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" If you remember all the way back to 2008, you will recall that the president took some altogether justified heat for picking noted multimillionaire faith-based grifter Rick Warren to give the invocation. Now, I don&amp;#039;t think there even should be an invocation to any Deity as part of the ceremony by which we install the leader of one-third of our secular government. (I feel this way for the same reason that John Quincy Adams refused to be sworn in on a Bible, and the same reason that Mr. Madison didn&amp;#039;t even want congressional chaplains.) I, however, will live to fight another day on that one. But if we are going to Pause For Prayer, we should do a lot better than Warren, is all&amp;#039;s I&amp;#039;m saying. And, thanks be to Whoever, the president has managed to do so. Years ago, as part of the research into a magazine piece that never ran, I spent some time with Ms. Evers-Williams. The re-trial of her husband&amp;#039;s murderer, a lump of racist sludge named Byron De La Beckwith, was going on at the time. She is a very formidable woman who&amp;#039;d fought the case for decades before a jury finally sent old DeLay to prison, which was an OK verdict by me seeing as how the jury was not empowered to send him to Hell on a barbecue spit. However, I do take exception to the cup of hot cocoa served up by Parson Meacham here. &amp;quot;I would imagine that even people who are made somewhat uncomfortable by the allusions to religion in such public moments will find an invocation by the widow of a martyr to be moving and poignant,&amp;quot; said author Jon Meacham, who has written on religion in American history. &amp;quot;This is as unifying a gesture as a president could make, it seems to me.&amp;quot; First of all, I do indeed take great pleasure that the prayer is not being offered by a professional preacher. But I choose to look at the rest of it differently. The Civil Rights Movement may have been pasteurized and sanitized for the history books, and to salve the conscience of a still-guilty nation but, in a lot of places, many of which have been quite vocal in their opposition to President Barack X, the Movement is still divisive, and it is divisive because it has been to the political advantage of people to make it divisive. In too many other places, people choose to remember the Movement has a triumph for the American nation and not a victory for basic human rights that had to be wrenched out of the nation itself. And the struggle is ongoing. There is a substantial portion of the American people who will not accept the legitimacy of a black president 50 years after the March On Washington. It took Myrlie Evers-Williams 31 years to get simple justice for her husband&amp;#039;s murder. It will be nice to hear a prayer from someone with so very few illusions. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17854/obama-inauguration-invocation-010813/>