Intolerance at the Inauguration

There has been a firestorm over Barack Obama's invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Warren's conservative evangelical faith - and his homophobia - has caused many of us who supported Obama to blink, or in some cases to rage.

But, let's pause a second. The very idea that we have a prayer before we swear in our President is profoundly misguided. Offering a prayer before an important civic ceremony like this is offensive, to those who don't have religious beliefs, to those whose commitment to faith takes a non-traditional form, and to those who firmly believe, as I do, that government should be free from religious vestments.

Realistically, we are not at a place in our collective life where the invocation can be dropped. So somebody has to do it. I wish it could have been my friend Alison Boden, formerly the chaplain at the University of Chicago, and now Dean of Religious Life at Princeton. Alison practices a humane and inclusive version of Christianity. But politics being what it is - Will Rogers once referred to politics as applesauce - it was necessary to pick someone who had majority appeal. And Warren seems to have that. Author of the best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren is about as mainstream as you get. For a generation, America's Presidents called Billy Graham to deliver the inaugural invocation. And Warren is, in many respects, a natural heir to Billy Graham. The Purpose-Driven Life is still a top-selling book, even six years after its publication. And when someone somewhere decided that Obama and John McCain needed to hold a dialogue on religion this autumn, Warren seemed like the most likely host.

Politics - and perhaps Obama's own Christian faith - compelled him to pick a pastor to deliver the invocation. From a political perspective, Warren was the obvious choice. Of course it could have been more courageous to pick an imam, at this moment in our collective life when Islam is distrusted and misunderstood. But if the choice is principally a political choice, then courageousness isn't really what we are concerned with. Politics is the art of the possible - assembling necessary numbers to win votes, pushing through measures, even watered-down measures, when one can, waiting until the opportunity is right to push through more ambitious policy shifts. Smart politics is characterized by caution, not courage. It's about reading the winds, not plowing forward into the perfect storm no matter what. Selecting an imam to deliver the invocation would have been impossible for Obama - a large part of the country still is unsure whether he is a muslim or not. Picking an imam to lead prayers at his inauguration would have triggered a flood of right wing emails - each one starting with "I told you so."

Let's say something here that perhaps needs to be said: for all of you who believed that Obama was going to end politics, it's time to wake up and reconnect with the facts on the ground. Politics still matters. It always will. Politics is the machinery we have - the process we employ - to pick leaders and build consensus (or at least support) for what those leaders choose to do. What matters, though, is law and policy. Will Obama embrace progressive policies? Will he nominate progressive judges? Will he reengineer our policy-making process - in so far as he can - so lobbyists don't determine our national agenda and kill policies we need (to build greener industries and to achieve meaningful change in the delivery of health care, to name two priorities). Will he map out approaches to move the country toward ambitious changes that are unimaginable now?

Picking Warren to deliver the invocation is applesauce - to borrow Will Rogers' characterization. The meat and potatoes is the policy agenda that follows the inaugural festivities. Is Warren intolerant? Yes he is. As is the vast majority of America. The good news is that anti-gay bigotry is dying, and Warren's views won't matter 25 years from now. He is on the losing side of the issue. The success of supporters of Proposition 8 is a last gasp. This form of discrimination, this particular expression of intolerance, will be swept away when the generation that still holds anti-gay views are displaced in the political landscape by the young voters who overwhelmingly support gay rights. I'm not saying we should wait for that day. What I am saying is this: political choices like picking Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration have no lasting consequence, what matters is the laws we pass and the judges we pick to interpret those laws. The insult is the passage of Proposition 8, and overturning it should be a priority. Picking Warren to deliver the invocation is just politics. It is treading water, while we wait for the opportunity to steer the country forward.