President-elect Obama has angered many supporters – and probably many detractors – by asking California Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at the upcoming inaugural ceremonies. Politico.com reports:

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

The rapid, angry reaction from a range of gay activists comes as the gay rights movement looks for an opportunity to flex its political muscle. Last summer gay groups complained, but were rebuffed by Obama, when an “ex-gay” singer led Obama’s rallies in South Carolina. And many were shocked last month when voters approved the California ban.

“There is a lot of energy and there’s a lot of anger and I think people are wanting to direct it somewhere,” Solomonese told Politico.

The selection of Warren to preside at the inauguration is not a surprise move, but it is a mirror image of President Bill Clinton’s early struggles with issues of gay rights. Obama has worked, and at times succeeded, to bridge the gap between Democrats and evangelical Christians, who form a solid section of the Republican base.

Warren has been more outspoken than usual lately about issues seen as purely moral, particularly gay marriage. This was unavoidable given the fur flying in California over Proposition 8. A CNN piece pointed out Warren’s objections, the kinds of objections that make sense but don’t get much airplay these days.

Warren’s support of California’s Proposition 8, a measure that outlaws same sex marriage in the state, sparked the ire of many gay rights proponents earlier this fall.

Warren, who has made it a practice not to endorse candidates or political parties, wrote in October that the issue of gay marriage is not a political issue, but instead “a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.”

“For 5,000 years, every culture and every religion — not just Christianity — has defined marriage as a contract between men and women,” Warren wrote in a newsletter to his congregation. “There is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population.”

Warren also stirred controversy earlier this week when he told Beliefnet.com his grounds for opposing same-sex marriage laid primarily on his right of free speech.

“There were all kinds of threats that if [Proposition 8] did not pass, then any pastor could be considered doing hate speech if he shared his views that he didn’t think homosexuality was the most natural way for relationships, and that would be hate speech.”

Warren has also spoken out against abortion and defended Christians from the knocks they have taken (unwarranted in my view) for being “single-issue voters.” In a recent interview with Beliefnet, Warren outlines a fascinating discussion he had with Democratic senators:

And I went around the room and when I came to Chuck Schumer I said, “Chuck, how bad, if you had a candidate and he was right in EVERY SINGLE AREA that you agreed with but he’s a holocaust denier, there’s no way you’re gonna vote for a holocaust denier. That’s a single issue issue for you. And I said, “For these people who believe life begins at birth, alright–at conception–it’s an America holocaust. They believe that there’s 40 million people who should be here. And to them that’s an issue.”

These views may be starting to change some people’s views of Warren, sometimes seen as the poster child for a New Evangelicalism that isn’t as in-your-face about the contents of the Gospel and moral issues. But Warren has probably never been what the political Left would like people to believe he is.

Likewise, many Evangelicals have been uncomfortable with Warren because of this perceived overemphasis on social action at the expense of evangelism. Warren himself seems to be annoyed at this and takes pains to correct false impressions, as seen in a USA Today profile earlier this month:

He never stopped planting churches, he says, but as he spoke around the world, he realized government, business and non-profits could all share in efforts to reconcile global conflict.

“All of a sudden, I started having people of goodwill who were not Christian or not church members saying, ‘We’d like to do that. We’d like to partner with you on helping the poor. We’d like to help end AIDS. We’d like to help end corruption and injustice.’

“So,” he says, “I started making the appeal for people of goodwill, whether they happened to believe, as I do, that Jesus Christ is the son of God, or not, to work together on the areas where we can work together, and not worry about the areas where we can’t.”

Says Warren, “We’ll work with anybody who wants to stop AIDS.” And that, he says, “really makes the fundamentalists mad.”

“But when people say Saddleback is not a evangelistic church,” or that Warren is not standing for Christ all the time, “there’s a spiritual term for that,” he says.

“It’s when you cross an abalone with a crocodile. It’s a crock of baloney.”

If he can infuriate so many different kinds of people he must be doing something right.