How Gay is This?

Obama's invitation to Rick "Homos are the same as pedophiles" Warren to perform the invocation at his inauguration is indefensible.

I feel betrayed and embittered.

I feel disappointed and discouraged.

I feel like someone invited my worst enemy to a celebration I've longed for my whole life.

Talking to my fellow Obama supporters I'm getting the same feedback from them.

Contributing most of all to our collective migraine over this affair I believe are the multitudinous ironies involved, almost all of which are seemingly, ubelievably unintentional.

I mean for Christ's sake - we're liberals.  Obama's gang is a team of liberals (I'm hoping?).  We're supposed to do intentional irony, not unintentional.  That's what the GOP does when they rail about declining morals and get caught the next day with a hooker under their desk sucking the family values out of them.

We're supposed to be smarter, dare I say snarkier than all of this messy business.  Yet Obama seems to be willfully oblivious to how he has allowed cynicism's ugly shadow to loom behind what should be the most optimistic American day in a generation.

Let's have an irony run-down, shall we?

First and foremost there is the irony of the guy in this beefcake photo being super-friendly with a homophobe.  Because if this picture were any gayer it would be blowing George Michael in a public bathroom.

Second and more tragically there is the enormous irony of a bigot being invited anywhere near the inauguration of our first African-American President. 

Call me crazy but I think the first black President's swearing in ceremony should be a bigotry free zone.  Don't know why but that just makes some sort of cosmic sense to me being that African-Americans have historically been the most oppressed minority in the USA.

Third, for the life of me I cannot figure out why there is a prayer allowed anywhere near the swearing in of someone for what is Constitutionally a secular office.  

Folks it is a fact that there was no publicly sanctioned invocation at any inaugural until 1933 which means we swore in 31 Presidents (including Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln) without so much as one shouted "hallelujah" or muttered "amen".

Well it seems to me the country hummed along just fine unless you want to somehow blame the Civil War on a dearth of inaugural God talkin'.

There is also a "benediction" to be given.  A fricking benediction?  OK, are we at a church service now or a secular, civic ritual?  What's next?  Will we all be asked to sing along with the new "National Hym"?

I'm getting confused and I bet the rest of the people who believe in the Jeffersonian "wall of separation of church and state" are too. 

To quote the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."

By having a Christian prayer are we not thereby governmentally endorsing Christianity as our state religion?

Don't think so?  How would you feel if there was a Muslim Imam praying instead of a pastor?

I rest my case.

You see I believe what happens between a man and his God, lack of Gods, or 457 Gods is between him and whatever he believes or doesn't believe in.  However this has no place in the public square and the laws of this land would back me up.  

So as an agnostic I find it frustrating that there is an official prayer at the swearing in of the most powerful secular office-holder in the country.  

I suppose it raises the question though - are things so bad now we that we have been reduced to publicly abdicating responsibility for our future and instead begging an imaginary man in the sky to bless us with 8 years of prosperity?  

Why don't we just do a fucking rain dance while we're at it?

The point is we are not a "christian nation" and any public official who leads us down that slippery slope even one inch by lending tacit credibility to this repeatedly debunked notion is playing a most dangerous game.

Fourth and finally -  Obama has praised Rick Warren's AIDS work in Africa over and over as justification for his presence.

Yet Warren has aligned himself resolutely and repeatedly with a condom burning, witch-hunting pastor in Uganda (Martin Ssempe) who believes homosexuality should be criminalized!

Substitute the word "Jew" for homosexuality in that last sentence and you'll begin to understand how repellent Warren's associations are because make no mistake - Ssempe wants to purge gay people from Ugandan society the same way Hitler wanted to rid Germany of "the Jewish Menace."

That is hatred of an unconscionable measure and Obama should disavow Warren immediately for this connection alone. 

By the way, since the born-again Christian First Lady of Uganda basically gave the reins of the country's anti-AIDS program to Ssempe the infection rate there has shot up there by an average of 7 percent.  So instead of Rick Warren helping the AIDS problem in Africa (Obama's ancestral homeland!!) he is in fact making it far, far worse by pushing ineffective abstinence-only programs and encouraging discrimination against homosexuals.

In fact with his hateful rhetoric and associations one could very easily say Warren is encouraging violence against homosexuals, especially in African countries where the idea of masculinity is supreme and where the weak and the minority are not always guaranteed liberty or protection.

I could go on and on however I am going to try to go to bed and forget that this is happening.  

But I do desperately hope that Obama's office and staff are flooded with enough emails and phone calls so that we never have to see anything like this from him again.

Unless of course it's in another four years and the economy is rocking.  Then all will be forgiven because as Obama obviously thinks, hey, they're just queers.  Nobody cares about them anyway, right?

Right?

Wrong.