Dump Rick Warren, or Dump Religious Invocations Entirely?

The campaign asking Barack Obama to dump Rick Warren as the invocation speaker at his inauguration  is still on. 

There are plenty of good reasons to be mad at the choice of Warren.  Even if we were to set aside his clear homophobia  and sexism, there's the issue of how he has used his personal religious beliefs to drastically harm the very people he's been praised for helping in international efforts against HIV. The fact is that abstinence-only education doesn't work, and when you're talking about populations at risk for exposure to HIV, abstinence-only kills. 

How about this one: should we even have a religious invocation at the inauguration of a secular leader? Let no one forget, acceptance of LGBT people by Christian churches is still wildly controversial, and for every beautiful example of a truly Christian spirit, there is another example of hatefulness in the name of God. 

Comments

[Graciela]

Inviting Rick Warren to his inauguration as an "invocation speaker," is nothing else than Obama's payback for Warren's invitation to participate in a discussion with McCain at the Saddleback Church. I know, it's hard to digest but crystal clear. Perhaps we will need to redefine the words "homophobia" and "sexism" as being other forms of bigotry of equal significance as racism. In the history of this country, no rights have been granted or given to anyone. People had to fight, make demands, protest, sacrifice, and take incredible risks in order to advance progressive social agendas.
I personally don't think and never thought that Obama was anything more than a centrist mainstream politician who knew that he needed to portray himself as more to the left than Hillary Clinton and to praise the Reagan administration in order to ingratiate himself with people like Rick Warren and Ronny Reagan Jr. I also understand that people needed to project their own hopes and dreams on Obama, and this is something that Obama himself has acknowledged in his book "The Audacity of Hope."
Nothing short of a revolutionary third-wave feminist movement and a grassroots gay rights movement will be able to press for significant actions and deeds, not just words. I am tired of words and opportunistic "good" intentions that never materialize after political elections are won.