I’ve been talking about this Rick Warren thing for a while now. I’ve been called a drama queen, told that I’m getting my panties in a knot, that I should cut it out, and that President-elect Obama must have some unseen motive that makes this all right. Between aggravated sighs I’ve tried to relate my take on that.
I’m not saying Obama will be a bad president. Quite the contrary, I think he’ll be the right president at the right time in a lot of ways. I didn’t vote for him because I thought he’d put the LGBT community first on his agenda. I always knew that we weren’t, and I was prepared to live with that, especially given the alternative.
And I don’t actually expect President-elect Obama to change his mind on this. I certainly think it would be the right thing to do, but I don’t actually expect that he’ll throw away the political capital on LGBT civil rights. I’m not so naive that I think he’s anything but a grudging advocate of civil rights for us.
The problem, though, is that by asking Rick Warren to pray on behalf of the entire nation, President-elect Obama is giving Warren his seal of approval, which adds perceived value to Warren’s beliefs. Those beliefs include bigotry toward us, comparison between pedophiles and us, prejudice against us and understanding that we are broken and need to be fixed.
Clumsy white guy high five!
That’s what this prayer does; not to us in the LGBT community, but to the 22,000 members of Saddleback, all the other evangelicals who listen to James Dobson every day and think we should be wiped off the map, and people who just aren’t sure about this civil rights thing. It reinforces those wrong-headed and prejudicial beliefs that we so desperately need to get past.
If nothing else, Obama’s choice of a homophobic bigot to pray on behalf of the entire nation on his very first day in office should serve as a reminder to all of us that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are politically expendable. Our lives, our freedoms, our rights, and our needs as human beings are secondary to all else.
Our job, or at least mine, is to keep on reminding people of that so we aren’t terribly shocked when DOMA isn’t repealed because the fundies will get upset or DADT isn’t repealed because the Marines will get upset or marriage equality doesn’t happen because the straight people will get upset or the Matthew Shepard act isn’t enacted because the Republicans will get upset.
Their needs, rights, and freedom [insert any they] are up here [I'm holding my hand way above my head], and ours are way the hell down there [Now I'm pointing to the carpet].
We should never forget where the LGBT community stands with the Obama administration, and we should never let other people forget it either.
13 days, Mr. Obama. (Just in case.)
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