Open Letter to Rick Warren

Dear Rick,

Perhaps you’re just waking up out there in Lake Forest, CA, pushing back the duvet and breathing a big full breath, a breath that seems to allow you more air than yesterday’s first waking breath, now that you know that the anti-gay bill before the Ugandan parliament no longer prescribes the death penalty or life imprisonment for gays. Maybe you’re waking up glad you didn’t have to take a stand, and as you give your goatee a good morning scritch you’re hoping today’s media calls will just relate to climate change. People like you on climate change.

But I’m not quite ready to let you off the hook.

Listen, Rick: even though you don’t know me, I’ve been trying really hard to be your buddy. And it isn’t easy to be a friend of Rick Warren in the circles I run in.

Whenever your name has come up in conversation (and you should know, it’s usually introduced by an epithet) I rise, cautiously, to your defense. During Christmas dinner at my house last year, when conversation turned to the news that you’d been tapped to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration, many at my table were disgusted that you’d been chosen, fearful that government’s ties to the Religious Right were going to outlive the Bush Administration, angry that your selection seemed to be a tacit acceptance of your no-gays policy at Saddleback Church. But I defended Obama for picking you–you do good work on AIDS and on climate change, and I believe that continued dialogue with evangelical Christians is a critical part of progressive influence. I believe that ridiculing you and banishing you to your corner for four years isn’t going to do much to make you stop hating gay people. Or, sorry, hating the sin. I’d hoped we could all meet halfway, and inso doing, we’d eventually convince you, for example, that gay rights are civil rights.

This hope led some people to sardonically call me The Girl Who Loves Christians. Which is fine, because I do!

But Rick, right now you’re making it really hard for me to be The Girl Who Loves Rick Warren, because your silence on this anti-gay bill in Uganda is a big problem.

On Meet the Press you said, “As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides.” That is a pretty disingenuous copout, Rick. You take positions all the time!

And look, yesterday a whole slew of Christian leaders took sides, calling the bill “counter to Christian values,” and affirming that “in our efforts to imitate the Good Samaritan, we stand in solidarity with those Ugandans beaten and left abandoned by the side of the road because of hatred, bigotry and fear.” You didn’t want to get in on that?

Maybe you think it’s too late now, that those other guys did the work for you, now that capital punishment and life imprisonment are off the table. Here’s some of what’s still on it:

a seven-year jail term for anyone who “attempts to commit the offense” of homosexuality or who “aids, abets, counsels or procures another to engage in acts of homosexuality.” And anyone convicted of publishing information about homosexuality, or providing funds or premises for homosexual activity, would receive a seven-year jail sentence or a fine of $50,000. Authorities who fail to report homosexuals within 24 hours of discovering their behavior can be punished by up to three years in prison. Moreover, the bill defines homosexual sex (it’s pretty explicit) as even attempting to touch another person of the same sex with the “intention” of having sex; this can even occur through clothing.

If Uganda Executes Gays, Will American Christians Be Complicit? David Gibson, Politics Daily

And here’s why you, Pastor Rick Warren, must take a stand against this hateful bill, even denouncing the pieces that have been taken off the table:

1. Your influence on the positioning of evangelical Christians is almost unmatched, and your implied support of discrimination against gays will lead to increased homophobia on this side of the Atlantic, too.

2. You’ve “cut ties” with Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, who’d been your partner in combating AIDS, but who has led Uganda’s planned persecution of gays. Which is a promising start, so thanks for that. But according to Time you have a “immense influence among Uganda’s political elite,” so your voice would still have a lot of influence. You can’t get away with letting other Christian leaders proxy for you.

3. Even if the most lenient version of this bill passes, it’s still state-sanctioned discrimination, and we all know that state-sanctioned discrimination can become the rationale for unspeakable violence.

4. American Christians started this mess, exporting homophobia under the veil of traditional values, and American Christians have a responsibility to stand against it. According to Politics Daily, “three men, Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries, Don Schmierer of Exodus International and the International Healing Foundation, and Lee Brundidge, who often works with a group called Extreme Prophetic, were invited to the conference of the Family Life Network of Uganda to help organize what Lively called “an effective social and political force” to combat “anti-family Western agitators.” Those agitators, he said, are led by gay activists in Europe and the United States who “plan to spread sexual anarchy throughout the world under the guise of ‘human rights’ and ‘family planning.’”

Now even Lively–the paranoid homophobe who wrote a book called The Pink Swastika, in which he suggested that the gays have a Nazi-like plan for world domination–even Lively is suggesting this bill goes “too far.”

So Rick, get on the stick, dude. This is not a complicated issue. This is unvarnished discrimination and you have to speak out against it. Or I’m going to start speaking out against you.

With love and best wishes, for now at least,

Gina

UPDATE!

PS. Rick, a friend of mine just passed along the video you posted today, in which you do exactly what I’d been hoping you would–calling the Ugandan anti-gay law “unjust, extreme, and un-Christian toward homosexuals.” You still framed it in the insistence that homosexuality is wrong, but we can work on that another day.

I’m glad we were able to work this out. I hate it when we fight.