The always remarkable Sarah Posner has her latest column, The Fundamentalist, up online at The American Prospect.
Given the announcement that President-Elect Obama has pulled another Donnie McClurkin-style faux pas in selecting Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren — who has compared gay and lesbian relationships to incest, child rape and polygamy — to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration, Posner’s column seems more than a little timely. Â
From The Fundamentalist:
1. Democrats’ Lovefest With Evangelicals One of the Hottest Stories of the Year
The Democrats’ new focus on the country’s devout was the second-hottest religion-news story of 2008, according to the Religion News Service. Based on a survey of members of the Religion Newswriters’ Association, Democrats’ outreach, particularly to evangelicals and the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, was edged out for top honors only by Barack Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Time’s David Van Biema placed the same story seventh in his top 10 religion-stories list, noting that “powerful pastors like Florida’s Joel Hunter and California’s Rick Warren are pressing the culture beyond the narrow concerns of the religious Right.”
Obama has lavished praise on Warren, and the liberal group Faith in Public Life, originally a project of the Center for American Progress, pushed for the August presidential forum at his church. Obama prayed with Hunter on election night, hours before his acceptance speech in Grant Park. Although they have strived to distance themselves from the political elites of the religious right, both Warren and Hunter are self-described conservatives, and their views are much closer to religious-right dogma than they are to the heart of the Democratic Party.
The Obama campaign also had quieter, more behind-the-scenes outreach to religious groups more likely to vote Democratic, like mainline Protestants. But the outreach that got all the attention, and that the Democratic Party wanted to get all the attention, was the outreach to white evangelicals — the demographic least likely to vote Democratic.
Rick Warren, in Posner’s column, warrants a second listing called: Sick of Rick: The Never-Ending Quest to Discern Purpose-Driven Thinking. Read it at The American Prospect. And who wouldn’t love a copy of Sarah Posner’s God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters for the holidays?
UPDATE: (12-17, 01:48 pm):  Via Pam Spaulding: Have complaints to share? Parag Mehta is Obama’s LGBT liaison on the transition team - parag.mehta@ptt.gov
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