When you have questions about how upset the gay community is over the choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration, who better to ask than equally anti-gay homophobe Mike Huckabee?
Predictably, Huckabee's response is a big ol' heaping cup of "so what?":
VAN SUSTEREN: Let me jump to another topic, which you probably weren’t expecting, is that President-elect Obama has chosen Rick Warren to give the invocation and there are a lot of gay Americans very upset. What do you make of this?
HUCKABEE: Well, it’s ridiculous for people to be upset with Rick Warren. He’s one of the most influential spiritual leaders of this generation. I’ve known Rick for over 30 years. We were actually in seminary together in Ft. Worth, Texas, back in the mid-1970s. He is today what he always has been, and that’s a humble, gracious, thoughtful, very intellectual capable person. I think it’s a wonderful thing that Barack Obama reached out to him. I thought it was a tremendous expression on Barack Obama’s part. I’m proud that Rick Warren is going to do it and I think that people ought to recognize…look, that’s part of what being religious is all about. You have strong convictions and nobody is going to have a religious leader who is in agreement with everybody.
Talking about avoiding the question. No one is demanding a religious leader who is in agreement with everybody--what a strawman. But it would be nice to have -- in this post-partisan age Obama is allegedly ushering in -- to have "inclusiveness" actually mean all of us.
To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, 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.
Well, exactly. Ironically, Huckabee points out exactly why it's troubling to those that Warren has likened to pedophiles: he's one of the most influential spiritual leaders in the county...sending out a message of intolerance. But for fellow intolerant Huckabee, that's a tremendous message on the part of Barack Obama.
