Monday, December 22, 2008 - Posts
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Hey, wanna come over for some fruitcake and a long talk about Rick Warren? Me neither. But Dahlia, unless I've been blogging my blackouts, I never said he was a great man. I don't know what kind of man he is, other than one I mostly disagree with and will forever associate with my worst babysitter ever, who constantly lugged around his purpose-driven book, along with her other favorite volume, which was on how to make a fortune in 30 days. (Needless to say, her plan for raking in the big bucks did not involve providing excellent child care. And I saw her working at a Kinkos not too long ago.)
So where we differ is not so much on Warren himself, or over gay marriage, for that matter. It's not over censorship, as I'm sure we agree that the KKK can march around Skokie to their shriveled little hearts content and yay, odious speech. Though you think Obama's pick of Warren as official prayer-sayer is bad optics and I think it's great politics, even that isn't our real difference. Which is that I don't think opposing gay marriage automatically makes someone a bigot or a homophobe, and if I read you correctly, you do. But can you really write off the millions of people who read their Bible that way? (Don't they write off gay people?) Doubtless some do, but their traditional definition of marriage does not necessarily make them haters, does it? How could I view the Bible as (among other things) a cultural document and not see Bible readers as products of our various cultures, too?
The conservative Illinois town where I grew up (and where Obama not only lost to McCain in '08, but to ALAN KEYES for U.S. Senate in ‘04) was so lacking in diversity that we didn't have that much to work with, bias-wise, and the only conflict was the Christians versus the other Christians. Some of the neighbor kids who went to different churches were always letting us know that because we were Catholic (had not been baptized the right way, and had parents who drank and danced, though not as often as they would have liked) we were totally going to hell. So we'd run into the house - Oh no, so-and-so says we haven't been saved! -- and my Republican dad, whose greatest heartbreak in life is that he somehow wound up with the world's most liberal daughter - yes, everything really is relative -- never got the least bit worked up about our likely damnation, or ever, ever hit back: "That's what they believe,'' he'd say, and that would be that. Which was kind of frustrating at the time. But when I think now about what tolerance looks like, I do think of him shrugging and going, "That's what they believe,'' and I wish I were more like that.
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Poring through Michael Calderone's "Top Ten Media Blunders of 2008" in the Politico, it was hard not to notice how many of his favorite Fourth Estate screw-ups had to do, in some obvious or oblique way, with sexism purportedly making its way into the press. You've got the whole Hillary-in-New-Hampshire episode, in which Hillary wept and the media's subsequent mockery mobilized women voters on her behalf (or so the mythology goes); you've got MSNBC's choice to hand its election coverage over to Chris "She-Devil" Matthews; you've got the "Obama's baby mama" Chyron on Fox; and you've got the David Shuster pimp-Chelsea Clinton thing—along with the questionable coverage of two alleged Big Macher mistresses, Vicki Iseman and Rielle Hunter.
You could make the case that all the media's stumbles over sexism should alarm women, but I wonder if the opposite isn't the case. It shows how sensitive we've become to the various pitfalls inherent in covering women. (And, well, maybe too sensitive, but that's another debate.)
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Hello to all the XX women—major fan here. I'll be guest-blogging with you for a week, and I'm thrilled to join such an august set of old friends and admired colleagues. So thrilled, actually, I'm buying everybody a round of the "spam, egg, rice and seaweed Hawaiian specialty" that we now know our new president loves. Look for it in the mail, and please warn your letter carriers.
Before we move on to, say, the hot "Baby Alive" doll trend (" 'Be careful,' reads the doll's promotional literature, 'just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the 'potty' and sometimes she can't'"), I do want to say I think Hanna's on to something when she calls Obama's Rick Warren move "tokenism." It is a token gesture, and that's exactly what makes it irritating. For what seems like ages, liberals have dutifully swallowed the lesson that America is a center-right country, way more in line with Warren than with Wallis; that the bulk of Americans regard liberal values with suspicion; and that any Democrat who aspires to national leadership has to mince around either shading his liberalism (think of Bill Clinton and Don't Ask Don't Tell) or mounting grand conciliatory gestures toward the other side's values (think of John Kerry's attempts to look militant). This is a pretty broad phenomenon: In my day job at the New Republic magazine, I often write about Congress, and while hoofing around the country to cover congressional races this fall I was struck—as I was in 2006, too—by how far the infinitely adaptable red-district Democratic candidates go to demonstrate their sympathies with conservative mores, while the Republican candidates tend to feel far less pressed to make those kinds of adaptations or token gestures. (George W. Bush sure didn't see the need to tap Gene Robinson or Katharine Jefferts Schori to deliver his inaugural invocation.)
Of course, it's nice that many Democrats try to rise above dogma and pitch themselves to a broader coalition. That's the Obama Doctrine, as much as anything is. But at a certain point, the frantic efforts to smooth conservative America's ruffled feathers get damned tedious. I think Rick Warren was that point for many.
And why the hotshot obsession? What with signing up first Hillary Clinton and now Warren, whom the Independent aptly called "the most popular religious figure in the US bar the Pope," Obama seems to be on a mission to get every American with ~20 million followers to stand next to him on a podium and authenticate the breathtaking range of his appeal. But I can't help wishing he had chosen somebody a little less garishly megawatt, for God's sake. Some slightly more obscure person of good works; somebody less political and less token; somebody more along the lines of Kirbyjon Caldwell during the W. years. That kind of choice, not Warren, would have been the real surprise.
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E.J., I gotta say, thank you for going through all the stages of grief re: Rick Warren so I didn't have to. Here's the thing: Really, who cares. It "sends a message"—nah, don't care. As Peggy Noonan said of Jeremiah Wright, I'm finding it hard to be truly upset about this one. Maybe just distracted by my upsetness over the questionable future regulators who will be "sending a policy" in the form of "trillions of dollars."
So the guy is a huge homophobe: Meh, sorry Barney, still don't care. As you yourself have so often observed—and I'm "addressing" Barney Frank here, for the record—"the average American is less homophobic than he thinks he's supposed to be and more racist than he's willing to admit." Why is this? Well, statistically, the average American knows at least a handful of gay people. The average American knows a handful of women who've had abortions. The average American does not think people in either camp are evil for what they have "done." The average American probably even empathizes with the pain involved in belonging to said camp in an America whose moral culture is dominated by guys like Rick Warren. But wait, let's talk about that for a sec: Rick Warren's book is called The Purpose-Driven Life. It is not called The Perverts and Babykillers Bringing the Country to Ruin. I am sure he has said a lot of ridiculous things, but has he ever likened Gay Pride parades to Murderer's Pride Parades a la Ted Haggard?
I'd like to hear the Rev. Michael Pfleger on this one. One of my favorite things about being raised in such an old and big and totally screwed-up religion is all the deviant and/or dissident clerics the Catholic Church has produced over the years, exposing on a grand and tragic and awesome scale the fallibility of humanity and the consciousness that instills in us the sense that there must be something bigger and more beyond just our own petty civilization, and we can glean what that bigger thing wants from us. My favorite at the moment is the late Father Bob Drinan, the anti-war Jesuit priest Frank replaced in Congress upon the request of a new Pope uneasy at the thought of a representative in the world's most important legislature who said of abortion "I think abortion is a terrible thing … except for women."
At some point I expect science will allow mothers to test prenatally for homosexuality, and some sort of epic crisis of conscience will force Christendom to see humanity in a more nuanced light, in part because we'll all have much more pressing matters to confront by that point, like the economic apocalypse and so on.
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Another post from Hanna Rosin, who is having technical difficulties:
Think of it this way: This is not a gesture that signifies acceptance or even necessarily a desire for reconciliation. Instead it has a faint air of condescension, even tokenism. It puts evangelicals in the position of feeling grateful to be included.
I agree with you, Dahlia. Warren will never budge on gay marriage or abortion. But the tide is turning against people like Warren. The younger generation of Christians gives gay marriage a big shrug.
Leave them out of the next four or eight years, and they'll do what they always do: rise again. Give them a place—a symbolic one, as E.J. points out—and the whole thing will go more smoothly.
Read the rest of the XX Factor's discussion about Rick Warren giving the inaugural invitation.
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Well, Hanna, I don't think anyone is advocating censoring Warren. He has the same freedom to speak as does every other American, and certainly far more access to public forums. Nor do I think that failing to ask him to give the inaugural prayer would have been equivalent to pretending that evangelicals don't exist, any more than Reagan's failing to invite the late Rebbe Schneerson to give an inaugural prayer was equivalent to pretending that the Lubavitcher Chassidim didn't exist. Or more to Melinda's point, that Obama's failing to ask Christopher Hitchens to give the inaugural antiprayer is equivalent to pretending that atheists exist. Of course they exist. Of course they are free to preach, evangelize (which Hitchens does with particular enthusiasm), organize, and speak in the public square. Go forth. Multiply. Knock yourselves out in the marketplace of theological ideas.
The objection has been to giving an extremist-someone who thinks women who've had abortions were running concentration camps in their wombs, as Katha Pollitt put it so brilliantly in the L.A. Times-the honorary job of saying the nation's prayer over the presidency.
That said, over the course of this discussion, I have somehow talked myself into the other point of view. (Or maybe spending a weekend-long blizzard locked in the house with an energetic 5-year-old has just worn me down, and I'm willing to give in on anything that doesn't involve screechy toys. Is there a special circle of hell for screechy toy manufacturers and for "friends" who give said toys? This is my prayer: Please, God, let it be so!) Giving Rick Warren the temporary job of preacher-in-chief is an entirely symbolic scrap thrown to the right-wing evangelicals. In more important news, Obama appears to be ready to launch a reality-based science policy, to authorize stem-cell research, to lift the global gag rule on family planning services, to roll back Don't Ask Don't Tell, and to take similar actions on truly urgent issues. Warren's prayer won't actually have much particular public effect-except to give Obama his reverse "Sister Souljah" moment and the cover of appearing inclusive. Fine. Fine. Prez-elect, go play with whatever preacher you want to play with. I don't care, so long as I don't have to listen to the screechy toys.
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Melinda, you are precisely right that extreme right/left black/white thinking got us into this polarized, judgmental 2008 mess, and that Obama’s willingness to get beyond such thinking is exactly why so many of us were attracted to him. But isn’t the argument that Rick Warren must be a great man because he reverse tithes just as absolutist? Nobody (except maybe Hitchens) is suggesting that Warren hasn’t done extraordinary work toward relieving AIDS and poverty and global warming. But that doesn’t change the fact that not only does he not speak for all Americans, he also expressly rejects some of their very basic rights. We can debate about whether the right to marry someone you love constitutes a basic right. But—and here is where Hanna and I probably differ—I don’t think Warren is really interested in having that kind of argument.
I also think it’s not quite fair to claim that any criticism of Warren represents some kind of generalized anti-religious bias. Too many people of very deep faith don’t make Warren’s cut. That doesn’t make us religion-haters. It just means that you can’t call it “bringing people together” if you are honoring one group’s message while denigrating another’s.
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