Start a Dialogue? Yes, we CAN!

Now that Rev. Rick Warren has delivered his invocation at the Obama inauguration, perhaps we can start to focus on how we’re going to be advancing the cause of gaining recognition of equal civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people under federal law.

For those who don’t think we should be ready to move forward, ready, let’s recap the situation:

Rick Warren is the pastor of the Saddleback Church, an evangelical mega-congregation in Lake Forest, California, and is the author of a best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life.

His notoriety in LGBT circles peaked when, after having equated same-sex marriage with incest, pedophilia and polygamy (though it’s pretty obvious to me that the equivalency of these things in his mind may charitably be limited to “these are things Rick doesn’t equate with marriage”), he was invited by the Obama people to deliver the invocation at the Inaugural.

Here is what he said at the time, in an interview:

Rick Warren: But the issue to me is, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

Steven Waldman: Do you think, though, that they are equivalent to having gays getting married?

Rick Warren: Oh I do.

If it was merely a matter of drawing a line from Point A to Point B, it might have been what Joe Solmonese of HRC hysterically called “a punch in the gut.” Or it might not.


There was was more to it – there was a point in the presidential campaign at which Barack Obama and John McCain appeared to speak at the Saddleback Church, and Rick Warren endured much criticism from hard core Right Wing Christianists for allowing Obama to speak.

I’ll let singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge have the floor now – I’ve said and written from a similar viewpoint, but I think I’ll give the platform to her. She actually had a chance to talk to Warren. Here is what she says about her meeting:

"On the day of the [Muslim Public Affairs Council ] conference [at which Rick Warren was the guest speaker] I received a call from Pastor Rick, and before I could say anything, he told me what a fan he was. He had most of my albums from the very first one. What? This didn’t sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher. He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection. He struggled with Proposition 8 because he didn’t want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman. He said he regretted his choice of words in his video message to his congregation about proposition 8 when he mentioned pedophiles and those who commit incest. He said that in no way, is that how he thought about gays. He invited me to his church, I invited him to my home to meet my wife and kids. He told me of his wife’s struggle with breast cancer just a year before mine. When we met later that night, he entered the room with open arms and an open heart. We agreed to build bridges to the future.”

After her meeting, Melissa Etheridge bravely went forth with her message of peace and reconciliation:

"I believe I understand Obama's choice here. I believe that Barack Obama wants to be the President of the entire United States. Pastor Rick Warren reached out to him, brought him into his church during the campaign, which outraged many members of his church. Yet he reaches across and I think this is Obama reaching back and going, 'I think we can disagree on things, yet we can still all move forward. We need to get past our differences.' And I just want to make sure that as the liberals and progressives and Democrats or whatever you want to call us are moving into this new time with this new president do not say that they, the Evangelicals who say such horrible things about gays, they have to stay over here and we're not going to let them in. That makes us no better than the last administration."

After hearing the actual words Warren used, Melissa continues:

"Just because he (compares gays to incest or polygamy) does not mean I have to not speak to him, or don't ever want to be in his company. We had a crazy experience at the Muslim Public Affairs Council conference...We met, we spoke. He's a fine person...He said he was trying to make the definition of marriage not change, not necessarily saying that gays are pedophiles or any of that stuff. One can draw whatever they want from that. This is what he told me."

Now, I am going to reproduce the Rick Warren invocation here, highlighting what may be words of conciliation:

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can't see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you, it all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory. History is your story.

The Scripture tells us Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one. And you are the compassionate and merciful one. And you are loving to everyone you have made.

Now today we rejoice not only in America's peaceful transfer of power for the 44th time. We celebrate a hinge-point of history with the inauguration of our first African-American president of the United States.

We are so grateful to live in this land, a land of unequaled possibility, where the son of an African immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership.

And we know today that Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting in Heaven.

Give to our new president, Barack Obama, the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with generosity. Bless and protect him, his family, Vice President Biden, the Cabinet, and every one of our freely elected leaders.

Help us, oh God, to remember that we are Americans, united not by race or religion or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all.

When we focus on ourselves, when we fight each other, when we forget you, forgive us. When we presume that our greatness and our prosperity is ours alone, forgive us. When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the Earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us.

And as we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches, and civility in our attitudes, even when we differ.

Help us to share, to serve and to seek the common good of all.

May all people of good will today join together to work for a more just, a more healthy and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet. And may we never forget that one day all nations and all people will stand accountable before you.

We now commit our new president and his wife, Michelle, and his daughters, Malia and Sasha, into your loving care.

I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus, Jesus (hay-SOOS), who taught us to pray, Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

I underlined the parts of the prayer that seem to be showing a conciliatoty attitude. Certainly invoking the idea of a loving God who loves all his creation (even gay and trans people) is a good start.

Invoking the idea that as Americans, we must be dedicated and committed to "freedom and justice for all" doesn't seem to close the door on civil marriage for same-sex couples.

And if I want to be charitable (and why shouldn’t I be?), I would put a very positive spin on his “When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the Earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us.”

Of course, this last sentiment might be in accord with one of the schizophrenic sections of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church with respect to the treatment of gay people:

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,[140] tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."[141] They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

Now, aside from the catechism being totally incorrect about Sacred Scripture and natural law in relation to “homosexual acts” in Paragraph 2357, leading to the false conclusion that such “acts” cannot be approved, the next section, with regard to the treatment of gay people, says “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

Now, I know Rick Warren isn’t Catholic, but perhaps he’s suffering from the same sort of schizophrenic “I want to treat gay people with compassion, but I can’t condone gay marriage or human rights laws” theology that grips the Catholic hierarchy.

I think that unlike those evangelicals who believe that “homosexuality is a choice” Warren may be reachable on the theological side. (Alas, with the Catholic hierarchy, the encrustations of mistaken “tradition” keep the Church on a wrong course.)

Let’s look at Warren’s prayer asking for forgiveness for failing to treat “our fellow human beings and all the earth” with the respect we deserve as a start.

On the other hand, it may not be so far removed from the Pope’s 2008 Christmas Greeting to the Curia and Prelature referred to in my last post. The key is to discern what Pastor Warren might mean, regarding the LGBT community, to be the respect that we “deserve.”


I think that Pastor Warren, despite being “on the other side” on the marriage issue, may have a more open mind on the subject than he gets credit for when things are painted in pure black-white, good-evil terms. And he isn’t encrusted with as many barnacles of “tradition” as the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

We have to remember, too, that President Barack Obama, while certainly better on LGBT issues than anyone who has ever been President of the United States, still himself falls short of endorsing full equal civil rights for our community. There is a need for dialogue with the Administration as much as there is a need to dialogue with those with whom we have a fundamental disagreement.

The immediate and marked change on the White House website, including us under Civil Rights in the Administration’s agenda, is a huge step. The inclusion of “gender identity and expression” for the first time in the anti-discrimination hiring policy of this administration, in addition to the inclusion of sexual orientation (first added by President Clinton), is also monumental.

We have hope. With this Administration, we have a chance to change minds – and the opportunity is also clear that we must engage those who oppose the recognition of our rights with clearly articulated arguments from all perspectives. We do have the Judaeo-Christian ideological high ground, as well as the constitutional high ground, as well as the critical underpinning of the basic underlying rational philosophy under which the United States was created. It is only a matter of articulating these things in a way in which reasonable opponents can understand.

There may well be a basic disconnect between our understanding and that of our opponents. We can look at the same constitution, and the same sacred scripture, and the same philosophical writing, and come to such an amazingly and diametrically opposed conclusion.

If we can come to the point where we can resolve this underlying disconnection, I believe that we will find much more support in unanticipated places – support we can never find if we do not engage in the conversation. We may not have to convince, we may only have to go so far as to get the opposition to realize that “reasonable minds may differ” in order to defuse the opposition. After all, America is founded on the idea of respect, tolerance and free exercise for the religious beliefs of others as well as ourselves. If we can convince Christianists that their beliefs are not the only valid Judaeo-Christian understanding on our issues, they might well be willing to go the distance with regard to civil marriage – especially when they come to the realization that there would be no infringement of their right to refuse to sanctify a marriage that does not follow their interpretation of scripture.

Yes, we CAN!

Foreign Policy: Missing a History Lesson on Iran?

The recent vice presidential debates had me cringing at some of the answers from both sides, particularly on the issue of marriage rights. But there were other areas where I am not so sure that any of the major candidates seemed to be very strong - one of those things is with regard to Middle East foreign policy, particularly as it relates to Iran. Here is a segment from the Biden/Palin debate last week:

IFILL: Let's move to Iran and Pakistan. I'm curious about what you think starting with you Senator Biden. What's the greater threat, a nuclear Iran or an unstable Afghanistan? Explain why.

BIDEN: Well, they're both extremely dangerous. I always am focused, as you know Gwen, I have been focusing on for a long time, along with Barack on Pakistan. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons.

Pakistan's weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean. Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be very, very destabilizing. They are more than - they are
not close to getting a nuclear weapon that's able to be deployed. So they're both very dangerous. They both would be game changers.

But look, here's what the fundamental problem I have with John's policy about terror instability. John continues to tell us that the central war in the front on terror is in Iraq. I promise you, if an attack comes in the homeland, it's going to come as our security services have said, it is going to come from al Qaeda planning in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's where they live. That's where they are. That's where it will come from. And right now that resides in Pakistan, a stable government needs to be established. We need to support that democracy by helping them not only with their military but with their governance and their economic well-being. There have been 7,000 madrasses built along that border.

We should be helping them build schools to compete for those hearts and minds of the people in the region so that we're actually able to take on terrorism and by the way, that's where bin Laden lives and we will go at him if we have actionable intelligence.

IFILL: Governor, nuclear Pakistan, unstable Pakistan, nuclear Iran? Which is the greater threat?

PALIN: Both are extremely dangerous, of course. And as for who coined that central war on terror being in Iraq, it was the General Petraeus and al Qaeda, both leaders there and it's probably the only thing that they're ever going to agree on, but that it was a central war on terror is in Iraq. You don't have to believe me or John McCain on that. I would believe Petraeus and the leader of al Qaeda.

An armed, nuclear armed especially Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider. They cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons period. Israel is in jeopardy of course when we're dealing with Ahmadinejad as a leader of Iran. Iran claiming that Israel as he termed it, a stinking corpse, a country that should be wiped off the face of the earth. Now a leader like Ahmadinejad who is not sane or stable when he says things like that is not one whom we can allow to acquire nuclear energy, nuclear weapons.

Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, the Castro brothers, others who are dangerous dictators are one that Barack Obama has said he would be willing to meet with without preconditions being met first.

And an issue like that taken up by a presidential candidate goes beyond naivete and goes beyond poor judgment. A statement that he made like that is downright dangerous because leaders like Ahmadinejad who would seek to acquire nuclear weapons and wipe off the face of the earth an ally like we have in Israel should not be met with without preconditions and diplomatic efforts being undertaken first.

I honestly don’t think that either the Democratic or the Republican candidates, or, for that matter, most of the people in the American foreign policy establishment, have a real grasp of the issues that Iran poses toward stability in the Middle East.

Indeed, the single most destabilizing presence in the region is the presence of the American military in Iraq, and the single most destabilizing event was the ill-conceived and catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq. The result of the American invasion has been the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure and the balkanization of that nation as competing mostly-sectarian interests, previously held in check by the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein, have erupted into violence.

No one seems to take into account the history of the region, and the fact that the United States has since 1953 succeeded to the colonialist mantle in the region previously held by the British, dating back to their “great game” diplomacy in which there were twin goals of (a) exploiting resources in the region, and (b) denying Czarist Russia, and later the Soviet Union, access to a warm water port to maintain a powerful navy fleet.

Both Iraq and Iran have suffered from American interventionism, and Americans, sadly, do not seem to have maintained a proper historical perspective. Essentially, we seem to suffer from a collective amnesia when it comes to politically expedient short-term “solutions” that have turned into long-term nightmares.

First, let’s look at some truly “ancient history.” Iran is one of the few nations in the world to have had an independent existence that goes back to ancient times: the Persian empire, the Parthian empire and Persia, with some intervening occupations by Macedonian Greeks, Mongols, and some others, have evolved into modern Iran. When Islam swept across the region, Iranians developed their own version of Islam, Shi’ia, which has doctrinal differences with the Sunni Islam that prevails in much of the rest of the middle east (excepting, notably, southern Iraq, which has a Shi’ite majority).

More recently, Persia/Iran has been humiliated by British colonialism in its “great game,” much in the same way the Brits humiliated the Chinese empire. Unlike the situation in which China was opened up to Western exploitation by British foisting of opium on the Chinese in trade for Chinese goods and the auctioning of areas of Chinese influence to other western powers, the Brits forced the Persian government to accept British control of its tobacco and petroleum industries, in return for nearly nothing.

Smarting from the abuse of the British, the Persian government developed close ties with Nazi Germany, prompting an allied (pre-American involvement in World War II) imvasion and occupation of Iran – the British military forces smashed the Shah’s armies in a month.
After World War II, Iran emerged with a constitutional monarchy, and a democratically-elected government, headed by the dormer sha’s son as monarch, and led by a Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh.

In 1953, spurred on by false reports from the British that Mossadegh was going to transform Iran into a communist country, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sent the CIA in to effectuate a coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government. Iran had already nationalized its oil industry, giving the boot to the British control of its petroleum industry. In 1953, the American-sponsored coup succeeded, leading Iran into a brutal dictatorship under the leadership of Shah Reza Pahlavi. America succeeded to Britain in the exploitation of Iranian oil resources during this time, and as long as the Shah was an American friend, the United States looked the other way at the brutality of the regime.

During the time of the Shah’s regime, the only freedom existed in the mosques, and even so, many of the Shi’ite religiousl leaders ended up in exile, including the Ayatollah Khomenei, who spent many years in France.

When the revolution came in Iran, it was led by the religious elements, and the Ayatollah set up a religious theocracy in the country – a development that was not forseen by the Eisenhower administration when it engineered that coup in 1953.

During all that time, while the government of Iran was America’s friend, it was clear that America was not the friend of the Iranian people. And when the Iranians took American embassy workers hostage, and painstakingly reconstructed shredded embassy documents that showed the extent of Americn complicity in the Shah’s regime, American amnesia took hold.
President Jimmy Carter declared that the 1953 coup was “ancient history,” during a February 13, 1980 press conference:

Q: . . . Mr. President, do you think it was proper for the United States to
restore the Shah to the throne in 1953 against the popular will within Iran?

PRESIDENT CARTER: That's ancient history, and I don't think it's appropriate
or helpful for me to go into the propriety of something that happened 30
[actually 27] years ago.

(See the analysis published by the conservative Cato Institute in 1991 .) The Cato Institute paper covers a lot more than just the Iran situation – and all of what it does cover is relevant.
What is clear to me is that since 1953, the United States has consistently messed up in the Middle East. Support for Israel, while an important part of our foreign policy, has only played one part in the drama.

Right now, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. China has nuclear weapons, as does India and Israel. Iran may well develop them, regardless of the further efforts the United States makes to alienate the Iranians.

While Senator Barack Obama’s avowed willingness to meet with the Iranian government “without preconditions” has met with hostility from the MaCain/Palin camp, it may well be that going to Iran with an olive branch and an acknowledgment of the wrongs done to Iran by America in the past, and acknowledging Iran’s interest in the region, including as a part of the solution to the Iraq crisis, will go far to help create an atmosphere in which relations can be repaired over time.

Of course, this is farther than even Barack Obama is openly willing to propose.

In the debate on this point, Senator Biden gave a better answer – that Pakistan is perhaps a greater danger in the region at this point than Iran. The best intelligence estimates has the Al Qaeda leadership in the ungovernable mountain region of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan – and points out the numerous anti-American Islamist Madrassas schools that have sprouted like mushrooms in the border areas of Pakistan, training potential future Al Qaeda militants.

Of course, all one has to do is look at the legions of “home-schooled” American kids whose parents espouse a different sort of religious fundamentalism, and the many public school systems in the United States that still teach thinly-veiled Christianist mythology as if it had any scientific validity. In many regards, these are no better than Madrassas schools, yet they are tolerated and even encouraged.

If America does not change our own course into the future, if we do not learn from the mistakes of America’s past foreign policy and present military policy, the future of our foreign policy looks as bleak as the dystopian vision of the “social conservative” Republican Orwellian nightmare does for domestic policy.

As our own “home-schooled” and ill-educated children grow up into future Sarah Palin clones, America will have a lot more in the way of collective amnesia, when dealing with the products of Madrassas schools where a great deal of the hatred instilled in the students is actually based on things that Americans don’t learn about in our own history.

We have an opportunity with this presidential election, to stem the tide of the “social conservative” dystopia that had its roots in the Reagan administration and has only begun to flower under the regime of George W. Bush.

Still, the road ahead isn’t guaranteed to be bump-free. It is going to take a decade to repair the economic damage the Bush Administration has wreaked on the American people with its “asleep at the switch” oversight of the mortgage lending market, antitrust, and wall street investment firms, combined with the economic devastation the cost of its ill-conceived and disruptive invasion and occupation of Iraq. The destabilization of the Middle East caused by the invasion and occupation, and the ignorance of the Bush Administration’s “lone cowboy” foreign policy has damaged America’s leadership role, prestige and honor in the world.

I don’t see the Obama/Biden ticket as a panacea. They’re wrong on important issues like marriage, but even on that, they’re less wrong than McCain/Palin. They’re better on every other foreign and domestic issue as well.