James Irwin finds hope and wisdom in Obama’s choice of Rick Warren

Our article In Bed with the Enemy looks at Proposition 8 and the gay marriage controversy in California. Here James Irwin shares his thoughts about one aspect of the controversy: the decision of Barack Obama to invite Rick Warren, a supporter of Propositon 8 and pastor of one of the biggest conservative churches in the United States, to say the Invocation prayer at the presidential inauguration.

The American political right does not like Barack Obama, as anyone who has watched Fox News will know. The Fox coverage of the inauguration was less about the arrival of Barack Obama and more a long, protracted farewell to their neo-conservative hero. Later coverage repeatedly tried to claim that Obama ‘was not President’ after fluffing the oath - ignoring the fact that it was actually Chief Justice John Roberts who got the oath wrong.

However, Obama is doing all he can to appease the right. He wants to unify America, which could prove difficult given the amount of airtime given to Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

It is largely this attempt at unity that led Obama to ask prominent evangelical pastor and homophobe Rick Warren, Senior Pastor of Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, California to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration.

Yet Warren’s statements on moral issues are highly controversial. Of Michael Schiavo’s successful battle to remove his irreversibly vegetative wife’s feeding tube: ‘[it is] an atrocity worthy of Nazism’. And he claims that homosexuality is ‘not a natural way of life and therefore not a human right’.

All in all then, an unlikely choice for the very progressive, very liberal President Barack Obama.

But it is actually a choice incredibly in tune with Obama’s politics; not his political views, but his political ideals. We have known from the outset that Obama, like Abraham Lincoln, is assembling a ‘team of rivals’. It also fits his message of unity. Many moderate right-wing Americans have already come round to the idea of giving Obama a chance. But aforementioned commentators such as O’Reilly and Limbaugh are going to be hard to impress in the midst of their burgeoning attempt to destroy the Obama Presidency in any tenuous way they can.

The people Obama has to convince now are the ones who agree with Warren, the ones who attend Saddleback, and the many churches like it. Rick Warren is an olive branch. A message saying: ‘We don’t agree politically, but this is your America too, here’s the guy who’s going to represent your America, alongside all the other aspects of America.’

Rick Warren was not a deliberately controversial choice - Barack Obama is not Paris Hilton, he neither wants nor needs any publicity. Neither was it a shrewd, cynical political move. It was very much a gesture, an indication of how Obama is going to try and unite the country.

The appointment of Warren was not a snub or two fingers to the LGBT community - they know that Obama will make their lives easier.

And I think this demonstrates why Obama chose Warren. For once the right reached out, as token as it may be, to the Godless. To me it epitomised what Obama wants to do. He wants left and right to happily co-exist. The inclusion of a right-wing, evangelical pastor from Forest Lake in California was a tentative first step.