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  Rick Warren Will Give the Inaugural Prayer?!? Oh, Barack, Please Say It Ain't So ...

  Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 5:34 PM | By E.J. Graff

  So Rick Warren is going to give the inaugural prayer? Rick Warren, Jerry Falwell in sheep’s clothing, the leader of the Saddleback Church (megachurch, actually, with satellite campuses and broadcast sermons and services), who, as Michelle Goldberg puts it so pleasantly in The Guardian:
  

  He is a man who compares legal abortion to the Holocaust and gay marriage to incest and paedophilia. He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell. He doesn't believe in evolution. He recently the social gospel—the late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that led a religious crusade against poverty and inequality—as "Marxism in Christian clothing.

   Or as Linda Hirshman noted on the WAM listserv (I’m posting this with her permission):

  Rick Warren’s site for educating preachers, Pastor.com, has a long essay on why women should submit to their husbands. Here’s the money line: "The Greek word for 'submit' is hupotasso. Hupo means "under" and tasso means "to place in order." The compound word hupotasso means "to place under or in an orderly fashion." Paul didn't dislike women, he liked order! He advocated order in the church, order in government, order in business, and, yes, order in the home. 

  There have been a lot of heartbroken comments about this on change.gov.

  Barack, please, say you respect women—and nonevangelicals—more than this. Please?

  Filed under: Barack Obama, inauguration, Rick Warren

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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