In the comment thread to the post about my piece on the main site, it looks like one commenter has drawn the conclusion that Obama is facing some sort of alliance with the religious right. Let me debunk that right now: in the course of his campaign, Obama made some overtures to religious right figures, but by and large his religious outreach was targeted at religious centrists and progressives.
Over the next four years, the political alignment of religious activists will be really interesting to watch. While the left has been criticized for failing to respond to the religious right with a religious left, more cohesive movements are afoot to make a potent religious left a reality -- and that religious left is not just, as Obama was, opposed to Proposition 8, but actively supportive of same-sex marriage. At the same time, there's a concerted effort by a self-defined evangelical center to create a movement that rejects the worldview and political tactics of the religious right. While the evangelical center is, in my view, a largely center-right movement that maintains an opposition to same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, the advocacy of its leaders on issues like torture and a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, for example, is important, for both building wider coalitions on these issues and marginalizing the religious right.
As we saw this week, although the religious right will lose its considerable Washington clout with Obama in the White House, it still maintains the ability to mobilize voters to take away the rights of their fellow citizens at the state level. Obama's opposition to Proposition 8 was tepid at best, and although it was the religious right that took the lead in organizing for the gay marriage ban, its success was a result of bringing less extreme voters along for the ride. Obama, who was hoping to garner the support of those less extreme voters in California and nationwide, opted for the easiest course in not rocking the boat on same-sex marriage.
Obama's failure to take a more oppositional stand to Proposition 8 was similar to other hedging he engaged in over the course of the campaign, ostensibly to attract religious voters. (The other was talking about abortion reduction rather than reproductive rights.) While disagreement on issues like abortion and gay marriage should not prevent progressives from working with evangelicals, for example, on an issue like ending torture, the pursuit of centrist religious voters should not be done at the expense of the pursuit of other values like reproductive and LGBTQ rights. That is why, as I argued in my post election piece, that narrow appeals to perceived religious preferences didn't increase Obama's share of the religious vote; his overall articulation of his political values did.
The passage of Proposition 8 and the gay marriage bans in Arizona and Florida was a dark cloud on an otherwise joyous week. The idea that the legal and moral rights of some our citizens were stripped away by bigotry is, to borrow from the fundamentalist playbook, an abomination. But as The Very Rev. Scott Richardson, Dean of the St. Paul Cathedral in San Diego, an ardent opponent of Proposition 8 who holds out hope the ban will eventually be reversed, told me yesterday, "As sad as I am about Prop. 8, the perspective I have, the whole world is impacted by the presidential election. Our whole world is different now. The gay pride issue, the equal rights issue is really important. But I want to keep it in some perspective around the other issues addressed on Tuesday."
--Sarah Posner
