I understand why gays are upset about Obama's picking Warren to give one of the inaugural invocations, but I deeply believe that so long as "progressives" make culturally divisive values issues their rallying cry, it plays into the hands of the bad guys--at least until we resolve the constitutional crisis we're currently in the middle of. Let's get some perspective: We don't have habeas corpus right now. It means that the president, or one of his bureaucrats, could call me or you a terrorist, throw me or you into a Gitmo-like jail, and then throw away the key. That's the kind of country we are living in now, and that's not an exaggeration.
Until I am proved wrong, I will continue to assume Obama intends to dismantle the infrastructure of repression put in place by the Bush administration, and I will assume that he will be viciously fought on it, and that he he needs all the support he can get. If Obama fails, either because he doesn't try or if he does but can't get it done, we're in much bigger trouble than whether gays have the right to marry or not.
We are walking a razor's edge here. We have to use our heads and prioritize. Resistance to gay marriage or civil unions is rooted in age-old cultural taboos. There are lots of Americans--a majority in a blue state like California--whose identities and worldviews are invested in these taboos, and that isn't going to change because people on the secular left who dismiss traditional values as homophobic demand it. They have to persuade; they have to appeal to the decency, the compassion, and fairmindedness of ordinary Americans who don't know many gay people and think of them as stereotypes of decadence because they have no other reference points.
I think there are some people on the right who simply cannot be worked with. I don't think Warren or even a guy like Mike Huckabee are among them. I see them as honest, thoughtful people who could some day change their minds. They need to be conversed with, not vilified. And in the meanwhile, there is a lot of common ground that they share with progressives on issues of social justice that distinguish them from the really crazy, inflexible evangelicals like Dobson, Robertson, and Falwell.
With some people there is no possibility of finding common ground, but Obama's job is to find common ground with the broadest possible swath of sane Americans. Obama needs the support of moderates within the evangelical community, and Rick Warren and Mike Huckabee are their representatives. Yes, they are very conservative on social and cultural values issues, but they are left of center on many economic and social justice issues. It's more important that he find ways to establish common ground with them and the people they represent than that he be politically correct.
As long as the cultural left makes its secular cultural values its rallying cry, it plays into the divide-and-conquer strategy of oligarchs (see also here) who could care less about cultural values. The oligarchs are focused on the real prize, which is the aggregation of economic and political power. Both left and right are getting played by being suckered into a fight on these wedge issues, and my hope is that this move by Obama is a signal that he won't be played. I'm not certain of that, but it's plausible, and if I'm wrong, we're really screwed.
Gay rights will come, but getting angry at people like Warren is self-defeating. It alienates too many Americans Obama needs if he is to develop a center coalition to attack issues that are far more fundamental. If Obama fails get us back to the status quo ante on basic civil liberties like habeas corpus, and to find ways to restrain the Robber Barons who are trying to move us back into a form of neo-feudalism, I fear that a decade hence whether gays can obtain marriage licenses will be among the least of their concerns.
P.S. I think Warren is getting the same treatment from the left that Jeremiah Wright got from the right. If the Bill Moyers' interview gives some evidence that Wright is more complex than the cartoon caricatures made of him in the political sphere, I think this interview with Krista Tippett does the same for Warren. To understand where someone is coming from is not necessarily to agree with them. The point is that agree or disagree with either of them, they are reasonable, decent, fallible people like the rest of us who have some claim on normalcy. Wright isn't bin Laden, and Warren isn't the Ayatolla Khomeini.