If Rick Warren had utilized combative language to refer to any other distinct group of law abiding citizens, Obama would have been advised to distance himself. What is wrong with gays and lesbians that Obama would consider reaching out to a man who compares them with pedophiles, polygamists, and worse.

It tempts me to stand up and scream that Rick Warren is a bloated glutton whose pindick is hidden in blobby folds of abdominal fat, and that’s why he’s jealous of gays, whom he perceives are having a lot more fun sex than him. Jealousy and resentment, the two-headed dog of religious drive against gays.

I wish I was surprised by this, but I’m not because Obama made it clear from the start that he’s a politician without a backbone. He made it clear from the start that he’s a cautious, neoliberal politician who gives vague platitudes without explicitly stating where he stands on “hot button” issues. Obama typically does things such as this to piss off his base just so he can show others that he can stand up to them when necessary. (”He’s so pragmatic,” they say. “He’s trying to bring people together from all political stripes.” “He’s not a president of just liberals but ALL AMERICANS,” blah, blah, blah.) You best believe the press corp are cheering this as another example of Obama spitting in the face of those people who support him. The excuses that his supporters make of this is also not surprising.

This is why I was uneasy about him from the beginning because University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. had Obama all figured out at the beginning of his career in 1996 when he said:

“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program – the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway.”

There’s no excuse for inviting Warren to give invocation. No one is twisting Obama’s arm to do this. He’s doing it because he wants to.