As a conservative, I have greatly enjoyed the consternation among the American left engendered by Barack Obama’s choice of moderate evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration.
For Warren is a moderate, not a conservative, as the very definition of a moderate is someone who possess both right and left-wing views. In the pastor’s case, Warren’s conservative positions on abortion and homosexual marriage are balanced by more liberal stands on so-called “global warming” and other issues.
But where does E. J. Dionne, in today’s (12/23/08) column in the Washington Post get the notion that conservatives are upset about Obama’s choice? I am a voracious reader of conservative columnists and blogs and nowhere have I found any response from responsible conservative voices that are anything but delighted at Wonder Boy’s choice, just as those on the right were universally delighted with Warren’s interviews with both McCain and Obama during the Presidential campaign, where the man of God asked the candidates to answer genuine moral questions instead of the “gotcha!” inquiries directed at McCain and the deferential softballs Obama got in the Presidential debates and interviews conducted by the “mainstream” media.
No, we conservatives are just grateful for the wise selection and are also enjoying the gibbering tantrums thrown by such liberal icons as Congressman Barney Frank. Frank, who once let one of his “roommates” run a rent-boy service out of his apartment, objects to the fact that Warren said he would not support marriage between two same sex partners any more than he would support a marriage between a child and an adult. Warren, blustered Frank, was actually equating his own personal sexual deviation to another type of sexual deviation! What kind of a mean-spirited comparison was that?
(UPDATE: Since I originally posted this four days ago, the only “conservative” group or spokesperson I have heard of to object to Rev. Warren’s appearance at the inauguration is the anti-abortion group “Operation Rescue.” While this organization’s goals, ending the continuing slaughter of the unborn, are laudable, its methods, are borrowed from the worst tactics of the left, to wit, massive “civil disobedience” (i.e. violently breaking the law) so I cannot really regard it as a “conservative” group at all and my initial point still stands.)
