Dear Melissa and Tammy,
You were just hustled by a member of one of America’s oldest fraternities of snake-oil salesmen: the slick-talking preacher. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, because it’s clear that you both want to sincerely move forward into a new era of change with a spirit of openness, trust, and respect for the differences and disagreements that inevitably divide any group of 300 million people. You want to believe that Rick Warren really likes you, really likes gay people, really wants peace and equal rights for everyone as much as you do. I’m sorry — it’s just not true. He acted as if he likes you. Maybe he really does at some level. But that doesn’t change his job, and part of his job is to do things to hurt your family and families like yours.
At best, Rick Warren is a political opportunist who sings different tunes for different audiences, and is willing to change his colors on the surface if he has an opportunity for the spotlight. Unfortunately for that Rick Warren, he’s on the record about gays, abortion, and the proper submissive place of wives any number of times, and he can’t fool all of the people all of the time. At worst, Rick Warren may simply believe everything he says. In that case, he’s cynically furthering a far-right agenda to equate the pro-choice movement with Nazi concentration camps, keep gay sinners down, and keep wives submissive to their husbands by acting as the movement’s “nice guy, good cop” face.
I can understand why you might have made this mistake. You’d never heard of Rick Warren before all this, and your first reaction was that he must be an old-school fire-and-brimstone preacher in the style of Fred Phelps, railing against godless fags. He’s not. While you weren’t paying attention, a new breed of anti-gay politicians and preachers has seeped out of the far right: the ones that pretend they really like gays. Strangely, some of them are the SAME PEOPLE who used to outright revile and insult gays to our faces. In fact, some of them still do, including Rick Warren.
Rick Warren is a likeable teddy bear with an affable personality. As you said, he doesn’t have a tacky tweed suit and televangelist hair; he looks like a dad from down the street. His church does good work on global poverty and HIV issues, and I’m told he’s one of the more moderate evangelical leaders; he’s even broken with most of the others by believing in global warming, fancy that. But even if you believe that Rick Warren is suddenly sincere in his desire to help gay families, that all this attention has suddenly made him realize that all those statement he’s made were big mistakes, he and his church have a VERY long way to go before you can ask anyone else in the gay community to just take his word for it. But I guess you didn’t get around to asking him to put his money where his mouth is, huh? Slick-talking preachers have a way of avoiding that.
On the day of the conference I received a call from Pastor Rick, and before I could say anything, he told me what a fan he was. He had most of my albums from the very first one. What? This didn’t sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher.
Melissa, I hate to break this to you, but just because someone owns your albums? It doesn’t mean they’re not a homophobe. Just ask Liberace or Freddie Mercury. It certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t have anti-gay politics, that they’re not trying to further causes that don’t care if they hurt your family and friends in a number of different ways.
He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection.
I really wish you had asked him at that point what he was doing to ensure that every loving relationship has equal protection. Because somehow it seems like all he’s been doing in that direction is insisting that wives should submit to their husbands, and trying to keep gay folks from getting married and having families, spouting rhetoric repeatedly about how marriage is only for family and procreation, and therefore not for homosexuals. Obviously he wasn’t cultivating any regard whatsoever for families like yours.
Would he be in favor of civil unions? Somehow this never seems to get on the record. It might be because multiple courts and governmental ethics committees have found that civil unions violate Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared “separate but equal” against the law. The real opponents of marriage equality, Warren’s allies, are also against civil unions because they realize that civil union laws could be converted into marriage equality once the spectre of Brown is summoned. Like it or not, the stakes are marriage. (And I don’t like it personally, because I could care less about marriage — it’s the material rights and privileges attached by the government to it that really matter to me.)
On the other hand, if your ultimate goal was to get some of this stuff on the record — that Rick Warren believes that every loving relationship should have the same protections — then good job. Next time bring a video camera too, because not only would he have to stand by his words, but they’re words that would get him in trouble with a lot of his followers and friends. Oh oops — unless he claims he just made a mistake when he was talking to you, just like he supposedly did when addressing his entire congregation and comparing you to a pedophile or someone committing incest. Again, he could put his money where his mouth is by making a public statement. He won’t — he’s backed off of meeting with gay groups before, backed off of welcoming gay dads into his church’s Father’s Day programs, because he can’t take the heat from his evangelical cronies.
He struggled with proposition 8 because he didn’t want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman.
…and then he sold you on one of the most common lines in the book, the excuse that’s been regurgitated by every right-wing politico or religious spokesperson who’s made it to the national stage in the last couple years. “It’s not about you, it’s about the definition of a word!” Another variation of “love the sinner, hate the sin,” which always sounds so funny while they’re torturing the sinner, or in these less inquisitorial times, just keeping the sinner locked out of legal rights and privileges. Please see Jon Stewart vs. Mike Huckabee or Ellen Degeneres vs. John McCain for good examples of how not to just get bowled over by this argument. Please? You can be a celebrity AND stand up to political manipulation, it’s eminently possible.
He said he regretted his choice of words in his video message to his congregation about proposition 8 when he mentioned pedophiles and those who commit incest. He said that in no way, is that how he thought about gays.
Oh that’s good. Hey wait a second. What about this second video that aired on NBC the DAY BEFORE before you talked to him. In this one he just says that giving into gay impulses is immature, insists that gay people should “delay gratification” instead (forever, of course) and implies that gay people are all irresponsible sluts. I guess that’s much better? Or maybe he realized he made a mistake AGAIN in the day before he talked to you. “Oooops, my bad! I smeared your people again and not only insisted you shouldn’t be able to get married, but also that you shouldn’t even have sex, because it would be like if I tried to get with every hot woman I see.”
He invited me to his church, I invited him to my home to meet my wife and kids.
You know, I really do agree with you that there are some homophobic Christians out there who really are just afraid of what they don’t understand. I even believe that there are some out there who would experience a change of heart if they went and had dinner with your family. I’m not sure I believe that Warren is one of them. He knows what he’s doing. He chooses his words carefully. The day after you talked to him, his own words were pulled from his website: “Someone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted at a member at Saddleback Church.” Huh — maybe you really did change his mind? Or maybe he’s just aware that there’s enough pressure now that he has to back off of his more extremist views. Either way, I’m willing to go along with Mike Rogers’ characterization of the Saddlebackpedaling as a victory.
Maybe it will turn out for the best — who can say? But next time? It might be a good idea to do a little research before you make a public address to all the rest of the gays, asking us all to be noble and give this guy a pass in the name of peace and good will. You would come off like less of a huge sucker who had been taken in by a smooth-talking “love the sinner” line of bull. Sorry, I don’t mean to just pick on you. I have some things to say about Tammy’s companion piece too.
well, at times, it seems that the media presents us with target after target to smear, as if to say to us, “THIS IS THE GUY HOLDING YOU BACK!! GO GIT ‘IM!!!” and it does seem that my lovely gay family is so bruised and bettered and ready to fight back (myself included), that we attack and deem someone ANTI-GAY, and ready to SMEAR, simply when they don’t want the word “marriage” brought into our gay ceremonies.
For one thing, Tammy — the people who raised a hue and cry about this aren’t the mainstream media. They’re people like you and me, bloggers like Pam Spaulding who have been keeping an eye on Rick Warren for ages. Second, nobody’s ever complained seriously about anyone using the word “marriage” in a ceremony. They can’t legally enforce the use of a word — that’s freedom of speech. Even more importantly, marriage doesn’t mean the same thing in every religion. There are Christian faiths that embrace gay marriage. Some other church can’t tell them not to perform a religious ceremony for two men or two women — that’s freedom of religion. It’s none of Saddleback’s business or any church’s business what other churches do.
The issue, of course, is that marriage long ago was brought over onto the civil side. That’s when it stopped being a purely religious subject and became a matter of civil rights. The word “marriage” and “spouse” and legal definitions of marriage are all over our code of laws.
let’s say i am wearing a baseball cap. now what if i want to call it a yamaka? you know- it’s basically the same thing, but one is missing the sun visor. i don’t call my caps yamakas… cuz that is a religious name for a hat that is worn by religious people. now if i apply that thinking to this situation…. i would like to think of it as…. if they afford us the EXACT SAME RIGHTS, then who cares what it’s called? my friend joel can wear his yamaka. i can wear my hat. joel can light his menorah, i’ll light my candle. joel can eat his matzo ball soup, and i can break crackers into my soup. joel and hanna can have a piece of paper with the word MARRIAGE on it, and all 1200 rights… and i can have a piece of paper with who-cares on it, and all 1200 rights. the word marriage is a religious, holy, word that people who go to church on sundays are told belongs to them. like yamaka, menorah, or matzo.
Again, there are plenty of gay folks who go to church on Sundays — churches that believe in marriage for everyone. The word “marriage” doesn’t belong to those churches any less that it does to right-wing homophobic churches. But the legal term “marriage” in the law does belong and must belong to all of us — equally, because it has the force of law. If you really think not using that word is the solution, then the only way is to REMOVE marriage from the law and call it something else, for everyone. Which is something plenty of people have advocated for, including me, but somehow I suspect that would be a VERY uphill battle.
You know, I like the idea of civil unions. The battle for the word “marriage” has always struck me as a cultural battle, not a legal one. It’s a fight to try to gain legitimacy along with that most suspect of political goals, “first-class citizenship” by laying claim to the same institution in the same name. It’s not about the real material conditions, that list of 1200 rights you mention, that were guaranteed by civil unions in Connecticut and which make a real difference in people’s lives. But here’s the thing — it’s precisely that cultural battle for “me too” legitimacy that made the Connecticut Supreme Court strike down civil unions and replace them with marriage, because our laws, made famous in Brown vs. Board of Education, will not tolerate a separate but equal solution.
A rose by any other name, in this country, does not smell as sweet, because the American people look down on roses that are called “fakeroses,” won’t buy synthetic diamonds because they’re not real enough, and put much stock in names. And that’s the law, like it or not. It frustrates me, personally, because I don’t think the state should be trying to legislate marriage at all — I just think all families should enjoy the same benefits and support. That’s why I support the Audre Lorde Project position on marriage, and the vision of equality expressed by Beyond Marriage — above and beyond the goals of the mainstream gay marriage movement.
So… unfortunately? The word “marriage” is not really the issue. It’s just a smokescreen. One that I’d happily dispense with, but the legal stakes are now at marriage, not any other name. Plus, Warren’s allies who oppose gay marriage (and whose movment he continues to support, even in his conversation with Melissa) also oppose civil unions, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned.
the rest of the public is given an animation of rick warren… and then my wife meets the man behind the projections, the quotes, the “OTHER SIDE”. and he is warm, caring, effusive, and LOVES gays. since he nearly swallowed honey when he hugged her, i tend to believe him.
Look, everyone who’s seen the man in action knows that Rick Warren seems friendly and nice and like he wants to give you a big loving hug. That’s his job; that’s the kind of preacher he is. Seriously. (Update: Check it out, the story of another homo he hugged who was a little more nonplussed.) Tomorrow, if he’s called onto the carpet by his more radical evangelical friends for saying what he said to Melissa, he’s going to be backpedaling in the other direction, although probably in private. Just like he did to the gay families that came to break bread with him at his church.
I’m sorry.
Love and best wishes,
Holly
(who is definitely a bigger meanie than Rick Warren is)
An afterword for commenters: I’ve already made my feelings about the whole inauguration thing clear in comments to Jill’s previous post. I imagine people will want to keep talking about that, however, so I’ll summarize: Obama is the new president. We shouldn’t be surprised when the president expediently flips the bird to a chunk of his base; that’s part of what presidents do, and disappointment is what you get for believing too much in change through electoral politics. I believe Kristin and Kristen (also in comments) that Rick Warren is a relatively “moderate” choice for Obama to curry favor with the massive evangelical voting block through. However, we should also be honestly outraged and express that outrage, because that’s part of the job of keeping the left wing as honest as possible — which if we’re lucky, is more honest than the right wing possibly could be.