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A Civil Rights Issue

By Big Tent Democrat

Richard Cohen on the Rick Warren affair:

[Obama said] "We can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans." Sounds nice. But what we do not "hold in common" is the dehumanization of homosexuals. What we do not hold in common is the belief that gays are perverts who have chosen their sexual orientation on some sort of whim. What we do not hold in common is the exaltation of ignorance that has led and will lead to discrimination and violence.

Finally, what we do not hold in common is the categorization of a civil rights issue -- the rights of gays to be treated equally -- as some sort of cranky cultural difference. For that we need moral leadership, which, on this occasion, Obama has failed to provide. For some people, that's nothing to celebrate.

It is now clear that President-Elect Obama's choice of the Reverend Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation has been an extremely divisive decision. Beyond the substantive issue, it was a political mistake. For this reason, it makes E.J. Dionne's take particularly strange in my view. More . . .

Dionne posits that Obama has deliberately enraged those who support gay and lesbian rights. He thinks there is a reason why:

Obama and Warren have helped each other in the past, and both know exactly what they're doing. . . . One need not be too pious about any of this. Both Warren and Obama are shrewd leaders who sense where the political winds are blowing.

He believes Warren's goal in this is the following:

An opening to Obama is the right move for this moment, and Warren appears to be genuinely interested in broadening evangelical Christianity's public agenda. In a recent interview with Steve Waldman of Beliefnet.com, Warren compared gay marriage to "an older guy marrying a child," and to "one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage." But he also called upon evangelicals to be "the social change leaders in our society" engaged with "poverty and disease and charity and social justice and racial justice."

As Dionne describes it, Obama is willing to elevate Warren's anti-gay views in order to help Warren's "call" for evangelicals to be "engaged with 'poverty and disease and charity and social justice and racial justice.'" Of course even if this were true, it is problematic. what do we know of Warren's own engagement in "social justice?" We know he is an anti-gay bigot. We know he is virulently anti-choice. We know he is stridently anti-science. The upside on substantive issues of elevating Warren is not apparent to me.

Pols are pols and do what they do. So I doubt that Dionne's benign view of Obama's political motives is accurate. and of course we mean all pols. Jelani Cobb described a moment when Adlai Stevenson was an "inclusive pol":

In the name of national unity, the liberal Adlai Stevenson chose the segregationist John Sparkman as VP on the 1952 Democratic ticket. Black Democrats were rightfully furious. Unity is just as often a buzzword for those quiet periods where little changes.

Rick Warren's invitation is not as bad the Sparkman choice -- he's making a prayer, not policy. But it raises the memory of groups being left in the cold in the name of unity.

Stevenson lost in a landslide so his unity gesture was futile, as most are quite frankly. Dionne believes in them still:

Obama wants to encourage this move [by Warren], which would be good for him and good for progressive politics. Fear that Obama's analysis is exactly right is why so many conservatives are so angry with Warren for blessing the new president's inaugural.

Although I support same-sex marriage, I think that liberals should welcome Obama's success in causing so much consternation on the right. On balance, inviting Warren opens more doors than it closes.

Not only is this wrong I think, it is actually quite morally repulsive as well. The doors Dionne is willing to close involve the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

Dionne ends his column with some true silliness:

Yet liberals also need to come to terms with what it means to build a durable majority. Doing so requires not just easy gestures but hard ones. Here's a prayer that this one will be worth the risks it entails.

Dionne REALLY believes that Rick Warren leads us to the road of "durable majorities? What an idiotic thing to write. Perhaps the dumbest thing Dionne has ever written.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on December 23, 2008 (boomark / email).