Salon has a short round-up of concerns about Rick Warren's invocation at Obama's inauguration ceremony, concerns that go to reasons well beyond Warren's enthusiastic opposition to gay rights.
Meanwhile, MSNBC's ironically-named First Read blog weighs in with this blindingly stupid remark: "Where was this outrage when Obama appeared at Warren�s Saddleback forum back in August? The difference may be that the forum came before Proposition 8 passed in California."
Um, yeah. Or the difference may be between acknowledging that the representative of a large group of people has legitimate questions that you are willing to address head-on in a civil manner and giving that person a place of honor as part of the official launch of your administration.
Never trust highly-paid network political analysts to do the job of bloggers.
In a related matter, Sullivan dismantles the paranoid free-speech argument against gay marriage, and, at the end, picks up on his antagonist's claim that he's all for civil unions, just not "redefining marriage." This has become boilerplate make-nice talk for virtually all marriage-equality opponents. Even the Mormons tried it. and Sullivan asks the question that should be asked of every one of them: Really?
A few weeks ago Richard Cizik, the infamously "moderate" president of the National Association of Evangelicals, got a little too caught up in the NPR spirit in an interview with Terry Gross and played the "I believe in civil unions but not marriage card." Result: He was forced to resign the next day.
Update: Politico frames this as a story about "a gay rights movement that � in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California � is looking for a fight."
Sorry, but the people who got the proposal on the ballot and then spent a fortune on deceptive ads in order to jam it into the constitution are the ones who went looking for a fight. What's happening now is called finding one.
So what would be the most effective way for at least half of those 3 million people on the mall to protest when Warren gets up to do his thing? I have one idea, but it's probably gonna be too cold to walk home with no shoes on.
