Questions Obama Must Answer

A little while ago, I was listening to Rachel Maddow discussing Rick Warren's latest video to his church congregation wherein he stated out right lies and accused his gay critics being "Christi-phobes." Using past video taped interviews, Rachel basically made Warren look like a pathological liar and the one who is trafficking in hate speech as opposed to his critics. Rachel's segment also looked at the way in which the Warren "scandal" seems to be growing rather than diminishing. I continue to ask myself WTF was Obama thinking?
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More scathing, however is Christopher Hitchens' column in Slate which not only rightly looks at all the things that make Warren a poor choice on Obama's part, but also asks questions that Obama now needs to answer given his disastrous pick of Warren. I suspect that unless Obama acts quickly to eliminate the Warren problem, it will continue to fester and increasingly harm Obama's image. Here are some column highlights:

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If we must have an officiating priest, surely we can do better than this vulgar huckster. . . . It is theoretically possible to make an apparently bigoted remark that is also factually true and morally sound. . . . However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken.

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That's all in a day's work for the wonderful world of the American evangelical community, and one wishes them all the best of luck in their energetic fundraising and their happy-clappy Sunday "Churchianity" mega-feel-good fiestas. However, do we want these weirdos and creeps officiating in any capacity at the inauguration of the next president of the United States?

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It is a fact that Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., was present at a meeting of the Aspen Institute not long ago and was asked by Lynda Resnick—she of the pomegranate-juice dynasty—if a Jew like herself could expect to be admitted to paradise. Warren publicly told her no.

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It is also a fact that Rick Warren proclaims as his original mentor a man named Wallie Amos Criswell, who was the inspirational figure in the rightward move of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1960s. Rightward in that time and context meant exactly what you might suspect it did—a cold hostility to any civil rights activism on the part of the churches.

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I think we are all entitled to ask and to keep asking every member of the Obama transition team until we receive a satisfactory answer, the following questions:

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1. Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews?

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2. Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons?

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3. Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and an already nuclear Pakistan, by a half-educated pulpit-pounder raised in the belief that the Armageddon solution is one to be anticipated with positive glee?

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As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. . . . However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors. This quite simply cannot stand.

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[I]f we must have an officiating priest, let it be some dignified old hypocrite with no factional allegiance and not a tree-shaking huckster and publicity seeker who believes that millions of his fellow citizens are hellbound because they do not meet his own low and vulgar standards.