After thinking it through, after giving everyone a chance to speak, I am still pissed. I will not forgive, I will not forget, but we will move on because we must. I am not going to pull my support for Obama, yet.
Now it is time for Obama to prove me wrong. Come on Obama, be smarter than me and pull of this crazy hat trick.
Between my idealogical core, and my pragmatic thought process, my brain has exploded over the issue of Rick Warren speaking at President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration, and by proxy, gay marriage and really gay issues in general.
I'm not feeling well today (I'm actually home sick), but I wanted to say a few things. I will apoligize up front because I'm not at 100%, but I will do my best. Mostly, for now, letting others speak for me, while I try to really get my head around all of this.
Choosing Rev. Rick Warren – the evangelical pastor who has equated gay marriage to incest and pedophilia and strongly supported California’s gay marriage ban – to give the invocation at his inauguration on the heels of the community’s gut-wrenching Proposition 8 setback pushes past a simple insensitivity to seeming downright cruel.
How many times is the President-elect going to gouge this gaping wound before it even has a chance to scab over? He says he doesn’t play interest group politics – that he’s trying to rise above the fray of pitting one constituency against another. And yet, a sense of basic fair play dictates that you don’t kick a group when they’re down. No LGBT person expected the incoming president to choose a gay pastor to bless his inauguration, but neither did they in their darkest moments dream that he would be so tone deaf to our misery as to choose a man who compares our love to criminal offense.
Does he not remember that we can still be fired in 30 states simply for being gay without having any legal recourse?
Does he not realize that we have never had a single piece of major federal legislation protecting our rights signed into law?
Does he forget that we are still beaten and killed on America’s streets -- that ten years after a young man was strung to a fence and left to die, neither federal statute nor Wyoming law extends hate crimes protections to us?
The choice of Mr. Warren, pastor of a megachurch in Orange County, Calif., is an olive branch to conservative Christian evangelicals. Mr. Warren is an outspoken opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage — litmus-test issues for Christian conservatives. In fact, his selection set off a round of criticism by gay rights groups angered by his support for California’s ban on same-sex marriages.
But Mr. Warren has also been one of the most prominent evangelical leaders calling for Christians to expand their agenda and confront global problems like poverty, AIDS, climate change and genocide in Darfur.
Mr. Warren flaunted his clout this year when he managed to draw both John McCain and Barack Obama to his Saddleback Church for a forum in which he interviewed them on stage about faith issues. He has sometimes angered the older generation of conservative evangelical leaders aligned with the Republican Party, as when he invited Mr. Obama to speak about AIDS at an earlier event at his church.
Unless Rick Warren has changed, he is very disappointing in the pro-life cause. Just ask pro-life leaders their opinion. He doesn't like to deal with it at his church. It just seems funny that he is known as 'pro-life' when he largely ignores the subject and teaches others to do the same. I fear God for these 'men of God'. We have lost 50 million babies, and most won't say a word. Reminds me of Nazi Germany or our slavery days. Very few spoke out. It was more comfortable to keep quiet.
And lastly, with many saying it's great Obama is smart enough to ignore the "far left" of his party, I just want to know, when did equal rights and basic human kindness become a "far left" value? I guess it was a "far left" idea to give mix race couples the right to marry too? Far left values that created the Civil Rights Act of 1964? A far left idea that drove a group of men to come together and proclam "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."?
Please just watch, no matter what you think about the LGBT community or gay marriage, take a few minutes and listen.
Not really much to say that Olbermann didn't, except maybe this: You all know me. Are you ready to tell me I am something less than you? That you should be able to get married but I can't? Are you really telling me you are better than me?
Because, no matter what you say, that is what it feels like to me, to the millions in the LGBT community, and to the many more millions who think equal rights means equal rights, no matter the person's sex, skin color, religion or sexual orientation.
