Two views on Rick Warren
David Quigg of HuffPost has (imo) a pretty sensible discussion of the Rick Warren matter. His "what would Obama do" conceit for the column made me roll my eyes a little, but digging past that, there's some good stuff there. Discussion of Obama's pragmatism, of making allies, of the question of how feasible it is to "bridge some of our fundamental differences," of Saul Alinsky's book Rules for Radicals and Obama's own book The Audacity of Hope. There's some good nuance, and some difficult questions, but the piece ends by noting that Rick Warren is really not the central issue; if we want marriage equality, we've got better things to do than get distracted by the Rick Warren issue. I'm inclined to agree.
But then again, an unsigned opinion piece in the Chicago Sun-Times takes the opposite tack; it essentially says that Warren is bad in a variety of ways, not just on the same-sex marriage issue, and we shouldn't be cutting anyone any slack here.
I guess my overall feeling about this thing is that Obama has been saying all along that he wants to work with conservatives as well as liberals. He can either follow through on that--which will inevitably mean annoying some of us liberals at least some of the time--or he can reject it, bringing down criticism to the effect that he's engaged in politics-as-usual.
I suspect that I'm not the only liberal who loves the idea of reaching across party lines to work together but also wants the results to end up being liberal results. Let's all work together, to accomplish my goals!
Anyway. There are lots of difficult questions around the Rick Warren thing, and seeing Milk recently has only made me even more ambivalent about what the right path is. But I do agree with Quigg that we have more important things to focus on than Warren. But perhaps, as a nonbeliever, I'm naively underestimating the symbolic and metaphorical power of the inaugural invocation.