Obama, in a ‘slap in the face,’ invites right-wing evangelist to the inauguration

[IndianaGreen]

Obama, in a ‘slap in the face,’ invites right-wing evangelist to the inauguration

By David Walsh
19 December 2008

Warren is a religious bigot and know-nothing, hostile to gay rights and abortion rights, a believer in creationism and “free market enterprise for religion, as well as for everything else” and a supporter of American imperialism’s agenda to dominate the globe.

The son of a Baptist minister, he preaches a sort of New Age evangelism at the Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, where he has gathered a large following. The author of The Purpose Driven Life, Warren avoids for the most part the semi-fascistic rhetoric of televangelist and former Republican candidate for president Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, claiming to be a man of the “middle” and not the Christian right.

His mentor, he explains, is management consultant Peter Drucker and he has been compared to “entrepreneurs” like Ray Kroc (of McDonald’s) and Sam Walton (of Wal-Mart). In turn, he claims to be mentor to former GE chief Jack Welch and pastor to Rupert Murdoch, two of the most unsavory and ruthless business figures around. Warren’s web site approvingly cites this comment from Forbes magazine: “If Saddleback ministry was a business its influence would be compared with Dell, Google or Starbucks.”

Despite the affable, ‘up-to-date’ façade, Warren’s primitive and anti-democratic views are hardly a secret. He compares same-sex marriage to incest, pedophilia and polygamy, claims that socially-minded theologians advocate “basically Marxism in a Christian form,” denounces supporters of abortion rights as “Holocaust deniers,” and opposes stem-cell research.

On the right-wing Hannity & Colmes talk show on the Fox cable channel in early December, host Sean Hannity suggested that the US should kill Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—“We need to take him out.” The “non-political” Warren concurred, commenting, “the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped. … In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers.”

Speaking of homosexuality during a television interview in December 2005, Warren commented: “(I)s it natural? Is it the natural thing? … If Darwin was right, which is survival of the fittest then homosexuality would be a recessive gene because it doesn’t reproduce and you would think that over thousands of years that homosexuality would work itself out of the gene pool.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/warr-d19.shtml