say in defense or dismissal of the Warren choice:
Obama's a politician, and the Warren pick is just the latest sign that he's an exceedingly shrewd one (as Andrew concedes). Warren is beloved by mainstream evangelicals, who have helped him to sell millions of books extolling a fairly anodyne form of American Protestantism. (Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell he is not.) It is in Obama's interest (and the Democrats') to peel as many moderate evangelicals away from the GOP as he can. Giving Warren such a prominent (but purely symbolic) place in the inauguration is a politically cost-free way of furthering this partisan agenda.
As Linker's post indicates, part of the disagreement over this issue reflects deeper disagreements on several points. What is the symbolic value, positive or negative, of Warren's role in the inauguration? What is the source and significance of Warren's cult-like celebrity? Is he, as Posner calls him, a "culture warrior wolf" in "sheep's clothing," or, as Linker suggests, a purveyor of Oprah-style lifestyle advice that can be separated from his deeper theological and political positions? And who is legitimizing whom here? Is Warren blessing Obama's progressive agenda, or is Obama blessing Warren's reactionary views?
All these are legitimate arguments to have, this day or any day, but there's not much question that what makes this dispute red-hot at present is Warren's visible role, as a California-based megapreacher, in support of California's Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage.
It is abundantly clear that LGBT activists view the passage of Prop 8 as representing the dark underside of what is generally being treated by progressives as a Jubilee event on November 4. That it happened in a state that Barack Obama carried by a huge margin is especially troubling, and is understandably being interpreted as a sign that LGBT folk are being excluded from the Obama coalition. No one should be surprised that Obama's decision to give an avid Prop 8 supporter a central role in his inauguration--offering, in fact, the blessings of Almighty God to the new presidency--would feel like salt poured into fresh wounds.
But the backlash to the Warren designation illustrates something else about Prop 8 that hasn't gotten much attention in progressive circles: a real sea-change in LGBT acceptance of half-loaf Democratic commitments to equality. Put aside, if you can, the motives and underlying agenda of the most important Prop 8 proponents, and the lies they told to push the initiative over the line to victory. The actual language of Prop 8--"no" to gay marriage, along with "yes" or at least "maybe" to everything short of that--is highly congruent with the default-drive position of many, and probably a majority, of Democratic pols in the very recent past. The Democratic nominee for president in 2004 took this position. So, too, did the 2008 candidate for president often thought of as most "progressive," John Edwards. And it's within shouting distance of Obama's own position, even though he did make clear his own opposition to the initiative. And it's hard to find a prominent Democratic elected official in culturally conservative parts of the country who hasn't followed the no-to-gay-marriage, yes-to-domestic-partnerships template, though it's not so hard to find some who haven't even gone that far in a progressive direction.
Why is that postion now being deemed so insultingly unacceptable in progressive company? I'd say it's mainly because Prop 8 overturned established marriage rights that upwards of 20,000 couples joyfully took advantage of during the five-month regime of legalized gay marriage in California. Whereas in previous gay marriage struggles Democrats might be grudgingly forgiven for failing to have the political courage to blaze new trails, Prop 8 represents a (literally) reactionary step back, and in a state that is so often described as a cultural and political trend-shaper. Even as Prop 8 has galvanized the argument that gay marriage should be regarded as a fundamental right indicative of basic equality, not as a negotiable sign of "progress" or "tolerance," Prop 8 has almost certainly changed, probably forever, the terms on which LGBT folk will participate in the progressive coalition and the Democratic Party, despite the obvious lack of political alternatives.
I think it's actually a testament to progressive faith in Team Obama's political acumen that it's generally assumed he invited this controversy deliberately by paying Rick Warren the honor of a role in his inauguration. But it's a conflict that will persist after the echoes of Warren's invocation have long died.
That's a trenchant analysis, and I appreciate it. The sea change you describe isn't complete, as it happens. As a gay man, I am still ready (for the time being) to accept civil unions -- without the "marriage" name but with all equivalent rights -- in other states.
California is a special case. As you point out, what just happened in California is that fundamental rights were first granted by a court's interpretation of the state constitution and then snatched away by a simple majority in a referendum. This need never terrify heterosexuals. It will never happen to them. Why should they understand, or give a damn? Naturally, most don't.
But those of us who are both gay and educated have tried to think of a precedent, and personally, I have to go back to the days of Fugitive Slave Laws, when a slave who set foot in Ohio (and became legally free under state law) could either be kidnapped and brought back to his southern master or brought back by federal officers, and instantly be a slave again.
It drives black homophobes crazy when our struggle is compared in any way to the struggle for black civil rights, or when anti-gay laws are compared to Jim Crow laws, but that's just tough. The facts are the facts, and the likenesses scream.
In the aftermath of the victory of Proposition 8, while supporters like Rick Warren were smugly savoring their victory, gay people and heterosexuals of good will organized a stunningly swift and monstrously large reaction almost entirely using the internet. Protests occurred all over the country. They took place in Salt Lake City protesting the LDS's disproportionate funding of a rights grab in a neighboring state. They took place, too, outside Rick Warren's Saddleback Church.
Bad enough that Obama soft-pedaled his supposed opposition to Prop 8. Bad enough that he never protested the use of his own voice in Prop 8 ads. We were willing to forgive that. We had moved on and were living in the present, denouncing the Rick Warrens and ready to try again.
Then what does the President-Elect do? He rewards Rick Warren for his brutal involvement in invalidating legal marriages in California, in snatching a fundamental right from citizens for the first time since Dred Scott, with undoubtedly the most high-profile and symbolically important (and it's meant to be symbolically important) assignment any American religious leader will receive in the entire year of 2009.
Who among OUR constituency (the one that actually helped fund Obama's victory and voted for him) will stand with Obama on the speaker's platform and take up a specific role? The Obama transition think we will be mollified for this deeply hurtful and politically calculating insult by an invitation to a San Francisco gay marching band to participate in the inaugural parade.
That (letting the minority do the entertaining, but have none of the influence) will be recognized by some African-Americans as political minstrelsy. It's nice that we're allowed in the parade (we weren't at the Clinton inaugurations), but life isn't just a cabaret, old chum.
All over the internet, Obama's straight defenders are saying, what's the big deal that Warren is "anti-Gay Marriage"? He isn't. He's anti-gay. He thinks gay people are animals, the moral equivalents of child molesters. He says so specifically. He likens gay relationships to incest.
He is anti civil unions. He is anti domestic partnerships. He is presumably pro sodomy laws. Straight Democrats must stop prettifying him by equating his position to Obama's own. They must stop whitewashing him, Stop minimizing our concerns just because they don't share them.
I've been accused directly of "torpedoing the Obama administration" for denouncing this. If anybody torpedoes the Obama administration, it will be people tugging a change message back into business as usual, which in this instance is bigotry. In fact, it is we who have been torpedoed by a carefully-calculated Sister Souljah moment, and not for the first time.
Obama is not (as his own words maintain) a "fierce advocate" of equality for gay people. He is a half-hearted and occasional one. He has advocated equality (or contends he has; he doesn't support marriage equality) in a perfunctory fashion, and from time to time does something equal and opposite to dramatize just how in the tank for gay equality he absolutely is not.
Anybody who thought the "mistake" of inviting anti-gay "ex-gay" preacher Donnie McClurkin to entertain at an Obama rally in North Carolina wouldn't be repeated -- or that it was a mistake at all -- now knows better.
Like his inaugural plans, it was rather a calculated public insult to reassure homophobes that, despite his occasional statements of support (in principle) for equality, Obama doesn't really care for gay people very much. It shows that Warren's viciousness towards gays and lesbians, unlike racism and anti-Semitism, is no bar to his being given the most symbolically important religious role in the Inauguration. Warren is Obama's closest buddy in the right wing evangelical movement. Who's his closest gay buddy? I don't know either.
Some may find homophobia more respectable than racism and anti-Semitism, but not everybody does. Inviting Rick Warren to give the invocation is no better than inviting a notorious racist or anti-Semite. It's a disgrace. Gay men and women don't have to excuse it or overlook it.
Obama says he owes Warren this high profile honor because Warren entertained him at Saddleback, but if Warren were as openly anti-Semitic or racist as he is openly contemptuous of gay people, I wonder if Obama would have even accepted an invitation from Warren, let alone tendered him one.
Inclusivity ends someplace. We don't include Klansmen or other white supremacists. We wouldn't invite a Jew-hating Farrakhan to deliver an invocation. I think Obama really would be a "fierce opponent" of something like that. Gays and lesbians are the last minority in America to see those who advocate their utter subjection under the law elevated to the highest status in the land.
It isn't "inclusive" to pick Warren, it's exclusionary. The Warrens have always been in the club. This is a signal to gays that they're not at the table, and a signal to right wingers that Obama isn't serious about seating them there.
The day the very idea of asking an anti-Semite or a racist to deliver the invocation is exactly as unacceptable as the idea of letting a rabid homophobe do so, that will be the day gays and lesbians are included. And till that day, this is not an inclusive administration, and its politics still belong to the past.