Rick Warren's inaugural prayer
The reaction to the megachurch pastor's invocation on Barack Obama's big day
“All that fuss for nothing,” said Mary Katherine Ham in The Weekly Standard. Evangelical pastor Rick Warren's inaugural invocation, which liberals didn't want to hear, praised America, asked God to protect President Barack Obama and his family, hailed the inauguration of the first black president as a "hinge-point of history," and suggested "Dr. King and a great crowd of witnesses are shouting in heaven."
It was big of Warren to leave “the gay-bashing at home,” said Alex Koppelman in Salon. That indeed made it hard for anyone to get mad at his prayer, which was “as stock as it gets.” But “gay-rights groups and liberals can still be mad at his presence (and understandably a little protective of separation of church and state).”
Please, said Liza Porteus Viana in AOL News, the “dustup” over Obama’s selection of Warren to deliver the invocation was a waste of newspaper ink. Warren wasn’t trying to “convert anybody” or push an anti-gay message—he was just there to pray. And as he did, the weeping believers in the crowd served as “a testament to Obama's inclusion of people of all views.”
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