Christo-fascist Rick Warren Scrubs Anti-Gay Message

I previously did a post on Friday that focused upon Saddleback Church's policy of barring "unrepentant gays" from church membership and queried whether or not Barack Obama endorsed the church's bigotry. Lo and behold, today it is turns out that Saddleback's website has been modified to delete the offending page (pictured at left) although you can still find the anti-gay language via Google's cache. As John Aravosis noted at America Blog, the questions that spring to mind are:

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So does Rick Warren now welcome gays, all gays, as members of his church? Or is he simply embarrassed of his views - embarrassed of God's views, per Warren's own admission? And if Warren is embarrassed of God's views, then what is he doing as a public spokesman on religion?

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Tonight on Hardball, Mike Rogers debated the Rick Warren issue and from the clip I saw, Mike did a good job even though some of the others discussing the issue were condescending and/or petty. Granted, I would not have suggested that perhaps Warren has "seen the light." Many of us are indeed outraged by the Warren selection and we are NOT confined to "Cambridge MA, Georgetown DC, the Upper West Side of NY, Santa Monica and San Francisco, CA" as suggested by Mike Barnicle who I often find to be a conceited pompous ass.

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The reality is that Rick Warren is a Christianist extremist and personally, I suspect that all the focused scrutiny on what Warren is really all about was getting to be too much for both Warren and Obama and that, if the scrutiny continues to go unstopped, Warren might well have to be uninvited. Scrubbing the anti-gay message on the Saddleback Church website was but an example of efforts being made to lessen the embarrassment to Obama and/or to avoid Warren being uninvited. The scrutiny needs to continue so that Warren's extremism is fully exposed.

More on Rick Warren and What it Says About Obama

Andrew Sullivan has two posts which go to underscore the foul hypocrisy of Christianist, Rick Warren, and which further make my blood boil that Obama invited this viper to give the inaugural invocation. The first deals with the fact Rick "I love gays" Warren's church runs what is tantamount to ex-gay programs through something called "Celebrate Recovery" that occurs every Friday night at Saddleback Church. So now we know that Obama has invited an ex-gay advocate to give the invocation. It truly doesn't get much more insulting to LGBT Americans than to have a hate filled bigot like Warren (although a polished one at that) given such an honor. As I sad yesterday, why didn't Obama just take out a TV ad telling LGBT Americans to go f*ck themselves? Here are some highlights from Andrew's first post:

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As a longtime reader of your blog, I have to say that I respectfully dissent from your conciliatory tone on the Obama/Warren debacle. Most people probably don’t know this, but Warren’s Saddleback Church has a Friday night program called Celebrate Recovery. On the whole the program is modeled after the twelve steps, albeit with an evangelical supplement to it. There are subgroups in the program that cater to men with “addictions” to pornography, recovery alcoholics, and women with codependency issues. There is also a group for those who struggle with “same sex attraction”, the discourse of which is directly borrowed from the ex-gay movement. I know this, of course, because I was involved with the group in Spring of 2007.

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It’s obvious what Obama is trying to do by having Warren give the convocation at his inauguration, and it is understandable – but for me as a human being who was personally damaged by Warren’s theology and his church specifically, it is unforgivable. And to cover it over with vague rhetoric about a politics of inclusion and unity is similarly unforgivable. Some friends have told me that my “personal issues” make me too emotionally involved with this issue, and of course they do – but perhaps that is precisely what gives me the right to be upset about this decision.

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The second post makes a great case of just how dishonest the Warren/Christianist argument that CIVIL law gay marriage would threaten the religious freedom within church denominations. I have not heard the analogies made before, but they are 100% on point. Yet further proof that Rick Warren is a disingenuous liar. Here are highlights:

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[T]here is no conflict whatever between religious liberty and civil same-sex marriage. . . . The biggest single denomination in America - Catholicism - denies the existence of divorce, does not recognize the sacred status of re-married couples, and has life-long marriage at the core of its definition of the institution. Has the Catholic church's religious liberty been infringed by the ubiquity of divorced couples? Are Catholic priests denied their First Amendment rights because they occasionally have to interact in the civil sphere with married couples whose marriages they deem invalid? Was the late Archbishop O'Connor of New York giving up the First Amendment by treating Ronald and Nancy Reagan's marriage as a precious thing?

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Or take the Catholic church's insane position on the ordination of women. Gender equality is much more deeply embedded in the law than orientation equality. Has anyone actually sought to prosecute the church for being a deeply sexist institution? Have women brought lawsuits against priests because a parishioner went out and raped someone - or discriminated against them in employment? I mean: please. The whole idea is fueled by [people like Rick Warren and] pure panic at the thought of having to live in a society in which gay citizens are treated like everyone else.

Reflection on "Candidates' Faith Forum"

While Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, is nowhere near as loopy and down right insane as say Pat Robertson or James Dobson, he nonetheless shares a similar inability to grasp the fact that the United States was NOT founded as a Christian nation and that the civil laws should NOT be intertwined with one particular religious tradition inasmuch as there are citizens of a multitude of faiths. But then, with the Christianists, it ALWAYS all about them. Everyone else can go to Hell. I will also give Warren credit for not always functioning as an unofficial branch of the Republican Party like Daddy Dobson or Tony Perkins. Note how McCain uses religious beliefs of some to justify depriving gays of secular, civil rights. I find it sad that McCain and Obama both felt compelled to participate in the forum, although I suspect that it helped Obama more than McCain since it gave him an opportunity to counter the lies circulated by wingnuts that he's Muslim. Here are a few highlights from the Washington Post:

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LAKE FOREST, Calif., Aug. 16 -- Barack Obama and John McCain made their first joint appearance of the general election Saturday night, breaking away from the debates over national security and the economy that have dominated the campaign in recent weeks to court evangelical voters at an Orange County megachurch.

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The event was hosted by Rick Warren, the author of the best-selling "The Purpose Driven Life" and one of the country's most prominent evangelical preachers. Warren, a Southern Baptist, referred to both McCain and Obama as friends in his introductions. "They both care deeply about America," Warren said. "They're both patriots."

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Christian conservatives gave Bush 78 percent of their votes in 2004, and they remain a vital part of the Republican Party's electoral strategy. But although Democrat Obama has taken stances on issues such as abortion and gay rights that many Christians disagree with, his campaign hopes that he can cut into that showing by keeping his faith in the spotlight and by discussing topics such as poverty and global warming.

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McCain has publicly suggested in recent days that even though he opposes abortion, he might select a running mate who supports abortion rights. That drew warnings from Perkins and other religious conservatives that they might not show up at the polls in November if McCain picked an abortion-rights supporter such as former governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. But McCain's campaign has also sought to highlight stances such as his opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions.

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The Obama campaign made an aggressive sales pitch at the event, distributing a 12-page booklet to the 2,200 people who streamed through Saddleback's doors that chronicled the candidate's "Christian journey" and his long relationship with Warren.

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For Obama, the Saddleback event allowed him to reinforce that he is a Christian before an audience that doubtless included many familiar with Internet and talk-radio-driven rumors that he is a Muslim. That particular falsehood has proven maddeningly difficult to dispel for Obama's campaign, continuing to dog his candidacy. . .

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Religious conservatives and liberals alike pressed Warren to grill the candidates on difficult topics, such as the role of federal courts in social issues. Warren did ask both candidates which current Supreme Court justice he would refused to nominate. McCain named the four justices considered most liberal: Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. Obama singled out Clarence Thomas for criticism, saying he was not prepared for elevation to the court, and also noted that he disagrees sharply with Justice Antonin Scalia.

Some Evangelicals Changing Attitude Toward AIDS

I am not going to be holding my breath for the time that Evangelical Christians start treating members of the LGBT community as fully human and worthy of their love and understanding. In the meantime, it is encouraging to see that some Evangelicals such as Kay Warren are changing their views on AIDS - perhaps through more exposure to all those infected, including gays, they will start to see our equal humanity. It is always harder to spread hate about those you have interacted with after all. Here are highlights from an MSNBC story (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22005623/):

LOS ANGELES - Kay Warren says five years ago she was a "white suburban mom with a minivan" helping her husband run one of the most influential evangelical churches in the United States and barely aware of the global AIDS crisis. Today, Warren will host the third conference on her church's role in fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic after a spiritual awakening that rocked her own faith and challenged how the evangelical community responds to what many still regard as a "gay cancer."

More than 50 international speakers -- including the first ladies of Rwanda and Zambia and Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton -- will gather at Saddleback Valley Community Church in Southern California on Wednesday for three days to mobilize local churches around the world to help prevent HIV/AIDS and care for its victims.

"This is the passion, the call of my life," said Warren, a quintessential California blue-eyed blonde. She admits that U.S. evangelicals have been "late to the party" on the AIDS issue and castigates the "sinful absence and puny efforts" of her community's past track record. "I see more and more individual churches, pastors and believers who are recognizing that this is what the Bible teaches and that there is nothing strange about it," Warren told Reuters of her campaign.

The Saddleback AIDS initiative is the most controversial in a recent raft of social issues embraced by U.S. evangelicals, who have traditionally favored social conservatism. The Saddleback approach to AIDS sidesteps the thorny issues of sexuality and condom use by focusing on the care and support of victims. The Warrens say the question should be not "How did you get sick?" but "What can I do? How can I help you?" The plan encourages churches around the world to use their grass roots networks to set up testing centers, unleash volunteers, reduce the stigma of being HIV positive and promote "God's standards of behavior."

Some Saddleback members felt uneasy at being urged to care for AIDS sufferers. "They felt that our job was to speak to people's spiritual needs, that the church was about saving souls. I completely disagreed. This is historically at the heart of our Christian faith," she said. Five years on, Warren says she is no longer the comfortable wife, mother and grandmother she once was. "I froth at the mouth a lot. I'm not very much fun at dinner parties because I really want to talk about life and death issues. It is a radically different life," she said.