Over the weekend, I wrote a post giving three options as to why the story of Rick Warren’s inauguration prayer has hung on so long (and, as far as my blog reading this morning, it’s not going away just yet).  Among the many good comments on that post was this by Rosa Lee Harden:

What about this for the reason the Rick Warren prayer is such a big story:

There are quite a few of us in this country – and Christians to boot
– who have a problem with ‘religion’ being represented at the
inauguration by a person who equates love between people of the same
gender with incest.

There are more and more of us who understand the message of Jesus to
be primarily one of love and inclusion, not judgment and exclusion. How
Jesus treated the outcasts in society was the thing that got him in
trouble with the authorities. He didn’t label, judge and exclude. He
sat down at table and broke bread.

If we are going to have someone represent Christianity as our
‘nation’s pastor’ at the inauguration, perhaps there are enough of us
out there who want it to be someone who demonstrates those same values.
Maybe the GLBT people in this country are tired of being told that they
were not created in God’s image. That there is something fundamentally
wrong with them. Perhaps they and their friends are ready to take a
stand and be heard about this.

Maybe this is a big story because how we treat our GLBT sisters and brothers MATTERS.

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