Of course, I’m just assuming that the policy Warren refers to is the contraception mandate-he never specifies. He hasn’t talked to Obama either, but judging the president by one policy, he can say that Obama doesn’t value religious freedom.
Got that? Without talking to Romney-or apparently investigating his positions on religious freedom at all-Warren can safely say he’s pretty sure they’d be on the same page. “I have not talked about this issue with Governor Romney, but I would imagine that as a Mormon he’d obviously understand the importance of protecting all religions against persecution and ensuring people’s rights to practice their conscience without government intervention.” “President Obama’s policies clearly show what he values, and I have told him that I adamantly disagree with those particular policies,” said Warren. When asked by the OC Register reporter what he thought the candidates’ views on religious freedom were, Warren made it even more clear that he considers the issue from a partisan perspective.
#Obama pastor rick warren code#
But “religious freedom” has unfortunately become this year’s “family values”-a phrase that is now code for “socially conservative issue.” After rolling out the excuse that he couldn’t possibly hold a civility forum with such uncivil candidates, Warren explained that he would instead host a forum on religious freedom in September. That might ordinarily seem like a worthy, non-partisan endeavor. And Obama had a multitude of reasons to be wary of Warren, as I explained last month.īut if anyone in the Obama camp was feeling torn about skipping another Saddleback event, they have only to read Warren's comments to the Orange County Register yesterday to put their minds at ease. Romney has made clear that he wants to talk about his faith on his own terms, which the print interview allowed him to do. The decision makes sense for both candidates. The interviews were made public yesterday, just hours before Warren pulled the plug on his own event. It must have been quite the ego blow, then, to learn that Romney and Obama had reached an agreement to talk about matters of faith and religion in another forum-separate interviews with a little-known church quarterly, Cathedral Age, which is the official publication of the Washington National Cathedral. But in the absence of an agreement, he appears to have simply broadcast his plans for a repeat performance of the 2008 event and expected that the candidates would come to him. I have no doubt that somebody in Warren’s camp had a conversation with staff in the Obama and Romney campaigns at some point. At the time the proposed Warren forum was first publicized, the Romney camp said it was not planning to attend.” There is also no evidence that the church held a public lottery for tickets to the forum, as Warren originally said in July. (And lest you think a listing was removed when the forum was “cancelled,” the calendar does note that the cross-training fitness class originally scheduled for today has been cancelled.)Īccording to a Fox News blog, “Romney campaign officials say the campaign had not accepted the invitation nor put it on any schedule. The Associated Press reported this morning that neither campaign was planning on attending any event at Saddleback. Saddleback’s own events calendar does not list any candidate forum.
Despite Warren’s efforts to make it seem as if he was selflessly cancelling an appearance with both presidential candidates in order to avoid contributing to a toxic political climate, the evidence strongly suggests that there wasn’t any Saddleback forum this time to cancel.
0 kommentar(er)
