Gay leaders furious with Obama

By BEN SMITH & NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON  at Politico

Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to deliver the invocation at his inauguration is a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November, but it is drawing fierce challenges from a gay rights movement that — in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California — is looking for a fight.

Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government’s role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote to Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.

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Calling in Gay…

by the Pink Elephant Pundit

So, tomorrow is “Day without a Gay“. Or whatever you want to call it – basically, the gay community has decided that they need to prove their worth by showing the rest of us that we cannot function without them

My statement to the gay community is this: We know that you’re valuable. You’re people. You hold jobs, you have families. You, as a human being, are indispensable to those that love you, and are a part of our nation. Shirking the responsibilities that go along with that isn’t a way to prove anything. You want equality and acceptance – why do you try so hard to separate yourselves with special laws, and demonstrations like this? All you’re doing is increasing resentment in those that will have to pick up the slack for you tomorrow.

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