“Warren hasn’t budged an inch on abortion or homosexuality. He quietly supported California’s Proposition 8, which barred gay marriage. Later, he drove the point home in an interview with Steve Waldman of theWall Street Journal and Beliefnet.com.

“I’m opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling it a marriage,” Warren said. “I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that a marriage.”

“Do you think that’s equivalent to gays having marriage?” Waldman interjected.

“Oh, I do,” Warren said.

President-elect Obama’s invitation to Warren to deliver the invocation at his inaugural set off an outcry from gay rights activists. Obama defended Warren, saying both men believe in conversation with those who disagree with them. Likewise, many conservatives have criticized Warren for his association with the liberal Democrat.”

Read more, and listen to the NPR story here >> 

To help resolve the issue of gay rights, President-elect Obama should abolish the now moribund Commission on Civil Rights and replace it with a new commission that would address the rights of many groups, including gays.

The fault lines beneath the debate over gay rights are jagged and deep. Federal Social Security and tax benefits from marriage that straight people take for granted are denied to most gays in committed relationships. And because Congress has failed to enact a federal employment nondiscrimination act, bias against gays in the workplace remains a constant threat.

Gays are at risk under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And people who are only assumed to be homosexual have been subject to hate crimes. José and Romel Sucuzhañay, two brothers, were attacked in New York City last month by men yelling anti-gay and anti-Latino epithets. José Sucuzhañay died from being beaten with a bottle and a baseball bat. Yet the effort in Congress to enact a law that would increase the punishment for hate crimes against gays and lesbians is going nowhere.

Only two states, Massachusetts and Connecticut, permit gay marriage. New York acknowledges marriages from those states and from other countries, despite the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which was meant to allow other states not to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere. Vermont, New Jersey and New Hampshire permit civil unions, which provide gay partners the rights, protections and responsibilities of marriage. On the other hand, a referendum that just passed in Arkansas goes beyond banning gay marriage to prohibit the adoption of children by unmarried couples. Mississippi, Florida and Utah have similar bans. And many Americans believe their religion forbids gay marriage or even civil unions.

Read more here >> Op-Contributor – Gay but Equal? – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com.

In a democracy, the majority of citizens ordinarily may enact whatever laws they want. Some laws, however, are prohibited by the Constitution. For example, the majority of citizens may want a law denying African-Americans the right to vote or prohibiting Muslims from attending public schools, but such laws violate the Constitution.

Does Proposition 8 violate the Constitution? There are several arguments one might make for this position. One might argue that Proposition 8 discriminates against gays and lesbians in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. One might argue that Proposition 8 unconstitutionally limits the fundamental right to marry. One might argue that Proposition 8 violates the separation of church and state. It is this last argument that interests me.

Laws that violate the separation of church and state usually take one of two forms. Either they discriminate against certain religions (”Jews may not serve as jurors”), or they endorse particular religions (”school children must recite the Lord’s Prayer”). Proposition 8 does not violate the principle of separation of church and state in either of these ways. It neither restricts religious freedom nor endorses religious expression.

What it does do, however, is to enact into law a particular religious belief. Indeed, despite invocations of tradition, morality and family values, it seems clear that the only honest explanation for Proposition 8 is religion. This is obvious not only from the extraordinary efforts undertaken by some religious groups to promote Proposition 8, but also from the very striking voting patterns revealed in the exit polls.

In his first press conference after his re-election in 2004, President Bush memorably declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” We all know how that turned out.

Barack Obama has little in common with George W. Bush, thank God, his obsessive workouts and message control notwithstanding. At a time when very few Americans feel very good about very much, Obama is generating huge hopes even before he takes office. So much so that his name and face, affixed to any product, may be the last commodity left in the marketplace that can still move Americans to shop.

I share these high hopes. But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month.

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.

In this case, the capital spent is small change. Most Americans who have an opinion about Warren like him and his best-selling self-help tome, “The Purpose Driven Life.” His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change. He is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama. Unlike such family-values ayatollahs as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, Warren is not obsessed with homosexuality and abortion. He was vociferously attacked by the Phyllis Schlafly gang when he invited Obama to speak about AIDS at his Saddleback Church two years ago.

There’s no reason why Obama shouldn’t return the favor by inviting him to Washington. But there’s a difference between including Warren among the cacophony of voices weighing in on policy and anointing him as the inaugural’s de facto pope. You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face. “I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”

Warren, whose ego is no less than Obama’s, likes to advertise his “commitment to model civility in America.” But as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reminded her audience, “comparing gay relationships to child abuse” is a “strange model of civility.” Less strange but equally hard to take is Warren’s defensive insistence that some of his best friends are the gays: His boasts of having “eaten dinner in gay homes” and loving Melissa Etheridge records will not protect any gay families’ civil rights.

Equally lame is the argument mounted by an Obama spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, who talks of how Warren has fought for “people who have H.I.V./AIDS.” Shouldn’t that be the default position of any religious leader? Fighting AIDS is not a get-out-of-homophobia-free card. That Bush finally joined Bono in doing the right thing about AIDS in Africa does not mitigate the gay-baiting of his 2004 campaign, let alone his silence and utter inaction when the epidemic was killing Texans by the thousands, many of them gay men, during his term as governor.

Read the full text here: Op-Ed Columnist – You’re Likable Enough, Gay People – NYTimes.com.

Statement by the Rev. Rebecca Voelkel
National Religious Leadership Roundtable

“As a Christian pastor and a lesbian, I am deeply troubled by President-elect Obama’s choice of Pastor Rick Warren to pray at his inauguration. Pastor Warren was one of the leaders in smearing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in the recent Proposition 8 campaign in California. His words and actions have solidified the impression that Christian equals bigot when it comes to the LGBT community. And his leadership was one of the factors in Prop. 8’s passage.

“But Pastor Warren and the Saddleback Church, whose membership counts in the 20,000 mark, have also taken a leadership role in the fight against HIV/AIDS. And through this work they are coming to know many LGBT persons and our real lives — as opposed to the lies they have painted us with.

“My prayer is that Pastor Warren allow himself to repent of his hatred and harm to the LGBT community. If he is going to purport to acknowledge God’s presence at the inauguration, he must recognize the power and blessing in all our lives — especially LGBT people.”

California’s attorney general, former Governor Jerry Brown, said on Friday “that the measure was constitutionally indefensible and should be overturned.” He continued: “Proposition 8 must be invalidated because the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification.” According to the New York Times, “opponents have argued that the proposition fundamentally altered the state Constitution by taking away the right to marry from same-sex couples, who had been free to do so since May, when the California Supreme Court legalized such marriages. Proposition 8 overturned that decision by defining marriage in California as between only men and women …. Supporters of Proposition 8 asked the court in a separate legal brief filed Friday to invalidate the approximately 18,000 same-sex marriages performed before the ban was passed.”

For the full text of this article, visit the New York Times >>