A roundup of stories and posts on the fallout from Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation:
Rick Warren’s latest: Clarification?
One day you have soon-to-give-the-inaugural-invocation pastor Rick Warren, clear as a bell, telling Beliefnet founder editor Steve Waldman that gay marriage is morally the same as incest.
Now, after Warren gets excoriated from all sides for his views, voila, he’s back with a video of his own. In it, Warren blames the media (honestly, doesn’t that ever get old?) for falsely presenting him, saying that he just doesn’t want gay people to use the word “marriage.” Warren says he loves everyone “regardless of the choices they make.”
Waldman on Rick Warren’s New Clarification Video
In his December 22 video Warren had an opportunity to do something quite straightforward and healing: clarify, take responsibility and, ideally, apologize. He did clarify but did not, in my view, take responsibility. He could have simply said, “it came out in a way I didn’t mean and I apologize for those who I hurt because of that.” It wouldn’t have required him to back off his position on gay marriage one iota. Instead, he blamed the media and misremembered or mischaracterized what he’d said.
On the other hand, what’s most important is that he did make it clear that he doesn’t believe gay relationships are the moral equivalent of incest etc. That idea should now be put to rest.
Rick Warren loves gays, and more
A Saddleback spokesman, Larry Ross, tells me [Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe] that a controversial Q&A on the church’s web site, which suggested that gays were welcome to worship but not as members at Saddleback “has not been permanently removed as alleged in some media reports, but rather is being repurposed for clarity.”
As for Obama, in what may or may not be a reaction to the Warren controversy U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, the only openly lesbian member of Congress, has been named an honorary co-chairwoman of President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. Read the story here.