Katha Pollitt: "Choice for invocation is a slap in the face to Obama's base"

madfloridian

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Fri Dec-26-08 12:38 AM
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Katha Pollitt: "Choice for invocation is a slap in the face to Obama's base"

This is a column by her yesterday in the Merced Sun Times. Pollitt writes for The Nation, and was a guest last week on Rachel Maddow's show.

Choice for invocation is a slap in the face to Obama's base

To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton � or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it's hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain's case, it doesn't really return the favor.

Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters � feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community � by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead.

Actually I don't think the Democratic party has done this in the past, not to this extent. It is a fairly new phenomena brought on by conservative Democrats controlling the party's agenda and candidates.

...."Most Americans who've heard of Warren know him as the teddy-bearish, Hawaiian- shirted head of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County and the author of "The Purpose Driven Life." Perhaps they also know he's the rare right-wing Christian pastor who sometimes talks about poverty and global warming and HIV. His concern for those issues has given him a reputation as a moderate and has made him the darling of Democratic Party think tanks, ever hoping to break the Republican lock on the white evangelical vote. But on the signal issues of the religious right he is, as he himself has said, as orthodox as James Dobson. And as inflammatory. Warren doesn't just oppose gay marriage, he's compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn't just want to ban abortion, he's compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial.

Of great concern is his preaching of wifely submission, which has become all too common a tenet in the Southern Baptist Churches. It demeans women, and it shows that those who believe that stuff consider women inferior to men.

Take abortion. Most Americans, whatever their personal feelings, are pro-choice. On Election Day, anti-choice initiatives went down to defeat in all three states where they were on the ballot. Most Americans do not think the one-third of American women who terminate a pregnancy are running a concentration camp in their wombs. Or take marriage. At his Saddleback Church, wifely submission is official doctrine: The church Web site tells women to defer to the husband's "leadership" even when he's wrong on important issues, such as finances Is elevating this male chauvinist how Obama thanks women, who gave him more than half his votes?

That makes two groups who are being talked about as inferior to others in the church. It is a view that says women are incapable of making their own choices about their bodies. Good grief, what would happen if men were treated that way? It also makes another whole group within our party sound like evildoers.

It is inexcusable for one group of people to talk about two other groups of people that way. Most of DU talks about being tired of the discussion. This is not going away. You do not get tired of discussing the discriminations being faced by women and gays in our party. You must not get tired of it.