Platform for intolerance

Alfred Doblin's column in The Record on Friday -- 'Blazing Saddles' to Saddleback to 'Brokeback' -- takes the convenient lie that too many supporters of Barack Obama have been telling themselves lately to convince themselves that the president-elect's selection of the Rev. Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inaugural doesn't matter.

It does -- and for one very good reason:

Obama is giving a platform to someone who worked to strip a civil right — marriage from same-sex couples in California. Warren was not stating a theological difference from the pulpit; he supported changing a California law so that some Californians would be less equal than others. There is nothing more anti-American than taking away an existing civil liberty.

The decision, he says, does not cast the president-elect in a good light:

Obama is not an enemy of gay people, but that does not make him a friend.