Grief from God

Barack Obama has a preacher problem again.

The Rick Warren invitation certainly doesn’t look good—would be nice to make it to January without the cynicism and disappointment setting back in. Why, after having mortally pissed off a good chunk of voters with one loose-cannon preacher, would you ‘balance’ that by mortally pissing off everyone else with another?

Enough to make you believe in the separation of church and state.

Still, I remain inclined to wonder if we will still get something in exchange for sustaining this slap in the face, like for example, quick action on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. The inaugural speech would be a good place to bury that disastrous faux-compromise, and it would make the Warren invitation look rather clever with the guy simultaneously allowed to beam over his new prominence and forced to swallow the New Pluralism on the spot.

A less sanguine interpretation is that Obama plans to sacrifice gay issues to further his other agenda items, sort of like Franklin Roosevelt’s deference to southern racism as he put together the New Deal.

The gay lobbies will get over it in any case, just as they conveniently forgot the Clintons’ cowardice and consistent buckling on things like the Defense of Marriage Act. That didn’t stop half the gay world from piling onto the Hillary bandwagon when she was the Inevitable Candidate.

For the time being, however, it’s creepy to think that anyone close to the Obama team signed off on this bigot and another reminder that the movement had better look to its own organizational roots and mobilizing skills to defend itself and its demands.