But though he is right wing on social issues, he is also pretty good on some economic ones, especially third world ones.

Hey, Hitler loved kids and animals - should that earn him a pass for the Holocaust? Just because you hold some nice positions doesn't give you a pass for actions which are inexcusable. Sorry.

I could really give a crap if Warren just opposed gay marriage. Whatever. I still think that's a civil rights issue and that it would be in bad taste to bring in a preacher who opposes civil rights - and especially ironic, given that Obama is, you know, black. But I wouldn't be especially upset - Obama's trying to reach across the aisle and all that.

But this guy Warren is scum. He's gone way beyond just obstinately insisting that marriage is "between a man and a woman". He's compared gay marriage to incest and pedophilia, and was an instrumental player in the Prop 8 battle, during which the so-called Christian right spent tens of millions of dollars broadcasting barrage of outright lies to California voters.

As usual, the Democrats are behaving like Aesop's dog with a bone, betraying their supporters and their principles yet again while trying to grasp for some illusionary political gain. They aren't gonna get the fundie Evangelicals - not now, not ever - but they are gonna lose the base which elected them. And then they're gonna grow petulant when the base decides not to bother showing up in 2010 and 2012 to vote for a bunch of opportunistic turncoats.

Then why not invite the Grand Poobah (or whatever) of the KKK to the inauguration, too?

Apparently, some minorities are more equal than others.

I take a perverse pleasure in knowing that Pastor Rick Warren (and by extension the entire evangelical community) will be forced to publicly bless the presidency of Barack Obama - a candidate that he never endorsed, tried to subtly humiliate at Saddleback Church, and whose views he has vehemently opposed.

What's to keep Warren from going off-message and using the opportunity to attack Obama at his own inauguration? Warren certainly has nothing to lose - indeed, he'd gain instant credibility among the wingnuts, the crowd that butters his bread.

Think of it as the opening salvo to his 2012 Presidential bid.

I think Obama has cynically chucked women and gays under the bus and given a vile rightwing opportunist another opportunity to stab him in the back. Obama needs to re-read Aesop's fable of The Dog and The Bone, and be delighted with the base he has, and not an illusion he will never obtain.

As for the gay community, I see no particular reason that they should make this choice.

Nobody in the gay community is asking to make this choice. As a community which turned out overwhelmingly for Obama - both with dollars and with votes - the least he could do is not bestow plum assignments on vicious bigots who have lumped gay men and women in with pedophiles and those committing incest.

Could you imagine the outrage if Rick Warren had lumped Jews or blacks in with pedophiles, and Obama went ahead and picked him to give the invocation? It's inconceivable.

I voted for change, not for four more years of officially-sanctioned rightwing bigotry. If I wanted Rick Warren leading the invocation, I'd have given my money and my vote to John McCain - and so would millions of other Obama supporters.

There are plenty of ways to reach out to the Evangelical community without rewarding sanctimonious, self-important frauds like Rick Warren and their ilk.

I wonder what's going to happen when Rick Warren steps up to the podium to face 4 million hardcore Obama supporters.

Well, if Warren is true to type, he'll be playing to the wingnuts in the television viewing audience. So Obama's hamfisted attempt to "reach across the aisle," backstabbing the gay community which supported him in the process, will probably blow up in his face. Warren, who's an even more consummate backstabber and someone who's played Obama like a fiddle already twice before, will proceed to deliver a screed vilifying Obama and the Democrats for being pro-choice and supporting equal rights for "deviants" (read, gays) and just generally not living according to "Christian" principles.

It should afford him a nice pulpit from which to launch his 2012 bid for the Oval Office. I mean, after watching how far that idiot woman from Wasilla got in this year's election, slick, well-financed religious blowhards like Warren must be kicking themselves for not running. With Obama seemingly busy doing everything in his power to alienate his base before even entering office, 2012 should be a cakewalk for a con artist like Warren.

Our response as progressives to the invitation of Rick Warren is showing us to be more closed-minded than we accuse Rick Warren of being.

Oh, really? So, you'd be in favor of having a white supremacist pastor speak too, then? Maybe one who compared blacks to pedophiles? And how about inviting some raving anti-Semitic preacher who equivocates being Jewish to committing incest. Because you wouldn't want to be "closed-minded" by excluding those viewpoints, now would you?

Let's look at how the fundies handled Richard Cizik, a former-poohbah of the evangelical movement who was just forced to resign as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals because he dared to admit his views on civil unions had softened, and that he'd voted for Obama.

Whoops! Off with his head!

Gosh, one wonders what they'd have done if he'd compared evangelicals to pedophiles, the way Rick Warren compared gays to kiddie diddlers.