Word: pastoral
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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About three years ago, a reporter at Fortune asked Rick Warren, the successful pastor whom the President-elect has asked to pray at his Inauguration, about homosexuality. "I'm no homophobic guy," Warren said. His proof? He has dined with gays; he has a church "full of people who are caring for gays who are dying of AIDS"; he believes that "in the hierarchy of evil ... homosexuality is not the worst sin." So gays get to eat - sometimes even with Rick Warren! Then they get to die of AIDS - possibly under the care of Rick Warren's congregants. And when...
...have a message of hope for gays: they can magically become heterosexuals. (He didn't explain how, but I suspect he thinks praying really hard would do it, as if most of us who grew up gay and evangelical hadn't tried that every night as teenagers.) Homosexuality, Pastor Warren explained in the virtually content-free language of the dogmatist, is "not the natural way." And then he went right for the ick factor, the way middle-school boys do: "Certain body parts are meant to fit together...
...Scherer's review of Mike Huckabee's new book, Do The Right Thing, is an attempt to trivialize the mission of an extraordinary public citizen [Dec. 15]. Instead of noting that TIME once listed him as one of America's five best governors, Scherer identified Huckabee as a "Baptist pastor with crooked teeth," and "Huckabee's America" sounds like something from The Beverly Hillbillies. Those who dismissed Huckabee as a third-tier candidate when he continually argued for energy independence, infrastructure spending and better preventive health care should take a closer look at Barack Obama's priorities. Huckabee's accomplishment...
...smaller in retrospect. He spent almost all his energy trying to besmirch his opponent without offering a memorable new idea. Still, he deserves credit for two steps he didn't take: he did not play the race card by regurgitating the hateful sermons of Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor; and he did not play the anti-immigrant card that might have appealed to frightened average Joes and assorted plumbers throughout the Rust Belt and the Midwest. McCain has sullied his reputation, though, which is a pity. (A parenthetical and auxiliary Teddy should go to Tina Fey, not for courage...
...regardless of who the opponent was," he said, appearing to contradict the assessment of the campaign's ad man, Fred Davis (no relation), who has described in other interviews an atmosphere of extreme caution over racial issues that hampered the campaign's message on topics like Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright...