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  Do I Really Care About the Temporary Preacher-in-Chief?

  Posted Monday, December 22, 2008 11:47 AM | By E.J. Graff
  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.
  Filed under: Barack Obama, Christopher Hitchens, inauguration, Rick Warren

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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