Washblog

But we are more concerned about those couples already married than about those who want to get married. But all will better love each other and their neighbors if they keep their jobs - or find a new one. We ask, Lord, that you help all couples - married or not married -  to  economically stabilize their coupling.

Lord, please help our new president to find a few good men and women who will work intensely to stabilize marriage by doing everything in their power to achieve - not "work toward" - health coverage for every member of every family and every member-to-be of every family-to-be.

Lord,  we believe you when you say that a laborer is worthy of his hire. Help the new authorities increase family incomes with minimum wage increases and expanding worker benefits. This is the area of our nation where the largest number of marriages are already at risk.

Lord, we understand that the sacred institution of marriage is placed more at risk when it attempts to survive with inadequate housing, bottom-line cheapskate and/or corporate slumlords. We understand how family relationships are harmed when home ownership as an impossible dream.

Since we cannot tell each other what to do because of the mote-and-beam principle, help the macho image-makers and self-serving patriarchal philosophers understand that marriage is incomplete without intellectual, spiritual and moral equality.

Help us Lord to take a long look and seek answers from those who truly know about failed marriages in our society. Lord, are we really Christian in a purpose-driven society with unfettered corporate capitalism? Should we live in a trickle-down society the greedy try to convince us of naturally-occurring equal opportunities for every citizen to succeed in some idealized cookie-cutter manner?

Lord, would you please prompt the pretend warriors to fall silent and give priority to our married soldiers and their families? Help us to not let the irresponsible academic warriors write out political and military checks that the children in our families - families built on our sacred institution of marriage - will have to honor.

About those military families and our single soldiers: Please help us to care about what happens when they come home and are no longer tactical plastic markers on a map. Help us to better organize and make sure that the VA is truly an effective and functioning Good Samaritan - a boon to our society of veterans and something for which we as a nation can all be proud and not suspicious.

And we need to make sure that all household with or without marriage are not hampered by an urgent need for food assistance and other welfare.

Lord, help us to get out of the business of trying to control one gender's right to chose.

We desire a truly moral and ethical president, We want to be able to trust our leaders to work out processes of education and scientific study and encourage responsibility around human sexuality as a national concern and effort.

Help us to sustain and advocate for the sacredness of our marriage institution by educating and protecting our precious human national resource - our children.

Lord, to we really need the noisiest Christians prancing around sounding pious and sober about gay couples?

Is it not more worthy to march around obsessed with doing something about the factors that do greater harm to our families and their young members than whether or not we have a right to choose who marries who? Help us with our faith in your power and process so we can stop pretending that you want us to ban gay marriages  as the answer to solving the problem.

Please help us to work to encourage the nation to deal wisely with its domestic abusers and family abandoners in a major way.

And finally - In our plea for social justice and domestic tranquility - we also ask thy forgiveness for our ignorant religious moral arrogance.

In faith and trust we pray on this new day for new leaders,

Amen.

You'd think that we'd have learned from these experiences - particularly those of us who call ourselves "progressives" - that you get your desired results faster when you embrace, engage, and nurture your "enemies" than when you physically or rhetorically bomb them.

Barack Obama has learned that lesson, and is applying it in inviting Rick Warren to perform the invocation for his inauguration.

In doing so, he is reaching out a hand to those who today are - out of fear and ignorance - pushing away gays the same way their intellectual ancestors pushed away African Americans when anti-miscegenation laws were supported by most of these same "fundamentalist" Christian churches in the 1950s and 1960s.

Joseph Lowry, who is providing the other bookend to the inauguration with the benediction, is the other side of the balance Obama is bringing to this inauguration. Lowry has said, for example, "The same folks who are against progress for black folks are the folks who are against progress for women and gays and farmers and young people and peace activists.

We have to understand it's one struggle. This is ONE AMERICA, and the sooner we learn that the more effective our world will be."

And the more effective we will be at changing the hearts and minds of people like Rich Warren and his followers.

This is a tremendous first step, and I congratulate Barack Obama on his wisdom, walking metaphorically in Greg Mortenson's shoes to eventually bring the enemies of America's true values of love and tolerance over to our side.

So I guess I'm talked down ... and I'm willing to bet that getting Warren to talk to God in that cloying way Evangelical leaders do - before Obama speaks - means that Lowry's "amen" to what Obama says, will be much more meaningful than mere rebuttal.

Me?

I'd tell God to pay no attention to the man on the Saddleback with the Oil Can Henry beard.