Melissa Etheridge Speaks About Rick Warren at Muslim Event

Singer Melissa Etheridge, an outspoken supporter of gay rights–who is now unable to marry her girlfriend Tammy Lynn Michaels because of the passage of California’s Proposition 8–discusses her feelings on Rick Warren and the evangelical community backstage at Muslim Public Affairs Council’s annual dinner last night.

Etheridge also spoke a length with Pastor Rick Warren the night before the two appeared at the event.

Juan Cole, President of Global Americana Institute who shared the stage at the MPAC event with Warren and has a very thoughtful look at evening, wrote in his blog Informed Consent:

I was told that Warren’s friends among the MPAC Muslim community had urged him to call Melissa Etheridge Friday night in the run-up to their being (serially) on the same stage Saturday night, and that he did so and they talked for half an hour. During his address, Warren mentioned also seeing Etheridge backstage on Saturday…He explicitly mentioned meeting Etheridge, and explained that he has been a long time fan of hers, beginning with her self-titled first album of 1988. "I’m enough of a groupie," he said, "that I got her autograph on the Christmas album."

Warren, despite commenting smarmily from the stage,

and for the media’s purpose, I happen to love gays and straights

is not enough of "a groupie" to work for Melissa’s equal rights, or enough of a reasonable rational man to see that civil marriage equality is a matter of allowing everyone–regardless of race, creed, color or sexual/gender orientation–the right to equal protection under state and federal law.

Heck, his Jesus doesn’t have to bless the union, nor does the Catholic Jesus or the Mormon Jesus, because there are enough versions and visions of Jesus, enough forms of the Divine, of Isis and Odin, of Hekate and Lakshmi, of I Am and the Tetragrammaton, and enough judges and justices of the peace to perform marriages without Pastor Rick and his uptight aspect of the Dude God of Intolerance.