Okay, so Obama picked Rick Warren to give the something-or-other at the inaugeration. Comments on that specific event in a moment. Reading about it, though, and reflecting on Greta Christina’s comments on being an atheist in the queer community, something clicked for me about the tactics the gay rights movement should be using.

One angle on this is: “Look at the civil rights movement. The most successful leader was Martin Luther King, who reached out to people who opposed him. Therefore, the gay rights movement needs to reach out to Evangelical Christians.” Well yes, but: his rhetoric always about creating a world where white people and black people could live in harmony. That doesn’t make rhetoric about bringing gays and Evangelical Christians together a good idea.

The analogous rhetoric would be about gay people and straight people getting along–though that could seem a bit overblown, given that’s already how things work in half the country. Evangelical Christianity isn’t an inborn trait, like race or sexual orientation, it’s a belief system. A belief system centered around the inerrancy of a book which, among other things, says gays should be put to death. Rhetoric about Evangelical Christians and gays living together in harmony is a lot more like rhetoric about racists and black people living in harmony.

Granted, Evantelical Christianity is a much more complicated belief system than a simple belief like racism. It’s possible to buy into inerrancy but go through some mental contortions to avoid admitting the Bible says what it says about homosexuality, or feel ambivalent about inerrancy but feel a vague affection for parts of Evangelical subculture. Still, we shouldn’t tie gay rights too hard to the fuzzy thinking of people comitted to an anti-gay ideology. Tell straight people they can live in harmony with gays, but don’t pretend Evangelicalism is a good thing.

Now, what about Warren? Michael Reynolds is at least partly right that the Warren pick was politically savvy for Obama, though I wonder to what end. He knows how to advance his own political interests, but I don’t see much evidence of him being willing to risk them for the sake of good policy. His campaign promises involved a lot of trying to please everyone: get out of Iraq and fight terrorism in Iraq, cut taxes and enact expensive health care reform, and so on.

The post-partisan rhetoric that’s come up once again here scares me. What will take the place of partisanship? Please everyone policies and abscene of public criticism for what the government does? It’s a quirk of electoral politics that conflict tends to get channelled into political parties, and while it would be nice to set aside stupid conflicts and decide everything rationally, but since that’s not likely, we need to realize there are worse things than political squabling.

A lot of the discussion has emphasized what this does or doesn’t mean policy wise, from Joe Klein’s “Hey it doesn’t matter” to Reynold’s “you’ll see” to Glen Greendwald’s midly skeptical “wait and see” to Dan Savage’s “wait and see–but put the pressure on.” The sybolsim matters, though.

Warren is a James Dobson in sheep’s clothing, even his AIDS activism has a dark side. If you don’t want to read that entire link (Michelle Goldberg’s excellent piece on him), here’s one thing that should be enough: his mega-bestseller _The Purpose Driven Life tells readers to make the Bible, with it’s kill-homosexuals content, the ultimate authority in their life, placed completely beyond rational critique. We need to set a standard in our culture that unthinking devotion to a book with that kind of content isn’t okay, the same way that we have a standard that racism isn’t okay. Giving someone with those views a special role in the presidential inaugeration sends the opposite message.

The most frustrating camp re: the Warren invokation is not those who claim it doesn’t matter, even at their most hysterical, but those who claim the symbolism as a positive good. We need to realize from the outset that not all of this rhetoric represents a real position, like so much else it’s a matter of signalling alliances. From Sullivan’s talk of “dialogue” and the need to “engage” to the Obama camp’s “common ground” explanation (cheered on by Matt Nisbet), if we take the words of the pro-Warren folks in their simple, descriptive senses, these aren’t things the that they have a monolopy on. These aren’t things that you can only have in their rainbows and sunshine form. The tradition of philosophical dialogue often involves people shocked by each other’s positions trying to find points that their opponents will concede. That, though, is about the search for truth rather than buddying up.

Their main substantial point is that this is supposed to help clean up all the bad stuff politics today (though it’s been going on forever). For example, Joe Klein: “The thing is, Obama is trying to change the nature of public discourse from the raw blast it has been for the past 20 years to something more civil and tolerable.” Such statements say than they seem to. The “raw blast” can describe everything from screaming about trivialities to frankness about major issues. Klein doesn’t make clear what needs to be drawn back for him to be able to tolerate things. Sometimes, if you talk about an issue in a way that leaves everyone with warm fuzzies, you’re doing it wrong. There’s no way to to describe the Bible’s content that is both frank and pleasant.

The worst of the worst is Sullivan’s piety-display declaration that “If I cannot pray with Rick Warren, I realize, then I am not worthy of being called a Christian.” For some random writer, this would be ignorable, but Sullivan is a gay man who has frankly admitted that the Bible says he should be killed. If you think that such passages are horrible, taking them too seriously should also be horrible, a wildly misguided approach to religion (independent of wether religion has some value), and a disqualifier for a public honor like getting to make the inaugeral invokation.

Sullivan’s stance is a good example of what Dan Dennett complained about in _Breaking the Spell_, religious moderates providing unintentional cover for people who’s agenda they don’t support. Such people are the main reason that the insane brand of religion that Warren represents survives today. In a world of greater frankness about religion, they could not survive. Let’s create such a world.

>>>Note: it just so happens that tomorrow, I’ll be reviewing Dinesh D’Souza’s _What’s So Great about Christianity_, which will give me time to say more about Dennett’s views on this point, because D’Souza distorts them. What fun!<<<

UPDATE: Sullivan has more.