Saddleback Church's Official Statement on Homosexuality: Gays Not Accepted

by Michael Jones · 2008-12-22 05:04:00 UTC
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Rick WarrenThis weekend, Pastor Rick Warren appeared at an annual dinner for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of his first public appearances since being chosen by President-Elect Barack Obama to lead the opening prayer for Obama's inauguration.  Warren's selection has caused a great deal of pain to LGBT rights supporters, due to his outspoken support for Proposition 8 and his rather inflammatory comments on homosexuality.

Ironic, then, that he shared a stage at the Muslim Public Affairs Council event with Melissa Etheridge.  (They didn't appear together...just shared the stage serially.)  At the Muslim Public Affairs Council dinner, Warren turned on the folksiness that has come to define people like him (or Mike Huckabee) as compassionate individuals.   Here's his money line from the event:

Let me just get this over very quickly.  I love Muslims.  And for the media's purpose, I happen to love gays and straights.

Funny thing about this statement is that if Rick Warren really did love gays, would he champion an official church policy that outright said, "Someone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted as a member at Saddleback Church"?  Because that's what his Church's official statement on homosexuality says.

The statement also says that those who live together before marriage are not welcome at the Church, unless they repent.  How very 1950s.

This is just more evidence that Rick Warren is no different than James Dobson, or Tony Perkins, or Richard Land, or any number of the other "old-guard" evangelicals who made their careers out of bashing LGBT persons.  Like these guys, Warren thinks that homosexuality is an enormous sin.  (That's in the first two lines of his Church's statement.)

I'm not sure any amount of dialogue, no matter how hard President-Elect Obama pushes the idea, will ever push Warren to think otherwise.

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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