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A post from Hanna Rosin, en route to parts tropical:
I have to take a break from my vacation to object to this liberal groupthink. We elected Obama partly because he is able to talk to people with different views. Our standards for hearing out a religious leader should not be: Does he believe everything we believe? It should be: Is he willing to talk to the other side? Many months ago, Rick Warren gave the stage over to Obama—showing a form of open-mindedness from an evangelical leader we haven't seen since Billy Graham. Now it's Obama's turn to reciprocate. Your strategy—E.J. and others—would involve pretending evangelicals don't exist. And what good would that do?
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Michelle Duggar gave birth to her 18th child this week. The megamom is something of an icon in homeschooling and Quiverfull circles, but whenever I see her in the news, on the Today show, or on her family's numerous reality-TV shows and specials, I find myself frustrated.
I don't yet and may never have kids, but I do like them and respect the decision to have a big family if you're up to the challenge. But the Duggars bug, primarily because of their sanctimony. They talk about being debt-free as if it's a moral issue and brag about caring for the large family thanks to living frugally, but they also generate income from rental properties and, no doubt, from their TV shows and their recently released book. It seems dishonest to suggest that everyone can afford their lifestyle if they shop in thrift stores and buy in bulk when that's not what, presumably, actually keeps the Duggars financially afloat. Furthermore, while I respect their right to hold incredibly conservative views on dating (no kissing before marriage! handholding only when engaged!), gender roles, and childbearing, I hate the reverence for Michelle Duggar as some sort of supermom. According to their TV show, weaned babies are handed off to older children, usually the teenage girls, who cook all the food, do the laundry, and do the cleaning in addition to taking care of their "buddies." It seems that they do most of the work while their mother collects the glory. The girls say that they enjoy their lives and that people who think they're too sheltered should "get over it," but I wonder how many options they truly have.
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Noreen, when I returned to Dallas, the natural church for me to attend would have been the one I grew up in. But as it happens, that church has been torn apart by the debate over gay marriage. Half the church supports Robinson; half adamantly oppose him, and a significant minority want to leave the Anglican community altogether. Hell, there are even a few members who still oppose the ordination of women! Frankly, I couldn't be bothered. As someone who struggles with faith—most of the time I’m agnostic or not even that sure—I didn’t want to spend my Sunday mornings arguing with people whose views I found repugnant. So, now to the extent I go to church at all, I'm surrounded by people who think exactly like me. But I’ve sometimes second-guessed my decision as morally lazy and cowardly. I might have been well-positioned, as a native daughter of Dallas, to make the case for the pro-Robinson forces at my old church. Maybe I could have helped tilt the balance toward tolerance, and done more overall good, had I stayed.
In sum, I hate the Warren pick (and Wallis would have been a great candidate for all the reasons you say). But, maybe because I grew up among Republicans, I sometimes struggle with what real engagement with the other side looks like. My guess is that it makes everyone a little unhappy and uncomfortable. Don’t you know that there are right-to-lifers and anti-gay bigots right now who are just as furious at Warren as we are at Obama that Warren has even accepted this inaugural invitation. After all, he will be giving his blessing, in front of a national audience, to a pro-choice, pro-civil-union president. I'm not sure it's entirely clear who is co-opting whom. So, while I still wish Obama had picked someone else, and will be deeply disappointed if he backs away even one iota from equal rights for gays and lesbians at the policy level, I do think the symbolism cuts both ways.
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But Sara, aren't there ways Obama can create that dialogue without selling out his own beliefs? Picking Warren might make conservative evangelicals smile more kindly on Obama, but that choice also allows them to stay in a gay rights echo chamber, an inverted version of the liberal one you (and I) have put ourselves in. Instead, for instance, Obama could have asked Jim Wallis, the progressive evangelical who's a longtime friend, to bless his presidency. Wallis' work is mostly concerned with the plight of the poor. During his campaign to redirect religious-political dialogue away from social issues, he's in fact ended up saying some very interesting things about social issues. Like Obama, for instance, he's in favor of civil unions but not gay marriage. (Wallis: "I want churches that disagree on this to have a biblical, theological conversation and to live with their differences and not spend 90 percent of their denominational time arguing about this issue when 30,000 children are dying every single day because of poverty and disease.") People on both the left and the right recognize aspects of their beliefs in Wallis' work, but most probably also have serious disagreements with some of his teachings-isn't that sort of seductive nuance where dialogue starts?
Dahlia's absolutely correct to draw a distinction between public acts and private worship, but Obama's made it elegantly clear in the past that his religion and values shape the decisions he makes in public life. And, writer-in-chief that he is, he is acutely aware of the value of symbolism. That's precisely why this choice is so disappointing, because it means that he's given up a shot at intellectual honesty. He's not as far left on gay rights as I'd like him to be, but he could have publicized someone like Wallis who articulates the religious argument for his own position, in all its shades of gray.
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Rachael, I am so glad to be on this blog with you. You do make me examine myself for intellectual double standards. Remember, though, that we're critiquing the same politician—Barack Obama—for his ministerial choices, albeit different choices in different circumstances.
And, in response to your specific points, I do find those circumstances to be different in important ways. I found Wright's views to be appalling, but I found the Republican flogging of his views to be race-baiting. I suspected—no evidence, just a hunch—that he went to that church for political reasons, small-p political, socializing with the people who could help in Chicago politics and all that. So when Obama disavowed those views and quit the church, I shrugged off his attendance. I expect certain kinds of small compromises and hypocrisy from politicians, I suppose, and that one didn't seem especially large.
But like Dahlia, I find it to be a quite different thing to give a minister a national podium—essentially, to ask him to give the nation's prayer, to ask that minister to invoke his (can anyone remember a female in that spot?) divinity's blessing on our highest national office. How would you feel if it were Wright giving that prayer? What kind of racialized uproar would we be seeing?
And yet take a white extremist—someone who espouses what most of us see as unacceptable misogyny, someone who believes in evangelizing all people to his own religion, someone who gives voice to relatively extreme antigay sentiments (as Sara pointed out)—and give him a podium, and the mainstream nods at how inclusive Obama is.
I see a double standard here, but not the same one that you see.
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Like Dahlia amd E.J., I'm not thrilled with Obama's selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration, given Warren's opposition to gay marriage and many of his other views. At a time of high divorce rates and increased infidelity—and I'm talking about hetereosexuals, who are the real threat to the institution of marriage—I find it almost comically perverse that conservatives are against a group of people who so earnestly want to form committed, long-term, stable relationships sanctioned by God.
Indeed, when I recently moved temporarily to Dallas, my way of finding an Episcopal church for me and my daughter was to Google "gay," "bishop," "New Hampshire," and "Dallas." And sure enough, I quickly found the one congregation where every priest on the staff had supported Gene Robinson, and I feel right at home. But it did gnaw at me at the time that I just wanted to be preached to by the converted. After all, were I more committed to gay and lesbian rights, wouldn't I have joined precisely those Episcopal congregations where the issue is still an open wound—and believe you me, there are plenty to choose from in North Texas—and tried to persuade my less-enlightened congregants to see the light? I took the easy way out.
In this one sense, I do have grudging respect for Obama’s choice of Warren. Yes, it’s clearly a political calculation—but political in a good sense. I do believe Obama is genuinely trying to create dialogue with those who disagree with him in hopes of bringing a few more wayward souls along. If he can get even a few evangelicals to drop their active opposition to gay rights—to become more agnostic, so to speak, on this one issue—then that might, in fact, further the cause more than I'm doing on Sundays by kneeling, smug and self-satisfied, next to my fellow liberal parishioners.
Obama did, after all, actively campaign on bringing people together, and I remember at least thinking I supported that idea during the election. While I am sinfully spiteful enough after the damage of the Bush years to wish this unity would now take place under dark of night (or maybe involve issues I care less about), so long as Obama continues to push hard for equal rights for all Americans as a matter of policy, I have less of a problem with his otherwise entirely symbolic olive branch to Warren. However, if the result of such good-faith efforts is to provide an opportunity for right-leaners like Rachael to tar Obama again with Jeremiah Wright, then never mind: Bring back those good ole partisan politics.
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Dahlia, you ask if there's a difference between Obama's choice of a "personal spiritual adviser" and the public and political act of picking Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation. I agree there's a difference, but probably not in a way that you will like.
If Obama had attended a quiet, out-of-the-way church that focused on helping its congregants achieve spiritual growth, one where the kindly old minister made house calls to the elderly and infirm, sure, it would be unkind to compare that person to Rick Warren. But if Obama had attended that kind of church, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he attended a church whose preacher sought out the spotlight and sold DVDs of sermons in which he preached anti-American views. And Obama had a 20-year relationship with that church. Isn't that lengthy commitment, however personal, more telling than a brief and symbolic political act?
Let's frame this another way: If the Republicans had nominated a candidate who attended Rick Warren's church for 20 years, would it have been fair to question that person's choice of spiritual adviser? (Heck, I'd have questioned it.)
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Not surprisingly, and nevertheless unwelcomely, the Bush administration yesterday officially issued a rule barring clinics and hospitals that receive federal funding from refusing to hire medical staff who say they won't participate in procedures because of their moral or religious convictions. This is a bad and confusing idea; it takes a step down the path to nurses and druggists deciding whether you get the morning-after pill on the day you want it. Dahlia has pointed out the contradictions and hypocrisies here: The Bush administration is evincing much concern for the morals of pro-life health care workers even as it dictates a script of contested and medically inaccurate information for abortion providers. Obama will surely revoke this rule, but he can't do it with a quick stroke of the pen. In the meantime, let's at least refrain from calling this "the conscience rule," as the administration urges. It's really a rule about why your conscience is better than my conscience.
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Two things: First. A reader writes to chide me for using the word religious interchangeably with “right-wing evangelical” in my last post. Point well-taken. I didn’t mean to suggest that all religious Americans are represented by Rick Warren. Second, Rachael, surely there is a difference between Obama’s personal spiritual leader and the man he picks to bless the inauguration and his presidency? The choice of Warren in this case was a public and political act.
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E.J.,
Let me start by saying that there is probably very little outside of abortion that the Rev. Rick Warren and I agree on. My righty-ness has more to do with political and economic conservatism than social issues. I am a staunch supporter of gay rights and gay marriage, and I think the best marriages are equal partnerships, not employer-employee relationships. I don't know what the afterlife will bring, but I doubt it's a Christians-only country club.
So I respect and share your concerns about the message President-elect Obama is sending by inviting Warren to do the inaugural invocation. But isn't there an interesting parallel here? Obama attended Trinity United and listened to its pastor, the infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for 20 years. Jeremiah Wright, who is on tape saying, "God Damn America," who has claimed that the government created AIDS for the purpose of "genocide against people of color," and who just a few weeks ago marked the occasion of Pearl Harbor Day by calling it the anniversary of the United States dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.
Yet complaining about Obama's association with Wright was verboten during the election. Conservatives who raised the issue were viewed as intolerant, racist, or muckraking. It was a silly issue blown out of proportion and gave no indication of what kind of president Obama would be, we were told.
Personally, I'm no fan of extremism of any stripe. So I hope that everyone who is so up in arms about Warren right now can at least take a second and reconsider whether we righties were so wrong to complain about Wright.
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E.J.,
I agree. Obama’s decision to ask Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration shows exactly what happens when bipartisanship becomes an end in itself. The president-elect continues to confuse reaching across the aisle with being principled. Sometimes the principle is just too important to compromise. Both Obama and Warren are to be credited for reaching out across the chasm that separates liberals and evangelicals in America. Each has signaled a willingness to talk and—to their huge credit—to listen to ideas different from their own. But as you explain, Warren’s views on women, stem-cell research, and homosexuality are not moderate. He doesn’t even dress them up as moderate!
If Obama wanted to signal his continued respect for Warren and for religious Americans, he could have done so in a thousand ways that would have welcomed them into the tent, without banishing and insulting those already inside.
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Now the Times suggests the recession may spell the end of beauty as we know it, particularly the 21st-century plastic kind. Apparently, the economic downturn has resulted in fewer women getting elective boob jobs and sushi-party Botox injections. God forbid that on top of a skyrocketing unemployment rate, America will be further reduced to suffer the return of sagging breasts and smile lines. Will this recession stop at nothing? As a marketing adviser to plastic surgeons queries rhetorically, "If you are going for buttock implants, do you really need that?” For some, the answer may increasingly be: "No. I do not need those buttock implants." While I'm saddened to think that women who dream of looking like the bolted-on-breasted and frozen-faced cast members of The Real Housewives of Orange County may have their dreams deferred, perhaps more women will turn to alternative beauty therapies, instead—yoga to combat gravity's pull, cosmetic acupuncture treatments that have been used since the Sung Dynasty—and grow old gracefully for less.