Gay Backlash Overwhelms Presidential Transition

I watched Rachel Maddow's show last night. Not only is she funny, but she's a heckuva lot prettier than Keith Olbermann. Plus watching her show reveals just how much influence nihilist left bloggers have on the mainstream Democratic Party agenda - a point to keep in mind when leftists dismiss the policy impact of hardline bloggers like Daily Kos, Firedoglake, and their rotten ilk.

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In discussing the Obama/Warren invocation controversy, Maddow made the case against Warren for his "bigotry" and "hatred," citing John Aravosis at AmericaBlog. At issue is Warren's apparent exclusion of "unrepentant" gays from the ministry of Saddleback Church. Aravosis links to Warren's home page in a post, "Rick Warren Explicitly Bans "Unrepentant" Gays From Membership in His Church."

Now, citing Aravosis raises an interesting quandary: While the "unrepentant" gay issue is troublesome from the perspective of inclusion, Maddow's citation of Aravosis is equally so. As Rick Moran demonstrated during the primaries, Aravosis, last June, stooped to the lowest of the low in attacking John McCain's qualifications for the presidency, arguing that "Getting shot down, tortured, and then doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience."

While Aravosis is far from a credible source - and his comments on McCain are beyond the pale - he has a point about Warren's position on gays at church; and it's here where folks might rightly ask themselves where they're located on the issue of civil rights for gay Americans. While Warren, as a pastor of a private church, may by rights exclude gay members from his congregation, his practice gives ammunition to his secular and anti-Christianist attackers.

And all of this brings up an interesting thought: What if Barack Obama had it all figured out? What if the President-Elect, realizing Warren's religious fundamentalism might be offputting to many folks of faith who might otherwise hold more welcoming thoughts for homosexuals, people who might be less likely to compare gays to pedophiles or incest lovers, and who might, in fact, realize that same-sex marriage can be firmly opposed on both secular and religious grounds, and thus such demonization of gays is gratuitous and unproductive to the traditionalist case ... what if he picked Warren anyway, on the likely chance of instigating a backlash beyond the radical gay base? Sure, Warren could go on to give the inaugural invocation, but by then Obama, seeing partisan division and distress spread across the land, would have a ready excuse to backpeddle, to renounce his relationship to the "purpose driven" pastor and his ministry of exclusion, and then come out in favor of gay marriage. That's where all of this is headed ultimately, so Obama could have devised a brilliantly underhanded ploy of plausible deniability.

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Jerry Brown has done his own about face. He's announced that the state will seek to overturn Proposition 8 at the California Supreme Court, arguing that "the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification."

Looking at this from the sidelines one would think that, heck, forget majority rule. Tyranny of the majority must be so bad that any aggressive minority can have its way, traditionalism, objective right, and constitutional processes be damned.

But that's the way things are going in this country. We've got a president-elect who squeezed under the media radar with a free pass. We've got the Democratic-left which lies and distorts the truth to fit any purpose, folks who can demonize John McCain for his patriotism in captivity on the one hand, and then turn around and argue in favor radical gay rights activists who adopt the same tactics of totalitarianian intolerance of McCain's captors in Hanoi.

It doesn't make sense, but that's the world we live in right now. Sometimes I think it's best to just let things play out. The traditional majority's not dead, and by no means without power. The radical left, with its allies in Washington and Sacramento, will overplay their hand, and as the economy trundles through the current cyclical downturn, the political pendulum will swing back to more conservative traditionalism. Folks on the right might as well hunker down for a while, clinging to their guns and religion after all, and let the storm pass. Socialism's been tried before and in every instance it's failed. There's no reason to expect the current era to be triumphant over the long haul. And thank God for that.