There is also to be a Benediction at the inaugural...

[HereSince1628]

Not to discount that Rick Warren is an abominable choice, but with respect to who is leading prayer at the Inaugural, their positions on homosexuality and same sex marriage are not monolithic...

If I've got this correct...Joseph Lowery, the person to give the Benediction, apparently is seen as an abomination the right wing social conservatives. The Benediction is the closing prayer.

It is interesting to note that the fundies dislike for Lowery specifically includes Lowery's _support_ for same sex marriage

This from the right wing Frontpagemag.com (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=7F413AF3-811C-4A8F-A979-1C90812550B0).

"He also blasted his denomination, affixing his name to a petition calling his church’s position on homosexuality “spiritual violence.” (The UMC does not allow any ordained minister – heterosexual or homosexual – to openly have sex outside marriage.) He has also bewailed black opposition to same-sex marriage. “Don't ever let the Constitution be used to take away rights,” he thundered. “You can't say you're for equal rights and then make an exception.”

[tekisui]

1. That looks like a good choice.

Doesn't make Warren less repulsive, but at least there won't be two bigots praying.

[sam sarrha]

3. i'm not even going to watch.. why is religion crammed down our throats during a Government session,

[KittyWampus]

7. Think of an Invocation not as a prayer, but as a moment to focus ones intent.

[sam sarrha]

11. i suffer PTSD, from abuse and outright torture as a child from the Free Holiness Pentecostal Church

and what the hell happened to SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND F'N STATE. get god out of the GOVERNMENT.!!

i really am like the TV Caveman about 2 things.. i see religion.. and i walk away, just like seeing someone smoking in a new movie.. i'm gone, i walk out of the theater. its advertising a product that kills half a million people a year, cripples our health care system, the industry is dependant on child abuse, they have to hook children on nicotine to stay in business. by the time a kid reaches 18 their money is dedicated to getting laid.. they aren't likely to take on an expensive addiction. the industry must addict people at an age when they are not able to make reasonable critical decisions.. just like RELIGION, Religion will frame a child's view if the world around fear of eternal suffering if they displease authority, subservience.. acceptance of others truly Omnipotent control of them for their own welfare.

all the prophets of all the religions show symptoms of Schizophrenia, all people today who hear god tell them to kill their children are beyond doubt schizophrenic ..story of god telling Abraham to sacrifice his son.

and if Mohamed had not been the son of a rich man who gave people food in a long terrible famine to listen to his son, he would surely have been just another homeless person wandering the streets talking to the sky.. he was related to Abraham an Schizophrenia runs in bloodlines.

[peace frog]

2. Warren and Lowery

I guess this is Team Obama's idea of *fair and balanced* Christian representation. In an effort to make everyone happy by selecting religious leaders representing diametrically opposed beleifs, they may succeed in making no one happy with their choice.

[Dhalgren]

4. Why don't they drag a bull up on stage and slit its throat?

Why not have fifty chickens beheaded and then have some hopped-up doorman run his hands through the entrails in order to make sure one or another of the GODS are not angry? Why not have the New President pee into a goat's bladder and then throw the bladder against a wall to see what the spray pattern looks like? It might be a message from one or another of the GODS!

How long are these ridiculous pantomimes going to enthrall the whole nation? Some guy is going to get up on stage and before the whole nation talk to one of the GODS? And everyone believes this or at least supports the idea that this is a reasonable thing to do!? Talking to one of the GODS!?

It is just too fucking funny! :rofl:

[HereSince1628]

5. I find belief in ghosts and angels, God and Devil weird, and counter-empirical

But I respect that other's don't think or believe the way I do.

As much as I can sit in my campus office and chuckle at the amazingly silly things students come up with (answer to colleagues test question: Bach had 20 children and no stops on his organ), I've never found laughing at students or telling them they were stupid to be an effective pedagogy.

[Dhalgren]

13. I do not try to teach. It is a losing proposition.

I simply find some things funny. All this hoo-doo/voo-doo is a gas. Sorry, I have to go gossip with ONE OF THE GODS!

:rofl:

[kwassa]

10. It might be ridiculous to you, but not to most people.

I hope you delight in your feelings of superiority.

[Dhalgren]

12. Yeah and right now it's real easy to do...

:rofl:

[merh]

6. K&R - we need folks to realize that the stage does not belong

to any one faction - it is a table set for all.

[undeterred]

8. The person who gives the Benediction gets the 'last word'.

[kwassa]

9. Lowery started the SCLC with Martin Luther King

He is one of the greats from the civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lowery

Joseph Echols Lowery, (born October 6, 1921, in Huntsville, Alabama) is a minister and leader in the American civil rights movement.

Lowery was pastor of the Warren Street United Methodist Church, in Mobile, Alabama from 1952 until 1961. His career in the civil rights movement began in the early 1950s in Mobile, Alabama. After Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955, Lowery helped lead the Montgomery bus boycott. He headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places. In 1957, with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and subsequently led the organization as its president from 1977 to 1997.

His property was seized in 1959 along with that of other civil rights leaders by the State of Alabama as part of a libel suit. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the suit reversed. At the request of Martin Luther King Jr., Lowery led the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. Lowery is a co-founder and former president of the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of black advocacy groups. The Forum protested Apartheid in South Africa in the mid 1970s until the election of Nelson Mandela. Joseph Lowery was among the first five African Americans to get arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington D.C. during the Free South Africa movement. Lowery served as pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta from (1986-92), adding over a thousand members and leaving the church with ten acres of land. He is now retired but remains active in the civil rights movement.