I was fascinated last night to listen to the language used about Rick Warren on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.  For the record, I'm a huge fan of the show: she is intelligent, witty, thought-provoking, and offers commentary on each day's events that often breaks with orthodoxies on all sides. Last night, though, it was interesting to hear her take on Rick Warren.  Maddow is a lesbian, a feminist and thus strongly opposed to Warren's stand on Proposition 8 and on abortion.  Despite Warren's stand on the environment and on issues such as Darfur, with which she is in deep sympathy, she could not get beyond his position on gay marriage and the sanctity of life of the unborn, and thus described him as a figure of the `hard right.'  Now, I have issues with Warren theologically and ecclesiastically, but am in broad sympathy with much of his politics and so it was interesting to see him clobbered as too right wing for a change. 

Maddow's language reminded me once again of another hero of mine, Nat Hentoff, who came from a pro-choice to a pro-life position for the simple reason that he woke up one morning and realised that, as a man of the left, he was to speak up for the weak, the defenceless, for those who could not speak up for themselves.  I guess he'd qualify as `hard right' in the current taxonomy as well; that's what happens when the identity politics of the modern age trumps everything. You end up with a world where wealthy middle class homosexuals living in San Francisco have apparently become the poor, the marginalised, the weak and the defenceless, and where a man who stands up for justice in matters of genocide has this acknowledged by opponents as (to use the phrase once again) a kind of throat clearing before everything is relativised in terms of one's own pet issue.  Rick Warren and Rachel Maddow: who is the most consistent advocate for the poor and the marginalised and those who cannot speak up for themselves?