Early Warning: The Inaugural Invocation and the Selection of Rick Warren
by David Nixon

February 9, 2009 – In the middle of last December, the Obama transition team announced that Rick Warren, of Saddleback Church in California, would deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration ceremony on January 20. I was shocked, it was like being hit by a Steeler lineman.

That deal-making and compromise are the stuff of politics, I know and have long accepted. Even when the deals are not pretty, they are often necessary to actually getting something done. Again, accepted. But there was no deal here: this was gratuitous. It was a gratuitous slap at some of Obama’s most dedicated supporters: the LGBT community and its friends. At the time, I remember reading the well founded outrage of many for according a position of honor to an open supporter of the justly hated Proposition 8 in California, a measure that actually took away rights already won by the LGBT community. I could understand that anger and shared it.

Prior to the announcement, I thought of Rick Warren as just another plump, white, self-satisfied and rich (but he does so much good!) Christian huckster who blathered Far-Right Lite to the mostly white and well-heeled. After the announcement he was still all of those things and I was going to have to listen to him during the inauguration ceremony. Did I mention that I was angry about it?

There are some people who will never like, even accept, Barack Obama. They are hostile to all or most of his core values and nothing he can say or do (including totally surrendering his core values) will change that fact. I’m not sure Obama accepts this. It feels to me like he’s one of those people who, after winning the support of 99 out of 100 people in an audience, will just not rest until he’s won over that last person. Meanwhile, he angers the 99 new friends through inattention and negligence and compromises himself in a fruitless chase for the unattainable.

I really hope that this feeling of mine, it hardly rises to the level of analysis, is wrong. I have to say, though, trusting my gut more and my head less would have spared me a lot of trouble in this life.

So, to put out a marker, I draw two morals from this episode:
To Obama’s friends, trust but verify.
To Obama, this conduct will earn the contempt of your enemies and the resentment of your friends. (Actually, we’ve already seen this pattern repeat in negotiations with congress over the stimulus package but that’s another story.)

One last observation about Rick Warren. He made it worse than it had to be: he couldn’t just invoke the name of “God” (leaving it to the adherents of the many religions to define for themselves what that meant). No, it had to be “Jesus.” Jesus!