Cafe de Mello

Dear President Elect Obama,

Let me begin by saying that in choosing Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at your inauguration you have not lost my day-to-day political support; however, you have greatly diminished my respect for you. To regain my respect, I urge you to recognize that no shade of bigotry should be given a national pulpit and resend your invitation.

You cannot, as you said at your news conference yesterday, truly be a "fierce advocate for gay and lesbian Americans" and invite Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation. As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night on her show, this is not the equivalent of Warren's inviting you to his church. You are inviting him to a US Government event, something that rightly belongs to all US citizens. You are, in effect, inviting a bigot into my home, and allowing him to give the invocation demeans us all.

I have heard many rationalizations for your choice of Rick Warren. On the Rachel Maddow show, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome spoke of admiring Warren's preaching on HIV and aids, climate change, torture, and poverty—even though Newsom vehemently disagrees with Warren's stand on homosexuality and other issues. He says that Rick Warren is not a bad person and he hopes Warren's invitation will spark a substantive dialog.

In a similar vein, Andrew Sullivan wrote in "Taking Yes For An Answer" that "we should also understand Obama's attempt to bridge some gaps in America that the Clintons, with their boomer baggage and Dick Morris cynicism, couldn't and didn't. This is what matters." And that, "The bitterness endures; the hurt doesn't go away; the pain is real. But that is when we need to engage the most, to overcome our feelings to engage in the larger project, to understand that not all our opponents are driven by hate, even though that may be how their words impact us. To turn away from such dialogue is to fail ourselves."

To which I have to say (pardon the vulgarity but no other expression so precisely captures the exactly the nature of Newsom and Sullivan's appeasements) "Bullshit!"

No civil rights have ever been won through dispassionate reason. They are won by drawing a line (often an unpopular legal line like Brown v. Board of Education) in the sand and saying anything beyond this cannot stand.

That is not to say that every bigot is "a bad person." I have roots in the south and have known many people who were good and loving and bigoted. Like Rick Warren, they would have been delighted to serve donuts and water to civil rights protestors—so long as the protests changed nothing. And in the best of them, the bigotry was still hateful. It was something one had to confront at every turn. Sometimes that meant not inviting these "good people" into your home.

Rick Warren also believes man co-existed with dinosaurs. Anyone who has studied geology knows this is wrong (or God is an extremely gifted trickster, who created carbon 14 in such a way that it fools all scientific analysis, and why would God do that?). If that was the extent of his error, I could accept his being invited onto the national stage. We could use the invitation to open a national dialog on religion and science.

Rick Warren, however, is a man who compares gay marriage to incest and pedophilia. No matter how nice a man Warren is otherwise, this is no more acceptable than the beliefs of segregationists who believed blacks were less than human.

I cannot believe you, President Elect Obama, would ask the nicest Anti-Semite preacher or the most liberal racist preacher to give the invocation—even if they quoted tons of Biblical passages to justify their beliefs. Why then is this nice anti-homosexual preacher being given a national stage?

I am not a gay man sir, but your blindness to this human rights issue offends me. I call on you to draw a line sir and say that being hateful to other humans because of their race, religion, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation—even if it is politely expressed hatefulness—is not acceptable. Resend your invitation to Rick Warren.

Giles A. de Mello