Obama, Warren, and much inaugural ado

Look, as far as I'm concerned, the apostate cleric Jean Meslier had it just about right when 300 years ago he heartily endorsed the proposition that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

So why then would I urge tolerance of the intolerant Rick Warren?

Merely because symbolic inclusion -- which is all this priestly yokel's invocation delivered at Barack Obama's inauguration will represent -- is an ingenious political trade of little immediate cost for a long-term payoff.

Hey, President Obama can say to the religious racketeers from that moment on, you can't call me liberally doctrinaire: I suffered your Falwell-wannabe fool of a witch doctor on my crowning day, to the humiliating hoots and hypercriticism of a core constituency.

That won't conclusively please or pacify the thumpers, of course, since nothing ever does, yet it's a formidable but inexpensively wrought bargaining chip. Because Obama can then more easily put an end to the stupendously idiotic military-service policy -- something he can actually do something about -- of "don’t ask, don’t tell."

But good grief, the poor man needs cover -- lots and lots of political cover -- if he's to avoid the senselessly self-inflicted wounds of the early Clinton administration.

Obama foreshadowed as much at his news conference yesterday, when he reminded the disillusioned that symbolic inclusion -- again, that's my characterization, not his, for obvious reasons -- "is part of what my campaign’s been all about; that we’re not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable."

Translation: I'll suffer the fundamentalist community's medieval outrage, and I'll suffer it with a smile; but when the dust settles and the policy rubble stops bouncing, you'll see that I'm on top.

It's a delicate killing by kindness.

And, true, it's also a game -- an unfortunately necessary political game of subtle disingenuousness. But gentle bamboozlement, figures Obama -- and I think he figures correctly -- will in the long run accomplish a good deal more than abrupt, unilateral, in-your-face edicts.

That's not to say that I'm unsympathetic to the not atypical likes of Kevin Naff, editor of the Washington Blade, who wrote that Obama's invitation to Warren signaled a "tone-deafness to [the gay and lesbian community's] concerns," which "must not be tolerated."

Mr. Naff's sharp disgruntlement is understandable, but mistakenly grounded in recent history. "We have just endured eight years of endless assaults on our dignity and equality from a president beholden to bigoted conservative Christians," he added. "The election was supposed to have ended that era. It appears otherwise."

You can scour that assessment with an electron microscope for even the slimmest element of logic, but you'll find nothing but buckets of misplaced outrage. To venture that Obama's guileful invitation to the shamanistic Warren is but an extension of a former "president beholden to bigoted conservative Christians" is not only beyond the non-sequitur pale, it's just, in a word, silly.

As in prima-facie silly. As in over-the-top silly. As in Mr.-Naff-you-protest-with-blinders silly. On the other hand, I suppose such a call-to-arms hysteria might boost subscriptions. Nevertheless I remain sympathetic.

It seems to me that if one wishes to lay valid criticism at Mr. Obama's feet in this, the realm of theological superstition, ignorance and bigotry, it can fittingly be laid in terms of disapproval regarding his programmatic faith-based inclinations. For those, I am devoutly certain, are anticonstitutional.

One of the biggest lies ever spread by the fundamentally intoxicated is that the Founders -- were they Congregationalists or Anglicans or deists or atheists -- had no standing objections to the marriage, or at the very least courtship, of religion and government. Nothing could be farther from the historical truth, for they themselves had witnessed the contemporary perils of other societies having not strangled kings with the entrails of priests.

But as for Warren and his invitation? That's just smart politics, the benefits of which are in the offering.