the rick warren thing

Though I vowed to myself not to write anything about the Rick Warren inauguration controversy, and though enough has happened since then that part of me barely cares anymore, I find myself still slightly obsessing over it.

Things I could write about instead: Gaza, and how monumentally fucking depressed I am about that horrific situation. Why I’m pleased with Obama’s recent CIA and DOJ appointments. The rising cost of hypoallergenic cat food. How much I love our new stainless steel saucepan. Nasal congestion.

No? Rick Warren it is. I read a ton of columns and analysis about Obama’s selection of Warren to speak at inauguration, not because I really wanted to, but because I am a helpless junkie for discussions involving religion and queer sexuality. As I read, I thought, “OK, I see her point.” “OK, I see his point.” “OK, I see that point too.” I see the point of people who believe that this gesture has some positive healing potential, and I see the point of people who think that this gesture is a complete betrayal of Obama’s LGBT supporters. I see the point of people who think that the LGBT rights movement has pushed too hard too quickly on same-sex marriage and the backlash is bringing us things like Proposition 8 and same-sex adoption bans, and like it or not we have to slow down and reach out to people like Rick Warren, who are not virulent haters and could potentially be reasoned with. I see the point of people who label Rick Warren and his like “smiling bigots” and point out that approaching such folk in the spirit of reasonable discussion has never yielded much in the past, and that all we can really hope to do now is defeat them politically.

I wasn’t at all surprised that Obama made this selection; he has given every indication that he wants to reach out to evangelicals, most notably with his participation in the forum/debate/whatever that Warren hosted at his ginormous megachurch back this summer. I do wish he hadn’t chosen Warren. I don’t like Warren and I certainly don’t think he deserves such a platform. At the same time, there are things about him that I find encouraging, at least marginally. His work against poverty and for HIV/AIDS-related causes can be easily dismissed; there are scads of people, religious and otherwise, who do as much as he does, and one can easily argue that he doesn’t deserve greater accolades just because he does such work and happens to be an evangelical Christian. I remind myself, though, that within the evangelical world Warren inhabits, he has taken significant risks to do this work. Modern evangelicals are deeply fearful of work that furthers social justice. I’m not sure of all the reasons for this; I think “because they’re all hateful and smug” is far too simplistic. Evangelicals seem to have bought into a worldview that pits social justice against personal spirituality. Warren has struggled openly to figure out how they can be instead be balanced, and he seems to have convinced a lot of evangelicals to seek that balance as well.

This, of course, is not an argument in favor of the choice of Warren to deliver the inauguration invocation. Progressive Christians might legitimately ask why someone like Warren gets this gig, when so many of their ranks have done as much to alleviate poverty as he has, and have managed to notice that LGBT equality is a social justice imperative as well. (Such as the guy who’s giving the benediction.) For non-Christian, equality-minded folk, the notion that Warren is somehow radical for emphasizing the doing of good works is likely to be unintelligible. The fact that Warren is one of the less offensive leaders of one of the more offensive American political tribes is not a reason to give him a big cookie on a national stage.

Still, I’m not ready to proclaim Obama a complete enemy of LGBT equality for doing this. Obviously, he’s being calculating. (He may have miscalculated how much he can take LGBT support for granted.) In an interview he did with Rolling Stone last summer, Obama said that he advocated civil unions over same-sex marriage because he believed it is most effective to start where you have consensus, and he perceived that there was popular consensus at least on some basic civil rights for same-sex couples, if not marriage with a big “M.” (Just read his comments here; I’m not summarizing it very well.) I’m not saying his stance is necessarily the right thing; I don’t know if it’s the right thing. I don’t know if it would be a better idea to stand firm and fight like hell for marriage equality or to quietly focus on civil unions and on keeping anti-gay adoption laws off the books while waiting for younger and more progressive leaders to rise to power. To employ the language of a newly ubiquitous and already suspect dichotomy, the former is “ideological”; the latter is “pragmatic.”

The reason I find that dichotomy suspect, by the way, is that the “ideologue” charge can be used to handily dismiss people who are, frankly, fighting for what it right. I don’t think my belief in marriage equality makes me an ideologue. I don’t think that queer activists are ideologues or extremists for asserting that they are as entitled to the right to marry as straight people. We on the left are still flailing for a resonant language of morality. That’s a problem for another post, I guess.

But for argument’s sake, suppose we are to go with the “pragmatic” approach, which is Obama’s game. Is reaching out to people like Rick Warren and his evangelical fans a necessary part of the equation? A few days after the Warren selection was announced, Melissa Etheridge wrote a piece on Huffington Post entitled The Choice is Ours Now, addressed to her fellow LGBT activists and describing her own positive experience with Rick Warren. Warren, it turns out, is a big fan of Melissa Etheridge. She initiated a conversation with him when she realized that they had both been asked to perform at the same event by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (which is a pretty cool thing in and of itself, actually), and during their conversation he told her that he regretted some of the more extreme things he had said during the campaign for Proposition 8. They “agreed to build bridges to the future,” and she encouraged her readers to do likewise, writing this:

Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world's attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don't hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.

Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.

I know, call me a dreamer, but I feel a new era is upon us.

I posted this story on my Facebook page after reading it, mostly as a gesture of peace towards my evangelical Republican Facebook-using relatives, whom I know are big Warren fans. Of course, I doubt these relatives click on any article that I post on Facebook anyway, so it was probably futile. The only person who responded to my posting was a friend who is both an Etheridge fan and a lesbian, and liked it enough to post it on her own page.

But plenty of people were unhappy with her piece, and some made good arguments in response to it. (I could provide a bunch of links, but just Google “Melissa Etheridge Rick Warren” and you’ll find them yourself. It gets complicated, because Etheridge’s wife also wrote a blog post defending Warren, and people responded to that too.) Etheridge’s call for peacemaking sounds really good, but I had to remind myself, after reading some of the responses, that the bridge-building she advocates, particularly with religious people, sounds a lot better on paper than it often ends up being in practice. Here’s what I’ve observed among Mennonites, and I suspect it’s mirrored in other Christian denominations: LGBT people have already reached out, again and again. They have participated in “dialogue”; they have submitted to the terms of discussions that are stacked against them; they have listened ad nauseum to the “concerns” of bigots who are most interested in the sounds of their own voices; they have been patronized to and treated like truant children and at worst, exploited as objects for the sexual fascination of a church that still addresses sexuality primarily through denial and repression.

The lack of progress isn’t because queer people aren’t reaching out. We’re stalled on this because most church people are unwilling to engage in a discussion about queer sexuality unless the terms of the discussion are dictated by straight people. John Linscheid, a gay Mennonite activist who has been at this stuff for years, wrote a great piece about why he’s fed up, describing how “dialogue” makes him feel “sucker-punched.” (It’s a newsletter; scroll down to page five.) He writes, “…what the institution defines as ‘loving dialogue’ is inherently condescending. By entering the dialogue, I accept the implicit proposition that our human worth and our status as children of God are questionable and must be proven.” How can LGBT activists possibly be blamed for being sick of trying? None of my queer friends have any interest in these kinds of “dialogues”; they’re not masochists.

The most compelling and hopeful suggestion in Etheridge’s column, I think, is her suggestion that LGBT folk volunteer en masse alongside Warren’s followers to fight HIV/AIDS. Of course, I can see the resistance to working for Warren’s specific charities (“I’m sure as hell not volunteering for his AIDS charities,” writes Kevin Drum on his Mother Jones blog). I’m not sure I’d be comfortable working for his charities either; I’d have to learn a lot more about them first. But I’m still somewhat attracted to the proposal because it’s a way forward that has nothing to do with this dialogue crap. Most conservative Christians have been taught to believe in a fiction they call the “homosexual lifestyle.” They seem to think that queer people are selfish, wounded, and unable to contribute to society, and these prejudices are too entrenched to be easily dislodged by mere conversation. I’ve often wished that I could make some of my more conservative fellow Mennonites, who think of themselves as so communal and selfless, see the deep values of found family and mutual care that exist in many queer communities. While it’s not the job of queer people to prove these things to intolerant heteros, there is something wonderfully subversive about Etheridge’s volunteering suggestion. At its best, such action could get people off the endless loops of the culture war battles and work some magic we may not yet be capable of imagining. I’m sure it’s already happening somewhere.

At the end of the day, what this whole flap has most reinforced for me is how easy it is to coast on hetero privilege. How easy it is for even well-meaning straights to wag our fingers at the queers and suggest that they should not get so upset about people like Rick Warren. It’s a paternalistic role that has practically been written for us. I see the temptation. I would love to just write the Warren thing off as smart politics on Obama’s part so that I don’t have to start off 2009 thinking ill of my beloved Barack. But at the end of the day, I think it’s probably good that so many people gave him heat for it. He needs to know that the LGBT community will not just continually roll over and take it, and he needs to know that straight allies will fight too, that we will not just turn to our queer brothers and sisters and tell them to suck it up again and again and again.

And I also hope that Melissa Etheridge is right about Warren and about his followers. I want a way forward. I want to see a transformation; I don’t think we have to give up on changing hearts. I am jaded about this stuff, jaded enough to more or less leave my church over it, but nonetheless I still believe that homophobia is mostly the product of fear. And fear, we can do something about.


(ETA: I just reread this post. How on earth did I manage to use the phrases "roll over and take it" and "suck it up" in one exceedingly earnest sentence? What is wrong with me?)