Barack Obama and Rick Warren

Call it Barack Obama's first big mistake, said Kevin Naff in The Washington Blade. The president-elect has chosen Rick Warren—author of The Purpose Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church—to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Warren says homosexuality is a sin, so his involvement is a "slap in the face" to a gay community that has "just endured eight years of assaults on our dignity."

"Why are you surprised?" asked Pejman Yousefzadeh in RedState. Conservatives warned for months that Americans didn't really know "who this Obama fellow is." So it should shock no one what the "Healer of All Psychic Wounds" really thinks of advancing gay equality.

Anyone who hoped for more, said Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic, "should probably sober up now." No politician will realize the goals of the civil rights movement—we have to do that on our own. Obama probably won't be as disappointing as the Clintons, but "pandering to Christianists at his inauguration is a bad omen."

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Maybe, "but Obama's a politician," said Damon Linker in The New Republic, "and the Warren pick is just the latest sign that he's an exceedingly shrewd one." Warren is beloved by mainstream evangelicals, and it will help Obama and the Democrats "to peel as many moderate evangelicals away from the GOP" as they can.