Legal Commentary

So, as I've blogged before, I don't always agree with Christopher Hitchens about the application of principles of charitable interpretation. But in two recent essays, Hitchens has persuaded me that Rick Warren, despite his ostensible virtues, is not the right person for the Inauguration, notwithstanding Paul's strong anti-anti-Warren post here.  The first reason, which is somewhat familiar, is Warren's anti-gay statements, put sharply into larger context by Frank Rich.  (I admired Rich's arch observation that "fighting AIDS is not a get out of homophobia free card.") But Hitchens, in his first Slate essay on the topic, pushes the let's-revisit-this-man's theology claim a bit further--so as to discomfit more than just gays and their supporters. With some evidence to underpin them, Hitchens asks the following questions about Warren's interior disturbances:

• Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews?
• Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons?
• Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and an already nuclear Pakistan, by a half-educated pulpit-pounder raised in the belief that the Armageddon solution is one to be anticipated with positive glee? 

The first question would place a litmus test that would to my mind unduly intrude on Warren's liberty of conscience. If Warren's benediction is innocuous, it shouldn't much matter that he also holds unreasonable views of access to powers invisible. The second question reveals a guilt-by-association charge, which has, I think, proved itself to be an overplayed drama. Hitchen's third question seems to suggest that Warren's eschatology could have some impact on Obama's foreign policy, but that's ... unlikely.  I don't think we've much basis for worry that Warren will exert influence on Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, or the other advice-givers in or near the West Wing. 

The second essay by Hitchens, however, raises a more lacerating set of concerns than those posed by his religious views. They largely stem from things said during and after Warren's export business in eschatology to the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Hitchens writes:

"Syria," [Warren] told his viewers back home by video, is "a moderate country, and the official government rule and position is to not allow extremism of any kind." This is a highly original way to describe a regime that is joined at the hip with the Iranian theocracy, that is the patron of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that is the official and unabashed host of the fugitive Hamas leadership whose military wing directs massacre operations from Damascus itself. (One might also add that the Syrian Baath Party's veteran defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, published a book under his own name that accused Jews of using the blood of non-Jewish children for the making of those ever-menacing Passover matzos. I suppose it depends how you define extremism.)  ...

Our good pastor also found the time to tell his captive audience?if I may use such an unoriginal phrase in a literal way?that 80 percent of his countrymen opposed the administration's policy in Iraq. Assume yourself, dear reader, to be one of that possible 80 percent. Did you ever ask to be spoken for by Warren, who was a guest of a regime that sponsors al-Qaida infiltrators in Iraq, or to see him denounce the administration in front of an audience of Syrians that had no choice but to listen to whatever it was told? For shame.

No doubt there are synergies available that Obama should catalyze between Warren's minions and centrist and progressive minyans. That said, the selection of Warren is not well understood if only understood in instrumental terms, a point Paul trenchantly made. But along with that recognition must be alertness to the fact that the Who-should-bless-the-Inauguration question is not the same as who momentarily has the President's ear on certain issues. Indeed, it's precisely because the inauguration sparks the onset of a new era for the nation that the situation's optics must be heeded. And with the picture above, well, let's just say that Warren's star has dimmed. 

Photo: AFP PHOTO/SANA/HO