Let's keep focused on the long term goal. I wish that all the progressive anger about Rick Warren speaking at the Inauguration be focused on shedding light on the actions of last days of the Bush Administration and how to fix its legacy of social and environmental destruction (to find out what's being done to try and fix it, click here). The Warren invite reminds many of the bad old days, when only social conservatives ruled and many of us felt like we had no voice. But it's Obama sending a message to the other half of American, saying, come join us.
The Bush days are over, but change won't happen overnight. I choose to believe Obama asked Warren to speak in order to begin a healing process that ensures we never again endure eight years of such brutally polarized and destructive governance as what we've just been through. The lesson of the unipolar rule of the Bush era is that inclusion and dissent are essential to good governance. When Human Rights Campaign leader Joe Solomonese can take his president elect to task and expect a response, change does happen. Progressives don't have to agree with Obama's every belief or action, nor should they expect to. It's fair to say about the half the country is team Warren, not team Solomonese. But if both the Warrens and the Solomoneses of this world are at the table, and we have eight more years of dialogue, think about where we could be when the Obama Administration is entering its last days.
Instead, we're here: Re-endangering endangered species and women's health. I wish progressives would get half as mad about today's HHS decision to publish "its "conscience rights" rule as they did about Warren. The Bush rule is designed to protect healthcare providers from being denied employment or being fired if they refuse to provide abortions, emergency contraception, or certain forms of birth control because of providers' religious or moral beliefs. What it really does is allow health care providers to control women's options. I don't know what Warren thinks of the rule. I'd like to hear it.
Deborah Kotz at USA Today continues, "200,000 Planned Parenthood members filed comments against the rule, organization Vice President Laurie Rubiner tells me. One of the concerns raised--including by me--was whether patients would even be informed of their doctor's refusal to administer certain procedures or if they would simply be kept in the dark about their options."
Instead, Bush Adminstration officials today issued no legal requirement for a health care provider to have any kind of conversation with a patient about the provider's views. "While current law already protects the religious beliefs of health care providers and professionals, the Bush Administration's Health and Human Services issued a 'refusal clause' rule today that is so broad it could limit women's access to comprehensive health care and other services."
In the words of RH Reality Check, the rule "expand[s] the definition of health care providers protected by provider conscience regulation and allow dissenting providers to refuse to refer patients for treatment in addition to refusing treatment itself."
An early, leaked draft version of the regulation specifically suggested that providers who consider hormonal birth control to be an abortifacient should not have to prescribe it or refer patients for its prescription. The regulation relied on arcane, non-medical definitions of pregnancy to suggest that the belief that pregnancy begins at fertilization is valid and that, a hormonal contraceptive, which anti-choicers claim block implantation of a fertilized egg, is tantamount to abortion. The second, released draft, now published, does not conflate contraception with abortion, but in its broad scope nonetheless provides protections for providers who would like to do just that. "The regulation confirms what we feared," says Marilyn Keefe of the National Partnership for Women & Families. "HHS refused to allay any of the concerns raised in earlier iterations. Contraception clearly remains a target."
This is a last, radical step from Bush, Leavitt, et al. The vast majority of Americans favor access to contraception. A little less than half believes life begins at conception, a Warren view. A little less than half believe gays should be allowed to marry, but three-quarters believe in domestic partnership rights for homosexuals. Asking Warren to offer the invocation is an olive branch to half of America. There has to be room for most of us under Obama's new tent.
Follow Morra Aarons-Mele on Twitter: www.twitter.com/morra_am
What Morra and so many others forget is that outrage over gay rights is at such a pitch because no one else has stood up for them, or at least damn few, over generations of politics. For generations gays have chosen NOT to be one-issue voters (unlike evangelicals) and have been a force in progressive politics. While gays have set aside their own interests and promoted, supported, worked for, and voted for progressive candidates and issues, straight and African-American progressives have stood idly by when gay civil rights were at stake. Where were these people in 1969 during the Stonbewall uprising? Where were these people when gays were beaten and murdered for being gay? Where were these peple when DOMA was passed, and when Clinton caved on Don't Ask, Don't Tell? If there is gay outrage now, and outrage on the part of the latecomers to the issue, it is because for an American century they have looked behind them to see who "had their back" and NO ONE else was there. Don't ever say that the folks upset at Warren have not been there for YOUR issues. They have. And they've never been rewarded or ackowledged for it.
Rick Warren says that gays are unnatural and don't deserve full human rights (in Uganda in march of this year, for just one example). That dehumanizing language leads directly to beatings and killings.
You do not reach out a hand to walk together with brutality and violence -- you denounce it and say it is not acceptable in a civilized society.
Rick Warren is welcome to the table as long as he does not try to claim that some people are less than human. We tried that with Jews, blacks, women, etc. -- and it only leads to death.
Obama needs to tell America that is NOT acceptable to say that ANY group of people is less human than any other.
Rick Warren is wrong t-shirt:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sioenroux/3123031642/
Your recitation of these opinion snapshots continue to flog the false argument that this whole uproar is about difference of opinion. It's not. It's about Warren. If Obama wanted, as you see it, to send an "olive branch," then he could have chosen another pastor who holds identical views but who had not just last month participated in a secular political campaign to strip gays of a court-granted right.
Your entire essay misses the point.
Gay people, especially women, have been just as vocal and involved in the fight against the religious right's attack on women's reproductive freedom and their contention that their faith allows them to harm others, as they have for their own civil rights. Implying that they haven't just isn't true.
Warren's words and actions against the gay community and women's health are unforgivable. Warren is in league with some of the worst anti-gay leaders on our planet:
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/faith_and_politics/rick_warren_moderate_1.html
The religious right needs to be marginalized, not lionized. They need to be told their views on women's health and homosexuality are archaic, inhumane and UNACCEPTABLE.
Today the American people would never accept an administration who held out an olive branch to the KKK for their views on race, why the hell should they accept outreach to a man or group with similar prejudices based on gender and orientation? There is just no spinning Warren's role in this inauguration as a gesture of unity when it rewards a man and a group of people for their hate.
I have been fighting for reproductive rights. I spoke at a No on 4 and 8 rally and equated the two. I have done my part and continue to work to preserve reproductive rights in this nation.
I call on Morra Aarons-Mele to join the fight for marriage equality and to fight for the day when someone like Rick Warren is inadmissible in public discourse because of his bigoted repressive views about both gay people and reproductive rights.
Rick Warren is against abortion too.
I am as offended by his comparison of abortion to the holocaust as I am at his comparison of same-sex couples to pedophiles.
We cannot lay down our fight to fight yours because they are the same fight. You're just not holding up your part of the struggle.
There is much more at issue than just what matters to us. And your marginalizing us of needing to "get out of our 'self-imposed gheto'" is insulting. Our "ghettos" typically have higher home values than yours. When we move into "your" neighborhoods, YOUR home values go up because we actually FIX our homes up and take care of our stuff. Dont believe me? Check out the highest income and property values of San Diego Central. You will find it is Hillcrest. Who do you think owns the majority of properties in Hillcrest? You got it. GAYS!
I'm a registered Democrat (at least, I was). I notified the DNC that I was changing my party from Democrat to Independent, and the reason was because of Obama's selection of Warren for the inauguration. I then downloaded a registration form from my state's online voter registration - changed parties on the form - and mailed it. This may not be dramatic, but if enough of us do this, we'll certainly be counted.
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/faith_and_politics/rick_warren_moderate_1.html
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Morra
Good governance may require inclusion and dissent, but only as long as the inclusion folds in dissenters into your own goals and inclusion does not further their conflicting goals. And dissent is fine as long as it doesn't drive the current "governance" to act against America's best interests.
Now, that said, is it not possible for the new Congress to remove the "conscience clause" from Bush's regulation? Or for Obama to wipe it out with an Executive Order that would restore the original standards? Bush may be trying to govern past the inauguration date by pulling these stunts, but I am sure there are ways to undo the damage, either presidentially or legislatively.
I'm getting sick and tired of so-called friends like Morra Aarons-Mele who trivialize our fight for equal protection under the law.
I'm betting the people who think the Warren debacle is trivial haven't recently had their families outlawed.
who will have more rights because of it? i know one man who will have been told he has no place taking part in his own government, so i know one man who will have, at least symbolically, lost rights. but who will have gained them?
rick warren has heinous opinions, but ultimately all he has is his one vote, and his free speech. which of those two things would you take away from him?
i'd suggest you'd find more success spending this energy you use on being hateful back at him, and instead spend it doing what he did in the first place... go out and convince people of your side of things. go out and win votes for your cause.
What getting Warren taken off the inaugural bench would do is send a message to him and all of the other bigots out there like him, that their views on homosexuals and women's rights are unacceptable in our society.
Obama should be leading by example and expressing that message but by having Warren give his invocation he implies that Warren's views on gay and women's rights are acceptable.
Sorry to say we've become callous to Bush's evil. Hardly even a blip on the radar screen anymore.
Warren is anti-choice, so what does his inclusion signal? Maybe it will be tougher to reverse these rules than we may have hoped? Maybe we will see more insensitivity to choice advocates and feminists as well as to gay civil rights advocates?
Think people were just hoping for better than Warren.