The Voice That Will Inspire

From Huffington Post 12/28/2008
By: Tobias Barrington Wolff

Tobias Barrington Wolff served as the chief advisor and spokesperson on LGBT issues for presidential candidate Barack Obama throughout the 2007-08 campaign. Wolff is currently a law professor and civil rights lawyer.

The Voice That Will Inspire

When Barack Obama takes the stage on January 20th to be sworn in as our 44th President, one of the two men he has invited to offer commemoratory prayers will know what it means for a member of the clergy to have his speech silenced by oppressive government action. That man will not be Rick Warren.

In his advocacy for California’s Proposition 8 — the ballot initiative that deprived millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Californians of the equal right to enter into a civil marriage — Reverend Warren argued that the measure was necessary to protect the free speech of conservative pastors. So long as the California Supreme Court’s decision requiring equal treatment under the law remained on the books, he claimed, pastors could be prosecuted for hate speech if they preached against LGBT equality. That claim was flatly untrue. The Supreme Court has made it clear that any such prosecution would violate the First Amendment, and California authorities would never attempt such a thing. If they did, the supporters of LGBT equality that I know would be the first to object. As a political tactic, Warren’s argument may have worked, but his freedom of speech was never threatened.

Reverend Joseph Lowery, however — the man who will offer the benediction at President Obama’s inauguration — has a different story to tell. In one of the greatest free speech disputes in American constitutional history, New York Times v. Sullivan, Reverend Lowery experienced the full force of government power calculated to silence and oppress.

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