Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who is openly homosexual, will deliver the invocation at a Jan. 18 pre-inaugural event at the Lincoln Memorial.

President-elect Barack Obama’s invitation of Robinson is seen by some as a bid to placate homosexual activists, who were enraged by Obama’s earlier selection of Evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the actual inauguration ceremony on Jan. 20.

Warren opposes homosexual behavior as immoral and he issued a public statement of support for California’s Proposition 8, the ballot measure that amended the California constitution to define marriage as a one-man, one-woman institution.

The New York Times politics blog reported Jan. 12, “Bishop Robinson said in a telephone interview on Monday that he believed that his inclusion in inaugural events had been under consideration before the controversy over Mr. Warren, but that Mr. Obama and his team were also seeking to heal the pain that Mr. Warren’s selection had caused among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocates.”

“They called up and said this has actually been in the works for a long time,” Bishop Robinson said, “and at the same time, we understand that people in the LGBT community have been somewhat wounded by this choice and it’s our hope that your selection will go a long way to heal those divides.”

The starkly contrasting choices of Robinson and Warren does little to cast the nature of Obama’s own Christian faith in a clearer light.

But the prayers offered by Robinson at the Jan. 18 Lincoln Memorial event won’t have anything specifically Christian in them anyway.

The Episcopalian bishop told the Times that “he had been rereading inaugural prayers through history and was ‘horrified’ at how ‘specifically and aggressively Christian they were.’”

Promised the homosexual bishop, “I am very clear that this will not be a Christian prayer, and I won’t be quoting Scripture or anything like that.”

— Tom McFeely