The Real Rick Warren Exposed

As the tempest over Barack Obama's selection of Christianist homophobe Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation continues, there is one positive aspect that is perhaps being overlooked. Namely, that the real, nasty, gay hating, non-Christian hating Rick Warren is finally being exposed to the light of day. Too often the lazy, afraid to criticize Christianists main stream media simply gives people like Warren a pass and the true vileness of their agenda does not come out. Not any more - or at least not for Warren who is having all of his nastiness exposed. Whether or not Obama ultimately uninvites this bigot, he will not be able to continue to get the free pass that he has enjoyed to date. Democracy Now has an interview with Max Blumenthal that highlights this development. Here are some highlights:

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Prior to this controversy, Rick Warren was, you know, proffered by the media as the voice of the new evangelical movement, which embraces environmentalism and fights poverty and is going to move beyond the old hobgoblins of the Christian right and the old, you know, draconian figures of the Christian right, like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. Rick Warren was supposed to be the pioneer of this new movement.

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[B]ecause, you know, the media has expected evangelicals, especially conservative evangelicals, to be draconian and retrograde, you know, they’ve made a hero out of Rick Warren without looking at who he really is and what he really believes. . . . So, the real Rick Warren is someone who fights the culture war with a velvet glove. He even—he freely admitted to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that the principal difference, the only difference, between him and James Dobson is a matter of tone.

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And he’s [Warren]backed every anti-gay proposition that’s come down the pike in California in the last ten years, including Proposition 22, which laid the groundwork for Proposition 8. He joined up with James Dobson and Charles Colson and Tony Perkins and these people to do this. Beyond that, he compares pro-choice advocates to Holocaust deniers.

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Rick Warren has a doctrine of women’s submission, which he preaches to his church, and he tells the female members of his church that they have to support their husbands’ decisions, even if they make bad financial decisions, because women have to submit in a biblical manner to their husbands. So this goes way beyond being anti-gay. He’s, you know, patriarchal. He’s supported assassinating Iran’s president.

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[T]he question is, where does Barack Obama draw the line when someone demonizes a segment of Americans? Is this person really fit to address the nation and confer God’s blessing on the entire United States of America, when Rick Warren freely admits that he only believes that a small segment of Americans are going to heaven and that the rest of us are going to burn in an everlasting lake of fire? That’s the question.

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Personally, I believe that Obama's selection of Warren is an abomination - to use a term the gay-haters love - and I have discarded all of my Obama signs and campaign materials (as have other gays that I know, some of whom donated plenty of money to his campaign). Should Obama fail to uninvite Warren, I suspect the failure will ultimate haunt him. In the meantime, I hope more and more Americans come to know what a douche bag Warren is in reality. I am going to do my best to disseminate the truth as widely as possible.