As we saw during primary season, our president-elect is not free of his own brand of hubris and arrogance, and sometimes it comes before a fall: “You’re likable enough, Hillary” was the prelude to his defeat in New Hampshire. He has hit this same note again by assigning the invocation at his inauguration to the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County, Calif., megachurch preacher who has likened committed gay relationships to incest, polygamy and “an older guy marrying a child.” Bestowing this honor on Warren was a conscious — and glib — decision by Obama to spend political capital. It was made with the certitude that a leader with a mandate can do no wrong.
As Rich points out, the potential political gain from this invite is minimal. Warren's most fervent supporters are ones who declared Obama was an Arab Muslim terrorist. Furthermore, Obama's ardent pro-choice stance is unlikely to win any converts from the Evangelical Right, regardless of Warren's appearance. The President-elect couldn't possibly believe this move was about winning fundamentalist Christians over, because it's simply not going to happen.
Instead, Obama figures the invite to Warren is consistent with his message of "a new kind of politics" of emphasizing common American values to start productive political dialogue, as he explains in The Audacity of Hope. Obama may genuinely believe that inviting Warren is a legitimate way of bringing Evangelicals to the table and giving them someone to root for on Inauguration Day. (And perhaps a move to take attention off of the appearance of a San Francisco gay choir in the march.) But the invitation comes off as too slick. Rather than seeming like a leader bringing in opposing voices together to work for a common cause, Obama seems like a first-grade teacher telling two bickering children to get along, when one of them is clearly the bully and the other the victim.
If Obama believes that he can convince Warren and his flock that gays are "likeable enough" by being inclusive, then one just might wonder why he's not inviting racists and anti-Semites to speak at his inauguration, too. The bottom line is that Warren's church's position on homosexuality is radically out of the mainstream and absolutely offensive. He must acknowledge that in some cases, the progression of a just society and the legitimacy of fundamentalist Christianity are mutually exclusive. To believe that oppressed minorities like gays will be okay with the legitimization of such radical voices reeks of arrogance.
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