[Marxism] Frank Rich on Obama-Warren

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, December 28, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
You're Likable Enough, Gay People
By FRANK RICH

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.

Unlike Bush, Obama has been the vocal advocate of gay civil rights he 
claims to be. It is over the top to assert, as a gay writer at Time 
did, that the president-elect is "a very tolerant, very 
rational-sounding sort of bigot." Much more to the point is the 
astute criticism leveled by the gay Democratic congressman Barney 
Frank, who, in dissenting from the Warren choice, said of Obama, "I 
think he overestimates his ability to get people to put aside 
fundamental differences." That's a polite way of describing the Obama 
cockiness. It will take more than the force of the new president's 
personality and eloquence to turn our nation into the United States 
of America he and we all want it to be.

Obama may not only overestimate his ability to bridge some of our 
fundamental differences but also underestimate how persistent some of 
those differences are. The exhilaration of his decisive election 
victory and the deserved applause that has greeted his mostly 
glitch-free transition can't entirely mask the tensions underneath. 
Before there is profound social change, there is always high anxiety.

The success of Proposition 8 in California was a serious shock to gay 
Americans and to all the rest of us who believe that all marriages 
should be equal under the law. The roles played by African-Americans 
(who voted 70 percent in favor of Proposition 8) and by white Mormons 
(who were accused of bankrolling the anti-same-sex-marriage campaign) 
only added to the morning-after recriminations. And that was in blue 
California. In Arkansas, voters went so far as to approve a measure 
forbidding gay couples to adopt.

There is comparable anger and fear on the right. David Brody, a 
political correspondent with the Christian Broadcasting Network, was 
flooded with e-mails from religious conservatives chastising Warren 
for accepting the invitation to the inaugural. They vilified Obama as 
"pro-death" and worse because of his support for abortion rights.

Stoking this rage, no doubt, is the dawning realization that the old 
religious right is crumbling ? in part because Warren's new 
generation of leaders departs from the Falwell-Robertson brand of 
zealots who have had a stranglehold on the G.O.P. It's a sign of the 
old establishment's panic that the Rev. Richard Cizik, known for his 
leadership in addressing global warming, was pushed out of his 
executive post at the National Association of Evangelicals this 
month. Cizik's sin was to tell Terry Gross of NPR that he was 
starting to shift in favor of civil unions for gay couples.

Cizik's ouster won't halt the new wave he represents. As he also told 
Gross, young evangelicals care less and less about the old wedge 
issues and aren't as likely to base their votes on them. On gay 
rights in particular, polls show that young evangelicals are moving 
in Cizik's (and the country's) direction and away from what John 
McCain once rightly called "the agents of intolerance." It's not a 
coincidence that Dobson's Focus on the Family, which spent more than 
$500,000 promoting Proposition 8, has now had to lay off 20 percent 
of its work force in Colorado Springs.

But we're not there yet. Warren's defamation of gay people 
illustrates why, as does our president-elect's rationalization of it. 
When Obama defends Warren's words by calling them an example of the 
"wide range of viewpoints" in a "diverse and noisy and opinionated" 
America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a 
"viewpoint" defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual 
crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.

It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized 
and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely 
such fears. "You've got to give them hope" was the refrain of the 
pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought 
back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that 
hope has to mean action, not just words.

By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama's 
disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is 
nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It's no Bay of Pigs. But it 
does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black 
president. It's bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow 
himself to be on the wrong side of this history.

Since he's not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? 
For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at 
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama 
enthusiast who served on his campaign's National Lesbian, Gay, 
Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail 
on Christmas Eve.

After noting that Warren's role at the inauguration is, in the end, 
symbolic, McCarthy concluded that "it's now time to move from symbol 
to substance." This means Warren should "recant his previous 
statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian."

McCarthy added that it's also time "for President-elect Obama to 
start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his 
campaign so that he doesn't go down in history as another Bill 
Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus 
for the sake of political expediency." And "for LGBT folks to choose 
their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his 
policy-making, not on the character of his ministers."

Amen. Here's to humility and equanimity everywhere in America, 
starting at the top, as we negotiate the fierce rapids of change 
awaiting us in the New Year.


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