Mike Tidmus

In a recent interview with BeliefNet, Rick Warren claimed, “I have many gay friends. I’ve eaten dinner in gay homes. No church has probably done more for people with AIDS than Saddleback Church.”

In the same interview, the pop-pastor compared marriage equality for same-gender couples to incest, child abuse, and polygamy.

John Cloud, writing in Time magazine is understandably skeptical about Warren’s claims: “So gays get to eat — sometimes even with Rick Warren! Then they get to die of AIDS — possibly under the care of Rick Warren’s congregants. And when they go to hell, they won’t be quite as far down in Satan’s pit as other evildoers.”

Knowing that, thus far, not a single one of the pop-pastor’s gay dining companions has stepped forward to fill us in on how warm and fuzzy Ol’ Pastor Rick gets after a glass or two of Merlot, and knowing Warren’s intractable attitude toward a wide range of Americans who don’t share his particular Biblical worldview, Pastor Warren’s self-ballyhooed AIDS bravado rings hollow and merits a closer look.

In 2006, Warren and his wife Kay hosted their own AIDS conference called Global Summit on AIDS and the Church. The event, staged at Warren’s Saddleback Church, featured a handful of celebrities, politicians and a whole lot of anti-queer, anti-choice, anti-science conservative Christians. Rick Warren also invited Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, whose opposition to queer and women’s rights earned him the moniker God’s Senator, and then Senator Barack Obama, who has subsequently lavished praise on Warren for his HIV/AIDS work.

This past World AIDS Day, Warren conjured up an AIDS award and ceremoniously handed the first ever International Medal of PEACE to his buddy George W Bush for his administration’s philanthropic focus, to the detriment of domestic efforts, on AIDS in Africa.

Last weekend, I happened across a post at Pam’s House Blend by Repeal8 called Rick Warren and his message to gay folks with HIV/AIDS. Repeal8 pointed out that among the recommended resources at Warren’s AIDS conference website was a program called Walking people out of homosexuality. A Blend commenter pointed out that the link was bad, so I did a little digging and found the original page.

The program is a traveling, anti-queer conference called More Than Words from Cross Ministry of North Carolina. Here’s a brief excerpt from their promotional pitch:

MORE THAN WORDS is a compelling 1-day conference geared to help you better understand homosexuality so you can minister to a friend or family member. You will learn how to respond to “gay theology”, what the research really shows, and what your church can do.

MORE THAN WORDS goes beyond “talk” to walking people out of homosexuality. The complexity of homosexuality will crumble as you discover the root issues, explore the biblical record and witness the dynamic truths that lead to freedom from homosexuality.

Our churches, our schools and our culture are being bombarded with misinformation in order to legitimize homosexuality. Christians know that homosexuality is wrong, but many lack the knowledge and ability to refute the clever homosexual agenda. Millions of parents suffer silently with a homosexual son or daughter. Many pastors and counselors are ill-equipped to tackle the issue.

(emphasis: mine)

Among the other topics are: Debunking the “Gay Gene,” Untwisting “Gay Theology,” and Preventing Homosexuality.

Another link from Warren’s AIDS conference website leads to a book called 101 Probing Questions…101 Compassionate and Scriptural Answers, by Focus on the Family’s Mike Haley. The Amazon.com description reads:

Almost daily we hear news reports that confirm the acceptance of homosexuality in our culture. Homosexuals are adopting children, appearing as characters on television programs, taking vacations catering to an exclusively gay clientele, and even seeking the right to “marry” their partners. But is this acceptance healthy for society?

Few topics can raise so many questions so quickly. And for many readers, those questions hit close to home as they learn of the homosexuality of a loved one or close friend.

Here are the answers to the most often asked questions about homosexuality, fielded by an expert on the subject…and a former homosexual himself.

(emphasis: mine)

In an essay, reprinted from Cross Ministry, called Why can’t I tell you?, the anonymous mother of a queer son asks, “Is living a homosexual lifestyle sinful? Yes, God’s Word is clear on the issue, but is it a greater sin than any other? Where in the Bible do you find a sliding scale with some sins weighted more than others; some more “acceptable” than others? You can search from Genesis to Revelation and no such rule of measurement will be found.”

Given the lack of a sliding scale, homosexuality must be no worse than enjoying a shrimp cocktail or wearing a polyester blend jacket. Conservative Christians don’t see it that way. In fact Rick Warren’s own Saddleback Church has stated that it does not welcome unrepentant queers:

Because membership in a church is an outgrowth of accepting the Lordship and leadership of Jesus in one’s life, someone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted at a member at Saddleback Church. That does not mean they cannot attend church – we hope they do! God’s Word has the power to change our lives.

(emphasis: mine)

Don’t look for that text at Saddleback Church’s website. It was recently scrubbed, one presumes, to give the erroneous impression that he who dines with gays is not a homophobe. The text was, however, saved in a Google cache of the page.

Another section at Warren’s AIDS conference site explains the difference between SLOW and STOP approaches to AIDS prevention. SLOW is a safer sex approach; STOP is nothing more than a faith-based, abstinence-only strategy, and according to the writer:

Though these S.L.O.W.© strategies are relatively simple to implement and will work to slow the pandemic, they won’t stop AIDS. If AIDS is to be stopped, the Church must get involved.

The Church can use its moral authority to S.T.O.P.© the spread of HIV/AIDS by encouraging and supporting these four strategies…

Warren does not entirely oppose the distribution of condoms for AIDS prevention to “prostitutes in impoverished, high-risk AIDS regions such as Africa and India.” He told WorldNetDaily, “I want to keep them alive long enough that I can win them to Christ. If they’re dead, it’s too late. The good news is only good news if it gets there in time.” He does, however, oppose the distribution of condoms to the young and unmarried. Warren said, “My personal thing is I’m not going to give a condom to a kid.” He adds, “What I try to do is work with people to the degree that I can without compromising my convictions … As a pastor, my job is to change behavior.”

A recent article by Kathryn Joyce at Reality Check, a reproductive health blog, addresses the impact of conservative American church’s attempts at behavioral change on global AIDS policy:

But churches anxious to follow Warren’s lead didn’t want to provide comprehensive HIV prevention services, such as safer sex education or condoms, so they lobbied for PEPFAR [the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] funding policy to be interpreted narrowly, creating stand-alone abstinence-until-marriage programs out of the law’s 30% abstinence-only earmark. The new faith-based arm of the AIDS movement Warren had energized asked for, and got, a number of obstacles to prevention services: a prohibition on needle exchange programs for drug users; a ban [on] family planning services in Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission clinics; and the anti-prostitution loyalty oath, which required all groups receiving PEPFAR funding, including those that work with sex workers, to condemn prostitution. As with conscience clauses, [founder and former executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, Jodi] Jacobson says, this ideological interpretation of PEPFAR became a source of U.S. funding that “allows groups or organizations to avoid having to provide prevention treatment or care according to evidence-based criteria.” The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation has stated that “PEPFAR has been successful not because of provisions such as the mandatory abstinence set-aside, but in spite of them.”

[ ... ] 

How that flawed policy plays out can be disastrous. As journalist Michelle Goldberg noted at Religion Dispatches, one of Warren’s protégés in Uganda, the rabidly anti-gay pastor Martin Ssempa, has interpreted Warren’s faith-driven solutions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic by burning condoms at universities and offering faith-healing to disease-stricken congregants. Other PEPFAR grantees, as Jacobson’s colleagues in the global AIDS movement have witnessed, use their funds to promote fundamentalist interpretations of marital roles, advising women that if their husbands beat them, they should try harder to please them. 

(emphasis: mine)

In short, Pastor Rick Warren’s boast about no other church having done more to combat AIDS needs to be taken with a grain of salt about the size of Gibraltar. Yes, the Warrens, to their credit, made an effort to play a role in combatting AIDS overseas, and such a gesture is rare among their fellow conservative Christians. However, Warren’s meagre involvement with domestic AIDS, particularly as it pertains to queers living with or at risk of HIV/AIDS, is about little other than converting sinners through reparative therapy to Warren’s narrow interpretation of Christianity and unrealistic, anti-sex, abstinence-only measures for all non-queer sinners. John Cloud’s remark, about Warren and queers with AIDS, is not far off the mark, because, ultimately, Warren’s policy toward queers with HIV/AIDS is no more compassionate than the rest of the radical religious right’s convert-or-die-you-brought-this-on-yourself-sinner attitude.

UPDATE (12/22 10:35 pm) Oh lookie! Pop-Pastor Rick Warren has ignored that whole thou shalt not bear false witness thing and posted a video in which he tells us bloggers to “get a life,” because he maintains that he never said what he actually said in the BeliefNet video (linked above) that marriage equality was comparable to “incest, child abuse, and polygamy.” Rick, darling, you can scrub the anti-gay off your Saddleback Church website and try to run, but, honey, you can’t hide from the ugly truth of your homophobia.