Few clergy demonstrate this corrosive tendency better than Rick Warren, who presides over a large church in Lake Forest, California. As pastor of Saddleback Church, “He has recently compared marriage by loving and committed same-sex couples to incest and pedophilia,” Sarah Posner writes in The Nation magazine. “He has repeated the Religious Right’s big lie that supporters of equality for gay Americans are out to silence pastors. He has called Christians who advance a social gospel Marxists. He is adamantly opposed to women having a legal right to choose an abortion.” Ms. Posner terms Obama’s selection of Warren as a “slap in the face,” and calls Warren the “absolute worst” pick.
On Anderson Cooper’s recent TV show Rick Warren explicitly conflated older Mormon men who marry 10-12 year old girls with two loving adults of the same sex who freely choose to plight their troth in marriage. Warren also compared gay marriage to incest, saying on the same show that “having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage” is analogous to a marriage of two unrelated adults of the same sex. It is difficult to imagine more hateful, less “Christian” sentiments than Rick Warren’s virulent condemnations of loving, life-long partnerships. For this reason alone it would be preferable that president-elect Obama omit any religious tainting of his historic Inauguration by Warren or any other religious figure.
There is also a consistent pattern of intrusion by both distant and domestic Roman Catholic officials into secular life in the United States. The latest Vatican document on bioethics, entitled Dignitas Personae, was released just last week. It injects the church’s condemnation of embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, the “morning-after pill” and other techniques of biological science into our secular public dialogue. Never mind that Catholics comprise less than a quarter of the population; their (all male) clergy seem to find sufficient time to impose narrow and dogmatic religious strictures on the majority of U.S. citizens but make too little time to weed out documented, institutionalized rape and pederasty by their fellow clergymen.
Adding insult to injury, a number of Roman Catholic officials, like Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Mo., brashly exposed their prejudices during the Presidential election when they threatened their parishioners with excommunication and loss of salvation. (Ow! That hurts!) Other priests advised their flocks to seek absolution in confession if they had strayed by voting for Mr. Obama. Egregious, yet totally ignored by the I.R.S., these outrageous sorties into secular life by church officials should have resulted in immediate loss of tax exemption.
Each of these examples would be sufficient by itself to make the case that religious intrusion into secular life exerts corrosive and destructive influence. Taken altogether, these few instances reflect just how pernicious is the effect of organized religion in perverting public discourse.
But another reason—the essential Christian hypocrisy embodied by Rick Warren—is an equally compelling basis for this new administration, which has promised major changes from the old ways, to avoid the contamination of Obama’s inaugural ceremony by religious association.
Consider the typical socio-religious charade in the Christian sect of Sarah Palin’s church, where great attention is paid to a collection of ancient texts commonly called the Bible (from the Greek biblios, or “the books”). The congregation in Palin’s Wasilla, Alaska church believes overwhelmingly that the Bible reveals exact messages (literal truth) from the very God their pastor claims can exorcise devils from unwitting sinners.
One of those Biblical messages takes the form of a story in which a wealthy ruler and successful merchant asked Jesus, “How can I get into heaven?” The response was simple (Matthew 19:16-24). Jesus is alleged to have replied, “If thou wilt be perfect, go [and] sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,…” This direction is both simple and unequivocal, and the typical exegeses of this section leave no doubt that the young ruler sorrowfully rejected Jesus’ advice precisely because he was too attached to his material possessions to give away even a few of them.
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