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There's No Religious Prejudice in Politics...Except Towards Muslims

Where's the Conservative Outrage Over Warren?

E.J. Dionne channeled some of the I'm-fine-with-Rick-Warren arguments on this blog in his Post column today, which suggests that the brilliance of the Rick Warren choice is that it challenges everybody, not just lefties:

By inviting Pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, President-elect Barack Obama has alienated some of his friends on the left. By accepting, Warren has enraged some of his allies on the right.

There's this notion out there—call it the equivalence of outrage—that right-wingers are just as upset with Warren for agreeing to bless Obama as left-wingers are upset with Obama for asking Warren for his blessing. But where are these explosions of rage on the right happening? I can't find them. I went to National Review's lively "Corner" blog and couldn't detect any irritation. ("I haven't gotten a single angry email from a reader about this, and usually when conservatives are enraged by something, somebody emails me about it," NR's Jonah Goldberg noted.) No rage immediately evident in quick skims of Michelle Malkin, Confederate Yankee, Ace of Spades, or RedState, either. Christian Broadcasting News even rhapsodized that Obama "said he was tired of the same old 'us vs. them' mentality in DC and beyond. Well, picking Warren does the trick."

To try to get to the bottom of this—maybe it's the conservative rank-and-file that's upset?—I did a highly scientific study of three right-wing friends of mine, none of them pundits, asking them the question, "What do you think of Obama's decision to have Rick Warren deliver his inaugural convocation?" Here were the responses:

I'm not too sure yet ... On the one hand, he is trying to keep some of the dissatisfied Republicans he obviously picked up in this past election. On the other hand, the reaction from the LGBT community shows that Obama will find himself all too often ticking off either his political base OR America at large as he tries to do this.

I am mildly amused by the idea that some liberals are disappointed in Obama already.

I imagine he [Warren] would have a lot of good things to say and I will take him over Obama's pastors any day!

If that's anger, then Mister Rogers had an anger problem. I'm just not sure E.J.'s on target that "so many" on the right are upset with Warren. And unfortunately, his celebration of Warren kind of hangs on the equivalence of outrage—on the idea that Obama and Warren have both shown courage in bucking their supporters' wishes, and that Obama, in choosing Warren, is approving not of the politics of evangelical Christianity as they traditionally have been, but as they could be:

Warren appears to be genuinely interested in broadening evangelical Christianity's public agenda. In a recent interview with Steve Waldman of Beliefnet.com, Warren compared gay marriage to "an older guy marrying a child," and to "one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage." But he also called upon evangelicals to be "the social change leaders in our society" engaged with "poverty and disease and charity and social justice and racial justice."

Obama wants to encourage this move, which would be good for him and good for progressive politics. Fear that Obama's analysis is exactly right is why so many conservatives are so angry with Warren for blessing the new president's inaugural. Although I support gay marriage, I think that liberals should welcome Obama's success in causing so much consternation on the right.

Let's see Warren make a few moves that do provoke a little consternation on the right, and then we can be impressed. (E.J. actually offers some good ideas in his column.)

What's With the Big-Name Worship?

Hello to all the XX women—major fan here. I'll be guest-blogging with you for a week, and I'm thrilled to join such an august set of old friends and admired colleagues. So thrilled, actually, I'm buying everybody a round of the "spam, egg, rice and seaweed Hawaiian specialty" that we now know our new president loves. Look for it in the mail, and please warn your letter carriers.

Before we move on to, say, the hot "Baby Alive" doll trend (" 'Be careful,' reads the doll's promotional literature, 'just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the 'potty' and sometimes she can't'"), I do want to say I think Hanna's on to something when she calls Obama's Rick Warren move "tokenism." It is a token gesture, and that's exactly what makes it irritating. For what seems like ages, liberals have dutifully swallowed the lesson that America is a center-right country, way more in line with Warren than with Wallis; that the bulk of Americans regard liberal values with suspicion; and that any Democrat who aspires to national leadership has to mince around either shading his liberalism (think of Bill Clinton and Don't Ask Don't Tell) or mounting grand conciliatory gestures toward the other side's values (think of John Kerry's attempts to look militant). This is a pretty broad phenomenon: In my day job at the New Republic magazine, I often write about Congress, and while hoofing around the country to cover congressional races this fall I was struck—as I was in 2006, too—by how far the infinitely adaptable red-district Democratic candidates go to demonstrate their sympathies with conservative mores, while the Republican candidates tend to feel far less pressed to make those kinds of adaptations or token gestures. (George W. Bush sure didn't see the need to tap Gene Robinson or Katharine Jefferts Schori to deliver his inaugural invocation.)

Of course, it's nice that many Democrats try to rise above dogma and pitch themselves to a broader coalition. That's the Obama Doctrine, as much as anything is. But at a certain point, the frantic efforts to smooth conservative America's ruffled feathers get damned tedious. I think Rick Warren was that point for many.

And why the hotshot obsession? What with signing up first Hillary Clinton and now Warren, whom the Independent aptly called "the most popular religious figure in the US bar the Pope," Obama seems to be on a mission to get every American with ~20 million followers to stand next to him on a podium and authenticate the breathtaking range of his appeal. But I can't help wishing he had chosen somebody a little less garishly megawatt, for God's sake. Some slightly more obscure person of good works; somebody less political and less token; somebody more along the lines of Kirbyjon Caldwell during the W. years. That kind of choice, not Warren, would have been the real surprise.

The Oldest, Holiest Profession

The New Yorker has a fascinating piece this week about devadasis, sacred sex workers in India. It's not online, but it's worth checking out. Delhi-based journalist William Dalrymple (author of White Mughals) focuses on two contemporary devadasis dedicated to the goddess Yellamma, in the southern state of Karnataka. It's a hard tale. Both women take a certain pride in their work—they make relatively good money, for example, and they have more dignity than "common" prostitutes. Because they're considered auspicious, they're often invited to bless upper-caste weddings and receive various gifts during holy days. At the same time, their lives are exceedingly grim. AIDS is a major issue, and many women are sold into the profession against their will by destitute families.

Dalrymple quotes his subjects extensively—at one point, there are nearly 20 unbroken paragraphs of straight quotation—and he does a skillful job of revealing the tensions between what these women say their lives are like and the reality of those existences. I found myself wishing for more, for better context, though. I still had a lot of questions about the practice when I was finished—like, for example, how legitimately "sacred" is the sex work if the priests themselves denounce these women? Maybe Dalrymple's chapters about devadasis in the forthcoming anthology Aids Sutra (about AIDS in India) or in Dalyrmple's own book about pre-Hindu religious traditions will shed more light on the subject.

In the meantime, you can check out Mrs. Marcus B. Fuller's The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood—written in 1900—for her take on the subject.

The Right Not To Do Your Job?

Most of the time, the Constitution doesn't let employers refuse to hire people on the basis of religious conviction. This has the comforting ring of a bedrock American freedom. But lately, it's being manipulated. First by pharmacists who say they refuse to dispense emergency contraception on the basis of their religous beliefs. And now  by the Bush administration, which this week ordered family-planning clinics who receive federal grants not to refuse to hire nurses and other medical staff who object to abortion "based on religious beliefs or moral convictions." And not just surgical abortion, but “any of the various procedures—including the prescription, dispensing, and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action—that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

There's some serious accordionlike expansion of categories going on here—from objecting to abortion based not only on a religious belief but on a presumably secular moral one. And from D and Cs to emergency contraception. Worse, however, is the way in which the administration's directive feeds into the conflation of religious freedom with the idea that people have a right to a job even if their religious beliefs mean they can't do it. What does a nurse who objects to abortion do in a family-planning clinic? Sit out the procedures she was hired to help with? Hang protesting posters in the waiting room? I don't get it.

There have always been exceptions to the idea that employers can't discriminate. If you need to be Christian or Jewish or Muslim to fill out the four corners of a job description, then you can be denied the position if you're not. Example: An evangelical college can interview only Christians for the post of president. A synagogue can hire only Jewish Hebrew-school teachers. This isn't discrimination, in any legally recognizable sense of the word. Here's the family-planning parallel: If you are a nurse who feels she can't assist at an abortion or give a patient the emergency contraception the doctor prescribed, it doesn't matter whether your refusal is for religious or moral reasons or because you're not in the mood. You can't do the job. Maybe the Bush directive allows for this, in the sense that it's only protecting job candidates who could object to abortion and do the work that's required anyway. They also presumably wouldn't hang graphic posters of fetuses in the waiting room. I hope that's the right interpretation, anyway.

Mrs. Blair's Baggage

Born-Agains are voting for WHOM????

Barna Group, which regularly surveys the political mood of conservative Christians, just released one strange set of findings. According to thier latest poll: If the election were held today, most born-again voters would choose the Democratic nominee for president. Barna's research indicates that "born-again" voters are most likely to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton (20 percent), followed by Sen. Barack Obama (18 percent), and Mike Huckabee (12 percent). Yes, you read that correctly—SEN. HILLARY CLINTON.

In its shock and dismay, the Family Research Council points out that to be sure, a born-again ain't what it used to be. The category only includes "people who make a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as their Savior and believe they will go to heaven when they die." A true "evangelical," by contrast, also believes in the accuracy of the Bible, God as the earth's creator, and a few other conditions.

Still, pretty weird. This is like, back to born again, circa 1950. Maybe it's time for the first female Pat Robertson.