12/19/2008

Prayer Rower Pisses Off Partisans Left And Right

With the election of Obama, does that mean he is required to dance to the Left tunes? Apparently not. President-elect Obama has picked Rick Warren, head of the 20,000 member Saddleback church in California, to say the prayer at Obama's inauguration.

One of my right-wing co-workers who eats his lunch in his car listening to Rush Limbaugh said lots of "conservatives" think Warren is too weak on abortion. Another friend who keeps her ear glued to left-wing radio via Air American told me how Obama is pissing off the gay community by picking Warren who opposed the recent anti-gay marriage amendment in California.

I may have heard Warren's name mentioned a few times and was reminded that he invited McCain and Obama to his church together during the campaign. It's a beautiful sight to see the myopic, partisan visionaries lined up against the Left and Right walls of American politics seeing the tone of the government settle into the center. Did the Left wing think the political world was going to suddenly veer to the Left ditch? Lord knows that's what the Right wing was telling us during the campaign. The no-compromisers are going to learn, if you want to tear down the partisan wall in America, you will be meeting in the middle.

From my humble perspective, politics is about working out compromises among groups with differing opinions. The Right may want the whole pizza to be sausage and the Left may want the pizza to be peperoni, but the result in a democracy will be a pepperoni and sausage mixed with some onions, mushrooms and green peppers sprinkled in to represent some of those third party voices that can't scream, bitch and complain as loud as the mouthpieces on the Left and Right.




From The Right...

"Unless Rick Warren has changed, he is very disappointing in the pro-life cause. Just ask pro-life leaders their opinion. He doesn't like to deal with it at his church. It just seems funny that he is known as 'pro-life' when he largely ignores the subject and teaches others to do the same. I fear God for these 'men of God'. We have lost 50 million babies, and most won't say a word. Reminds me of Nazi Germany or our slavery days. Very few spoke out. It was more comfortable to keep quiet."

E-mail to Pat Robertson' Christian Broadcast Network @ Alert Net.

From the Left...

"My take on this is that President-elect Obama and his staff are being incredibly disrespectful to Progressives who were a major part of getting the Obama-Biden ticket elected and having Warren anywhere near the festivities on January 20th is just flat-out stupid politically.

People in the Religious Right will never support Barack Obama or his agenda, so giving a homophobic bigot like Warren such a prominent place on such a special day for our country will do absolutely nothing to gain Obama support from that lot. Meanwhile, he will piss off a lot of his supporters before he even takes office and will be going against what the mainstream of America thinks by boosting someone who is anti-choice, for continuation of the Iraq occupation and who clearly hates gay people."

Bob Geiger @ Huffington Post.

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