Pastor Rick Warren's Inaugural invocation will be simultaneously translated into a message of love and tolerance, a spokesman for Saddleback Church announced today.
“When Pastor Warren takes the stage at the Inauguration,” Wes Fulstrum told a hastily assembled Lake Forest, California news conference, “immediately to his left will be a person versed in simultaneous translation, and that person will render his words into a message of love and tolerance that all Americans, straight and gay, can accept.”
Gay rights groups were outraged by the President-elect Obama’s choice of Pastor Warren to offer the invocation at the Jan. 20 Inauguration, because of Jacobs’ deep opposition to Prop. 8, essentially outlawing gay marriage in the state of California.
“We know that many people were upset by the choice of Pastor Warren,” Fulstrum told reporters. “But his message of traditional religious values, as interpreted by him, can easily be translated into a message of tolerance for all people, and we’re going to provide that in real time at the Inauguration.”
Fulstrum said that Obama was not trying to “send a message” to social conservatives that “he wasn’t as radical as they feared.” Fulstrum also said that Obama had not selected Pastor Warren because “he was fulfilling a Billy Graham-type, basically unobjectionable, middle-of-the-road, offend-almost-no-one, undemanding type of spirituality.
“The truth is that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was unavailable on the 20th,” Fulstrum said, “so Pastor Warren was actually Obama’s second choice.”
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