Seven Steps

President-elect Obama has invited "Pastor" Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration. This is a man who has likened gays and lesbians to pedophiles, whose church runs a discredited "conversion" program to "fix" gays and lesbians, and who campaigned to strip gay and lesbian families in California of the right to vote. Who thinks assassination of foreign leaders is a good idea and who supported African Anglicans who are supporting the breakaway groups in the Episcopal Church.

Commentators on various news programs say that the transition team is counting on this to all go away.

Let's make sure that it doesn't. This will take about 20 minutes of your time to do all of these things. Please do them.

Seven steps to take:

(1) A brief (two or three sentence) comment at the feedback site for the transition team here.

(2) Obama's liaison to the LGBT community is Parag Mehta. Please send a short, polite and to-the-point email. It will take all of 3 minutes to send a four sentence email. Please send it to parag.mehta@ptt.gov

(3) Speaker Nancy Pelosi serves on the congressional committee for the inaguration that made the official offer to "Pastor" Warren. Please send her an email asking that this invitation be rescinded here.

(4) Ditto for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. His contact page is here.

You have to select a "topic" from a strange list of subjects. Choose "Congressional Affairs."

Ask for the invitation to be rescinded.

(5) The Democratic National Committee has a feedback page here.

Then copy and paste the same note to this page and select "LGBT" as the appropriate "community"

Then call and leave a message at (202) 863 8000 saying that you would like the message given to Governor Dean that the inclusion of Rick Warren is unacceptable. Ask for him to speak out against Rick Warren being given such a prominent place in the inauguration. Be brief and polite. Charm them even if the person who answers the phone is less than happy to hear from you. Don't give them an excuse to not record how many calls they have gotten on this issue.

(6) The Obama campaign has closed off their contact page and redirected email contact to the transition team, but RollCall has a form up that will allow you to still send emails to the remaining staff at the election campaign team. They need to hear from us, too. Short, polite and to-the point works best write here.

(7) Finally, please pass this information to anyone that you think would be willing to speak out, too. Post it on your blog or your webpage. With a little push back from us the Obama transition team will know that we are interested and watching what happen on this issue. Although we may not keep Warren from standing on the inauguration stage, the Obama administration will have a better understanding of how far they now have to go to earn trust back on issues of equality.