Rachel Maddow reads Rick Warren

ok, i didn't see it anywhere on here, but i saw a scroll thing on cnn earlier....but it seems melissa etheridge doesn't think rick warren is a homophobic jerk or something and that they are good friends...  O_o

did anyone else hear/read about that? just found it......odd.

Yeah, but Warren was supposedly "nice" to her and told her he was a big fan and now she's all "Oh, let's all give Rick Warren a chance, peace and love and cooperation, etc., etc."

Yep, I know I'll welcome him with open arms... that is as soon as he publicly (and not just in private with a celebrity) renounces his work for Prop H8 and all the denigrating things he's said for years about gays and lesbians, including just last week when he told Dateline NBC that even if it were unquestionably proven that homosexuality were 100% biological, he'd still be agin' it.

Oh, wait... he's not renouncing any of those things?  You don't say.  So I suppose we should be the ones to compromise and maybe it'll be such a nice example to him and he'll eventually come along, like maybe in ten or twenty years, and...  Good GOD, does it ever end?

Looks like Warren knows how to play Etheridge even better than she plays her own guitar.

Rick Warren is so much more repugnant and offensive to me than any of the James Dobsons out there because unlike those figures, he self-righteously masquerades as a so-called "progressive evangelical" because of his would-be noble advocacy for "non-traditionally evangelical" causes, which basically amounts to taking two "bold" positions: one for Peace in Darfur, and one for the importance of environmental priorities, which are supposed to be progressive because they challenge the rest of the fundamentalist Christian right. Perhaps it's just me, but saying that genocidal holocaust and global warming are serious problems doesn't really seem like too much of a bold or gutsy move. Which brings me to my critique of him, which is that in reality, he's not substantively any different than those other evangelical hate-mongerers. The mere fact that he has so nobly and selflessly acknowledged awareness of genocide and the environment doesn't mean that he isn't a right-wing zealot. He himself even admitted that underneath the phony progressive image, he's truly a social reactionary when he described the difference between himself and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson as amounting to merely "a matter of tone", which basically means that they have the same beliefs, but different ways of expressing them (i.e. different layers of bullshit to pile on top of them to make them seem more mainstream and less out of left, or should I say 'right', field). So to get back to why I hate Rick Warren more than I hate James Dobson, it comes down to two prosetylizers holding the same backward views, one who sugarcoats them in order to gently coerce otherwise rational non-extremists to subscribe to them, and the other who proudly and concisely lines out his beliefs with a minimum of B.S.

I couldn't be happier that Obama chose Rick Warren for two reasons: 1) because the fact that Rick Warren will be doing...whatever hokey shit he'll be doing at the Inauguration doesn't change anything about the fact that Obama is a self-proclaimed "advocate for gay and lesbian equality", and 2) because FINALLY, it's caused more people to realize what I've known all along: that Rick Warren is not this "fresh", "new", "progressive", "different", "non-extremist", "non-traditional" evangelical that his hokey book and all it's glorious success has made him out to be, but that in reality, he just boils down to the same old, divisive, and petty garbage from the Christian Right.

America's Pastor? I think not.

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"There are two types of straight people in this world: the ones that hate you to your face, and the ones that hate you behind your back." -- Brian Kinney ("Queer As Folk")

. . .or does Rick Warren seem to be channeling the Armistead Maupin look?

Betcha our favorite gay writer loses his moustache and haircut style quick!