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It is not exactly the first time that Barack Obama's choice of clergyman has raised eyebrows this year. Rick Warren is no Jeremiah Wright and Obama has not decided to become a member of Warren's Saddleback Church, just to ask him to say a prayer at his inauguration ceremony. Nevertheless Obama "found himself in the middle of the nation's culture wars," according to NBC's Savannah Guthrie.
In ABC's A Closer Look, Dan Harris (embargoed link) pointed out that Warren is an evangelical activist on issues such as HIV/AIDS, global poverty and climate change. That was not the issue: tis election season, Warren had also been an active proponent of Proposition 8, which prohibited Californians from marrying someone of their own gender. Harris quoted from a beliefnet.com interview with Warren in which the preacher equated same-sex spouses with incestuous siblings, child brides and polygamists. The President-elect's invitation to Warren "appears to have ended the honeymoon between Obama and the left wing of his party," Harris suggested. Chuck Todd, newly-named as NBC's White House correspondent, was more nuanced. "There has always been a tenuous partnership," he reminded us. Many gay Democratic activists supported Hillary Rodham Clinton over Obama for the nomination.
What is it about the timidity of NBC's anchor interviewers in asking follow-up questions about marriage? Before the election, Brian Williams sat down with candidate Obama to ask about the Constitution. Obama insisted on unenumerated privacy rights: "I mean, the right to marry who you please is not in the Constitution but I think all of us assume that if a state decided to pass a law saying Brian, you cannot marry the woman you love that you would think that was unConstitutional." Now Guthrie quotes from Ann Curry's Dateline sitdown with Pastor Warren in which he makes this tendentious claim: "For 5,000 years every single culture and every single religion has defined marriage as a man and a woman."
Why did Williams not ask about marrying the hypothetical man that he loves? Why did Curry not ask about the centuries-old traditions of polygamy and ownership of wives as chattel? What about a follow-up?
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