Hell hath no fury like a homosexual seemingly scorned. That seems to be the lesson learned by the media in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's announcement that he will have Rick Warren - pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback megachurch in Lake Forest, California - deliver the invocation at his presidential inauguration next month. Warren is most famous for his bestselling book, "The Purpose-Driven Life," his godly attempt to imitate motivational speaker Tony Robbins, as well as the genuine good works he does in poverty-stricken corners of the world. Lately, however, he's been involved in less benign activities, namely the campaign to pass California's Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment stripping gays of their court-ordered right to marry. Pastor Rick represents the new face of evangelical Christianity in America in that he puts a friendly sheen on homophobia, delivering the requisite line that he supports "equal rights" for everybody and that some of his best friends are gay, he just doesn't want them to have the same rights as heterosexuals. Oh, and legitimizing their "lifestyles," he says, would be akin to accepting bestiality and incest.

Gay activists were understandably angered by this announcement, and they made that anger felt. Joe Solomonese, head of the Human Rights Campaign, the country's most prominent gay rights organization, issued a public letter to Obama calling his decision a "genuine blow to LGBT Americans." The denizens of the Huffington Post have been expressing their rage, and the popular gay blog Queerty went so far as to claim that Obama "spat on the gays." Adorable lesbian Rachel Maddow called it "the first big mistake of his post-election politicking."

Color me not outraged. In part because amidst all the righteous indignation (something that professional gay activists never seem to lack) over Obama's selection of Warren to deliver his inaugural invocation was his simultaneous choice of Joseph Lowery, a black pastor, civil rights leader and, important for the purposes of the controversy du jour, gay civil union supporter, to deliver the benediction, or news that Tammy Baldwin, the only openly-gay Congresswoman, was named an honorary co-chairman of Obama's Inauguration Committee. "I'll leave those who are upset to their calling," Lowery remarked when asked for his views on l'affaire Warren, suggesting that the perpetually-outraged gay Left might want to reconsider their behavior with what they claim their life's work to be. Did the dons of the gay lobby ever stop to question whether Lowery and Baldwin's presence on the dais would similarly upset the Bible-thumpers? Not for nothing did John Gallagher and Chris Bull call the gay movement and the religious right, "Perfect Enemies." More than one person has seriously suggested to me that the Reverend Fred Phelps, he of "God Hates Fags" fame, might actually be a plant on the gay rights lobby's payroll.  

Invocation, benediction, what's the difference? Apparently, a lot. "The person selected to deliver the invocation has the honor of serving as the spiritual representative for the entire nation," writes Leah McElrath Renna. Perhaps I missed it, but there is no "spiritual representative" of our constitutional republic, and Renna does her cause no bit of good by ascribing such official significance upon a private citizen like Warren, a man whom most Americans did not know about until gay rights activists raised such a stink, and upon further investigation sounds like a pretty nice guy not deserving of all the insults heaped upon him. The uproar over Warren has the detriment of confirming one of the worst stereotypes of homosexuals: hysteria. That's because Warren is the lowest common denominator of the socially conservative evangelicals. Up until the Proposition 8 fight, his political involvement extended to such hot-button, "culture war" issues as fighting African AIDS and poverty. Aside from the incest/bestiality slip (which was an effort, however clumsily executed, to make a slippery slope argument rather than a serious attempt at morally equating daughter/dog love to homosexuality) Warren has never really used his high public profile or pulpit to preach hatred of gay people, something that can hardly be said of the long list of Elmer Gantryesque charlatans the GOP has surrounded itself with over the past 30 years. Asked what was a "greater threat to the American family - divorce or gay marriage," Warren answered, "That's a no brainer. Divorce. There's no doubt about it," which makes him far more honest than most politically involved conservative evangelical preachers. Count me as being a member of the pragmatist gay camp (not to be confused with theater, dance or other camps), encapsulated by my friend Chris Crain, who writes, "It is a stroke of political brilliance to recruit a conservative megapastor in support of a president-elect who is arguably the most pro-gay, pro-choice and progressive in our history."

The problem for gay activists is that many Americans agree with Rick Warren when it comes to same-sex love. And these people, numbering in the over 100 million range, are not going to be budged in their views by hectoring activists who call them bigots (even though that's what many of them are). Now, I'm of the firm belief that these debates will be moot in 20 years, when the older generation kicks the bucket and the near-universally gay-accepting Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers take the reins of government. Whatever political victories they feel that they've won from Proposition 8 and the other marriage amendments across the country, the anti-gay forces of reaction in this country are gasping their last breath. The honest ones among them acknowledge this, if not publicly. We will hasten the day of gay equality by engaging respectfully with them and winning over the persuadable ones (many of whom, I bet, are followers of Warren), rather than calling them names.  

In that vein, gays would do well to store their gunpowder for the truly significant legislative battles that will no doubt be fought in the years ahead. Getting rid of the odious and national security-weakening "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" regulation, repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and Matthew Shepard hate crimes law will all be possible over the next four years now that we have a Democratic president and Congress committed - at least on paper - to effecting these positive changes. If gays had given Obama some much-needed slack on Rick Warren, perhaps he'd feel a political debt to us when these truly significant issues come up for debate. But how sincere - or politically threatening - will gay complaints about administration foot-dragging on issues that actually affect millions of gay and lesbian people sound in light of the unwarranted outrage that's been generated over the guy who's going to deliver a two-minute reading that no one will remember? Attacking the President-Elect who campaigned as the most pro-gay candidate in American history over an issue as irrelevant as this one, I fear, makes us look like we're crying wolf. And we all know how that fable ended.

The New York Times featured a profile of Senator Joe Lieberman on Monday, in which, predictably, a bunch of unnamed political hacks huff and puff and vent their rage at the Connecticut Senator and the Vice Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party eight years ago. Midway through is this little attempt at revisionist history:

Mr. Curry had lunch with Mr. Lieberman in December 2005 and warned about the antiwar sentiment sweeping Connecticut. “This is not an argument over the capital gains tax,” Mr. Curry recalled telling him. “This is the biggest foreign policy mistake in the history of the country.” Mr. Lieberman, who often praised the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, shrugged off this advice. He saw the war as an epic struggle against Islamic terrorism; bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either.

Actually, in October of 2003--a mere six months after the successful overthrow of Saddam Hussein--Lieberman called for Rumsfeld's resignation, long before it was fashionable. Here's what he said rather plainly on CBS News:

The uniform military feel deeply that he doesn't respect them, doesn't listen to them. The judgment about whether he stays or not is up to President Bush, but if I were president, I'd get a new Secretary of Defense.

Then there's the snarky, throw-away line stating that Lieberman came around to the belief, circa 2005, that "bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either." Never mind the sneering tone: does Michael Powell have Lieberman on record (or even off) uttering anything along lines indicating support for "bombing Iran?" Lieberman has never called for the bombing of Iran. In fact, he delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference last week in which he called for tougher sanctions so as to prevent military action. The assertion that Joe Lieberman thinks attacking Iran is "not a bad idea" is an outright lie. And it raises a question: why is establishment media now so keen on attacking anyone with views on military intervention to the right of Barack Obama's?

Related: The whole premise of this article is a factual error.

On September 11, 2001, the world champion chess player Bobby Fischer had this to say:

This is all wonderful news...I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

In addition to accusing Gary Kasparov of being a former KGB agent and a "crook," Fischer also had these delightful observations about Jews:

The Jews are a "filthy, lying bastard people" bent on world domination through such insidious schemes as the Holocaust ("a money-making invention"), the mass murder of Christian children ("their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies"), and junk food (William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin' Donuts, is singled out as a culprit).

Fischer died last week at the age of 64, and he'll probably be remembered for his radical views as much as his prowess as a chess champion. His ravings about Jews came to mind as I had just published excerpts from Ron Paul's newsletters on The New Republic website in which Fischer was praised as an "American hero." A cursory investigation reveals who might have been responsible for such passages.

The historian Ronald Radosh sent me the following email last week, recounting his experiences with Murray Rothbard, one of the leading lights of American libertarianism and an intellectual guru to Ron Paul:

You probably know that at one point I co-authored a book with Murray Rothbard that the Von Mises institute has now scanned and put on the web. I had been good friends with him and used to see him a lot during the so-called "left-right" alliance he forged in the 60's. At that point the concentration was on the Vietnam war. I broke with him and indeed never saw him again a few years later. He started to publish a mimeographed newsletter (oh those days before xerox copiers, blogs and the web) that had a very limited circulation. He would give me copies. I wished I had saved them. They were viciously anti-Semitic (even though he was born Jewish he converted and became a Baptist) and anti-Israel. That had never come through when I was associated with him, and I was stunned. He had some crazy analogy that I can't quite remember that put Cambodia and the slaughter there with Israel. I think he took a Chomsky like attitude towards Pol Pot and argued in print that those attacking Pol Pot and the Cambodian slaughter were doing so in order to gain sympathy with Israel through the back door.

For more on Rothbard's extreme anti-statism -- so extreme that it is indistinguishable from far-left anti-Americanism -- check out the CATO Institute's Tom Palmer, who has been tracking the "fever swamps" of the libertarian movement for years.

Repulsive comments such as the ones above, according to Rothbard -- in an essay published in a collection entitled, "The Irrepressible Rothbard" -- are at worst, "not Politically Correct." Rothbard had immense admiration for Fischer, a strange person to admire. But the two men had one thing in common; they were both Jews who had tried to erase any sense of their heritage, a severing that manifested itself in the form of self-hating anti-Semitism.

Slate has republished a 2005 essay by Melonyce McAfee in praise of Kwanzaa. Acknowledging that the holiday is "made-up" (without really getting into what this means), McAfee nonetheless concludes that her mother's decision to celebrate it was a positive one because "it brought my family together." That's all well and good -- but there are certainly ways of bringing the family together that don't involve paeans to Marxism, black nationalism and hating whitey.

McAfee makes only passing mention of the man who founded Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Karenga, né Ronald Everett. In her family-focused narrative, the man who created the holiday and his reasons for doing so are of negligible importance. She suspects, however, that readers are at least somewhat familiar with the radical origins of Kwanzaa, but dispatches this criticism with mockery, criticizing those "the naysayers who mock Kwanzaa as a pseudo holiday, created to annoy white people and kept alive to peddle cards and kente cloth."

In a serious discussion of Kwanzaa, however, the holiday's founder--and his ideology--deserve a little more than mere passing mention. Karenga came to prominence in the 1960's when he founded the United Slaves Organization (US), a group more radical than the Black Panthers, on the UCLA campus. The outfit was little more than a political cult and Karenga possessed all the traits of a political cult leader: megalomania, paranoia, and an inclination to lash out violently against his opponents, a black nationalist Joseph Smith if you will. All these traits were on display during a May 9, 1970 incident in which Karenga ordered the torture of two women he believed to have been an informant (Karenga himself allegedly beat the woman with an electrical cord). Here is a newspaper account:

According to a Los Angeles Times account of testimony published at the time of the trial, Karenga and the other men forced the women to remove their clothes, and beat them with an electrical cord and a karate baton. The men put a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and against her face, and they squeezed one woman's big toe in a vise, the Times reported. Karenga's former wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified he sat on one woman's stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose, according to the Times.

"Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know," Karenga allegedly told the women, the Times reported Oct. 7, 1970, shortly after Karenga's arrest.

Jones said during the trial that Karenga initiated the attacks because he suspected her and Davis of trying to poison him with "crystals."

But it's not just the violence which renders Kwanzaa a dubious "holiday;" many traditional Judeo-Christian celebrations are rooted in acts of violence, Chanukkah being an example (though that violence was arguably righteous, as opposed to Karenga's attempt to re-enact Hostel). It is Kwanzaa's separatist, Marxist ideology which ought to give African-Americans pause before embracing it. Here are the 7 principles celebrated during Kwanzaa:umoja, or unity; kujichagulia, or self-determination; ujima, or collective work and responsibility; ujamaa, or cooperative economics; kuumba, or creativity; and imani, or faith. "Creativity" and "faith" are wonderful things to celebrate, "cooperative economics" not so much. They haven't worked so well in Africa, to be sure.

Rick Rosendall explains how Kwanzaa opposes the American creed here, working in arguments by one of the greatest, yet under-appreciated, 20th century figures, Bayard Rustin:

Our destinies are inextricably intertwined by our shared history. Whether they like it or not, the heritage of white Americans contains African threads; and whether they like it or not, the heritage of black Americans contains European ones. You do not shed the European portion of your heritage merely because you take an Afrocentric name, nor do you give up your stake in the greater society of which you remain a part. In addition to colonialism (which existed in Africa before the white man came), Western heritage includes free markets and individual liberties, as well as the idea that all men are created equal.

Rejecting that idea four decades ago as a sham, Karenga and other radicals adopted a revolutionary posture and an Afrocentric program. In doing so they repudiated integrationists like civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, who pointed out that Black Studies "will hardly improve [black students'] intellectual competence or their economic power." In the campaigns by Karenga and his comrades to "Buy Black" and create autonomous communities, the language of liberation was a poor substitute for development capital. As Rustin wrote in his 1970 essay "The Failure of Black Separatism," "The call for community control in fact represents an adjustment to inequality rather than a protest against it."

Karenga is your garden variety racial-nationalist thug, a mix between Louis Farrakhan and Amiri Baraka. But this doesn't matter to McAfee, who simply wants people to understand that Kwanzaa was "a way to bring our ragtag family together and nudge us away from the false idols and commercial trickery of the holiday season." Yes, the principle of "cooperative economics" may disavow the obsession with merchandise that have come to mark the holiday season, but Kwanzaa is not lacking in the "false idols" department, black nationalism and Marxism being two pretty major gods that failed. McAfee should at least have the honesty to reconcile the actual reasons the holiday was created -- and, I imagine, the reasons why whatever few actual adherents it has celebrate it today -- with whatever beneficent characteristics she imputes to it and lay off implying that its critics are somehow crypto-racists.

Last, and least, is the faux-holiday's obvious ripoff of Chanukah that makes Kwanzaa just plane lame: 7 days instead of 8, but the candelabra is still there.

Just a few weeks ago, I criticized Desmond Tutu for one of his chronically outrageous statements about the Middle East. Of more interest to me, however, was that many use the "he's Desmond Tutu" line as if it that were in and of itself sufficient to defend him against charges that his rantings about the Jews and Israel are borderline anti-Semitic (not to mention how self-defeating and historically ignorant it is for him to compare the South African freedom struggle -- which never had serious elements worshipping a cult of death or calling for the wholesale genocide of its enemies -- to the Palestinian cause). I wrote:

Desmond Tutu is indeed a man of great stature; his criticism of the African National Congress for its unforgivable policies in support of Robert Mugabe and its AIDS denialism, as well as his calls for African Christians to be more accepting of homosexuality, have been exemplary and courageous. But he's not perfect, and happens to have rather odious views about the Middle East. I feel no amount of intellectual inconsistency embracing him for his honesty on Zimbabwe, AIDS and gays, while simultaneoulsy finding his words about Israel and Jews outrageous.

Lest my interlocutors at the time felt this avowal was a cop-out, I'll take this moment to praise Tutu for his latest moral declaration: lashing out at the Anglican Church for its "obsession" with gays. The years-long rift and coming split in the Church between its liberal, Western wings and the culturally conservative global south has not been lost on Tutu:

"Our world is facing problems -- poverty, HIV and Aids -- a devastating pandemic, and conflict," Tutu said.

"God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another.

"In the face of all of that, our church, especially the Anglican church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality."

"If God as they say is homophobic I wouldn't worship that God."

Dem's fighting words. Contrast Tutu with Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, who has to compete with Muslims for African converts (which is not to suggest that he doesn't believe the homophobic hatred he regularly spews) and has called homosexuality a "chronic aberration." No word yet on whether African Anglicans plan on matching the head of the Ugandan Muslim community's plan for a gay island.