Reflections From a Murky Pond

President-elect Barack Obama is drawing a fair amount of flak from various and disparate single-issue groups over his Cabinet appointments. Multiple special interest groups are complaining that they’re not appropriately represented in Obama’s incoming Cabinet.

The Feminists – in the form of the National Organization of Women (NOW) – are bitching about President-elect Obama’s Cabinet choices. They’re complaining that he only appointed five (5) women to his Cabinet.

The Blacks – in the form of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) – are ranting about President-elect Obama’s Cabinet choices. They’re complaining that he only appointed four (4) Blacks to his Cabinet.

The Latinos – in various informal forms since they don’t have a central or primary PAC – are railing  against President-elect Obama’s Cabinet choices.  They’re complaining that he only appointed three (3) Latinos to his Cabinet.

The Homosexuals – again in various informal forms since they don’t have a central or primary PAC – are whining about President-elect Obama’s Cabinet choices. They’re complaining that he didn’t appoint any openly queer people at all to his Cabinet.

Now, as any regular reader of Reflections From A Murky Pond already knows, I’m fairly close to the last American one would expect to defend Obama from his detractors or praise his actions. But just because I think that electing Obama was a horrible – and possibly nationally suicidal – mistake doesn’t mean that I’m going to side with special interest groups who are attacking him for no good purpose.

There are fourteen (14) Cabinet Secretaries. Of that 14 Obama has selected: 5 women, 4 Blacks, and 3 Latinos. That’s a quite diverse grouping of gender and races. Of course there is some overlap in the demographics of Obama’s Cabinet selections, cases such as Obama’s new Secretary of Labor, Rep. Hilda L. Solis, who is a Latino woman.

What I see is a bunch of single issue, self-serving enemies of American democracy and American meritocracy who are puling about not getting enough of their respective sorts into key positions in the US government. President-elect Obama has drawn their ire because he has apparently made a certain amount of effort to place the best qualified – for his agenda at least – people into the Cabinet positions. In other words, he’s doing something right!

Don’t get me wrong; I dsilike most of Obama’s Cabinet picks as well. They’re mostly from the Far Left and many seem to be Global Warming dupes.

So Obama has turked off a lot of people in the US with his Cabinet selections. Conservatives are unhappy about- but unsurprised by the political ideology of his Cabinet, and various groups who identify themselves solely or primarily by gender, race, or sexual proclivities are unhappy because Obama didn’t seemingly meet their expectations for increased power under his regime.

I hate to say it, but anytime a Liberal President declines to appease these groups in favor of appointing who he thinks is best qualified for the job he’s probably doing the right thing.

The American people, fueled by the Media’s heavy and biased coverage – have made a very big issue out of Obama selecting Pastor Rick Warren, who advocate for Proposition 8 to perform the Invocation at Obama’s January 20th Inauguration.  In the wake of California’s passage of Proposition 8, Homosexuals and their allies have done much to keep this topic in the forefront of our nation’s consciousness.  What has been largely ignored by the media, and therefor what resides outside the ken of much of America is that there are two (2) religious rites at an Inauguration – the Invocation and the Benediction.

I find it quite telling and quite sad that only the Invocation is considered newsworthy, and that only because of the controversy surrounding Obama’s selection of Pastor Warren to perform. Obama’s choice of the priest to deliver the Benediction should have gotten a lot more coverage than has so far.

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a stalwart of the civil rights movement and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to perform the Benediction at Obama’s Inauguration.

The 87-year-old retired pastor has been a stalwart of the civil rights movement. For over a half century Lowell as been in the front lines in the fight for racial equality.

In the 1950s – prior to much of the more publicized Civil Rights movements – Lowery headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places.

In 1957, Lowery, along with Revs. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth, co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Civil Rights organization that propelled Dr. King to international prominence.

In 1959, Lowery’s property was seized in along with that of other civil rights leaders by the State of Alabama as part of a libel suit filed by the Montgomery, AL police department. It took four years and U.S. Supreme Court ruling to reverse the lower courts decision.

Rev. Lowery is a co-founder and former president of the Black Leadership Forum, an umbrella organization for various civil rights groups.  As part of the Black Leadership Forum Lowery was among the first five African Americans to get arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington D.C. during the anti-apartheid demonstrations.

Reverend Lowery has repeatedly advocated for LGBT rights, considering them nothing more or less than normal civil rights, and supports same-sex marriage as one of those basic rights that all Americans are inherently owed.

Gods in their Heavens! Lowery led the Selma March at MLK’s direct request in March, 1965. Go look up “Bloody Sunday”!

It’s truly sickening that the MSM in its quest for ratings and its fervor to denounce Conservatives has willfully ignored Rev. Lowery’s selection to perform perform the Benediction at President-elect Obama’s Inauguration.

Edited – January 20, 2009: The full transcript of Lowery’s Benediction can be found here.

President-elect Barack Obama has “given his approval” for President Bush’s $17.4 billion bailout package for the “Big 3” automobile manufacturers in Detroit. It must be OK then for Bush to defy the will of Congress in this case; Obama says so, and so mote it be.

From Chicago (AP):

President-elect Barack Obama says the steps being taken to keep American automakers in business are necessary ones.

Obama says the nation can’t “squander” the chance to change bad management practices at the companies.

He says it’s “absolutely necessary” to restructure the companies to save the industry, while also working toward creating “fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow.”

Obama is responding to President George W. Bush’s decision to offer more than $17 billion in rescue loans to the auto industry.

He said in a statement earlier in the day that if the industry collapses, it would have “devastating consequences for our economy and our workers.”

So President-elect Obama has voices his endorsement of President Bush’s end run around Congress and Bush’s auto bailout package that includes the 2009 wage cuts that both the UAW labor union and the Senate Democrats were against.

This restructuring will require meaningful concessions from all involved in the auto industry — management, labor unions, creditors, bondholders, dealers, and suppliers.

Automakers must meet conditions that experts agree are necessary for long-term viability — including putting their retirement plans on a sustainable footing, persuading bondholders to convert their debt into capital the companies need to address immediate financial shortfalls, and making their compensation competitive with foreign automakers who have major operations in the United States.

— President George W. Bush
White House Press Release,
9:01 AM EST, December 19, 2008

Will Obama’s followers accept his agreement with President Bush’s actions and bailout plan, or will they cry foul? Can the Left stomach Barack Obama’s agreement with their archenemy, Bush and his praise of a plan that some described as “Union Busting?”

If the Left doesn’t have collective apoplexy over Obama’s praise of Bush auto bailout plan, how will they be able to continue complaining with any effectiveness about: the many times that President Bush previously defied Congress, the misuse of the Wall Street bailout monies – that’s where the $17.4 billion is coming from – and the Conservatives’ disapproval of the behavior of many large labor unions?

On the other hand, if the Liberals do protest this, what then? Obama has praised this bailout package and thereby made it OK in the minds of many. Will the Left go against the word of Obama?

All across America LGBT groups and their Liberal allies are outraged by President-elect Barack Obama’s choice of Pastor Richard D. “Rick” Warren to perform the Invocation at the Inauguration on January 20, 2009.

Their queers’ problem is that Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Church, publicly supported California’s Proposition 8. They view Obama’s honoring him in any way is seen as a slap in the face.

They’re right. President-elect Obama’s selection of Pastor Rick Warren to perform the Invocation at his Inauguration is a “slap in the face” to the LGBT community’s currently vehement and vitriolic – but fully understandable and expected- single-issue mindset. For those whose sole self-identification is as homosexuals, Obama’s selection of Warren is painful blow.

So why would Obama choose the controversial Pastor of Saddleback Church?

Well, it could be that President-elect Obama has no issues with Pastor Warren’s Biblically based opposition to gay marriage. Obama has never said that he was in favor of gay’s being allowed to marry. Obama has previously stated exactly the opposite.

Instead it could be that Obama sees Pastor Rick Warren differently than the LGBT community does. It is very probable that he doesn’t look at Warren solely through the narrow lens of gay rights as expressed through marriage.

Not only is Pastor Rick Warren the founder and leader of the 4th largest church in America, he is a bestselling author of numerous Christian books.  U.S. News and World Report named him one of “America’s Top 25 Leaders.” Time magazine listed him as one of the “15 World Leaders Who Mattered Most in 2004” and as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2005. Pastor Warren has also been sought out to speak at various national and international forums including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the African Union, the Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Time’s Global Health Summit.

The often controversial Pastor Warren has repeated went against the narrow and conservative views of US evangelical leaders by focusing less on issues such as abortion and gay marriage and calling on the church to include: fighting international poverty and disease, expanding educational opportunity for the marginalized, and combating global warming in their core agendas.

Perhaps President-elect Obama feels that a religious leader who is busy mobilizing – directly or indirectly – hundreds of thousands, if not millions of churchgoers worldwide to actively combat poverty, disease, lack of education, and environmental depredation is fit to give the Invocation and his Inauguration – even if that religious leader holds to the Biblical view of marriage being between one man and one woman.

Yes, it’s a “slap in the face” to the American LGBT community, but isn’t that classically what ones does to the hysterical in order to get them to pause, focus, and think rationally?

In the ongoing debate – some would say war – surrounding gay rights the two major contenders in America are the followers of the Abrahamic Religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) and the LGBT Community, with various other Conservatives and Liberal acting as adjuncts and proxies to these two groups for a plethora of often unrelated reasons.

The religious people are against our society both officially sanctioning and condoning – as oppose to tolerating – a lifestyle that is considered sinful by their faiths. They cite their holy books (the Bible, Qur’an and Torah respectively) regularly to explain their points.

From the Bible

Leviticus 18:22 – “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.”

Leviticus 20:13 – “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

1 Corinthians 6:9 “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind ”

From the Qur’an

Sura 7 (Al-A’raf) – “You lust after men instead of women. Truly, you are a degenerate people.”

Sura 26 (Ash-Shu’ara) – “Will you fornicate with males and leave your wives whom Allah has created for you? Surely you are great transgressors.”

From the Torah

Leviticus 18:22 – “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is an abhorrence.”

Leviticus 20:13 – “If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death—their bloodguilt is upon them”

This repeated focus on specifically male homosexuality throughout the Abrahamic holy books brings an odd – and I’m sure offensive to some – question to my mind:

Is Lesbianism permissible under the tenets of the Abrahamic faiths?

I can easily, as shown above, find multiple passages in the Bible, Qu’ran and Torah that specifically condemn male homosexuality, but I can’t seem to find any verses, sura or pasuk that denounce homosexuality without any male-specific reference.

Would God smile or frown upon this?

If these holy books are the incontrovertible an incontestable word of God as many fundamentalists assert, where does that leave the adherents of these faiths when it comes to lesbians? If there is no specific stricture in verse, sura or pasuk that condemns lesbians, are these fundamentalists contravening the Word of their God by denouncing lesbians alongside male homosexuals?

As I said, it’s an odd question but I believe it to be an intriguing one for the fundamentalists to ponder.