Rev. Danny Fisher

Over at Shambhala Sun Space, the awesome Rod Meade Sperry offers a “Buddhist’s New Year’s guide”. Check it out, and find something to do on New Year’s.

This week, New York Times columnist Frank Rich takes on the controversy over mega-church pastor and gay rights opponent Rick Warren’s selection to offer the invocation at Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration.

…There’s a difference between including Warren among the cacophony of voices weighing in on policy and anointing him as the inaugural’s de facto pope. You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face. “I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”

[...]

When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.

I recently wrote about this issue for elephant journal. You can read what I said here and here.