Here’s a video of Rick Warren proclaiming his love of gays and straights at a Muslim conference (he also told them that he loved Muslims):

I’m really glad that Obama picked Warren to deliver the invocation because he gets it. He gets what’s important in this controversy. We don’t have to continually proclaim the judgment of God, we can also demonstrate the love of Christ Jesus that we are to share with everyone. He can say he loves the Muslims and gays because we are commanded to do so:

Matthew 22:35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Melissa Etheridge was planning to perform at the Muslim conference and when she found out that Rick Warren was going to be the keynote speaker, she decided to reach out to him in the spirit of unity:

I told my manager to reach out to Pastor Warren and say “In the spirit of unity I would like to talk to him.” They gave him my phone number. On the day of the conference I received a call from Pastor Rick, and before I could say anything, he told me what a fan he was. He had most of my albums from the very first one. What? This didn’t sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher. He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection. He struggled with proposition 8 because he didn’t want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman. He said he regretted his choice of words in his video message to his congregation about proposition 8 when he mentioned pedophiles and those who commit incest. He said that in no way, is that how he thought about gays. He invited me to his church, I invited him to my home to meet my wife and kids. He told me of his wife’s struggle with breast cancer just a year before mine.When we met later that night, he entered the room with open arms and an open heart. We agreed to build bridges to the future.Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world’s attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don’t hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.

I think it’s clear from the article, that it’s Etheridge who learned not to fear Rick Warren, not the other way around. Christians don’t fear gays and the issue really isn’t about gays at all, it’s about the word of God. For many Christians the fight against redefining marriages is to preserve their understanding of marriage based on the word of God:

Matthew 19:3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

I know that many on the left become downright apoplectic at the thought of Christians trying to impose their view of marriage on others but aren’t those who are pushing for gay marriage trying to impose their views on them? Each of us votes guided by our worldview, which is formed by our principles. When we vote issues like this, we vote to impose our worldview on others. We have to vote our conscience, it would be wrong for us to do otherwise so it would be helpful if the left and right would accept that fact and show each other a little more tolerance.And if you get enough people together who are guided by the same principles, those principles win. In two years that will probably mean gay marriage will be legal in California. And I bet if a judge overturned the results of that election, gays would be pretty ticked off and would be screaming about judicial overreach.(via)