What’s all the fuss about Obama picking funda- mentalist Rick Warren to pray at the inaugural? I responded to Bibb Underwood’s column in which he wondered why so many are “whining” about it. I have no major beef with Underwood's general, overall sentiment, but.... First, he seems to fall for the popular misconception that all opinions are equal and deserve equal respect. There is nothing to respect about an opinion that the world is flat, that the holocaust never occurred or that reaching the moon occurred in a Hollywood studio. Similarly, an "opinion" that a category of human beings, simply by existing (regardless of their behaviors) deserve to be lumped with dogs or pedophiles, or that they be tortured mercilessly for trillions upon trillions of years, all because some loving deity finds their very existence that offensive, does not deserve our respect. It deserves our gentle ridicule and correction. This applies whether the group singled out are women, blacks, gays, jews, paraplegics or anybody else. The fact that ancient religious writings could justify this kind of "opinion" (ambiguous as they are, or not) is absurd -- especially when those same writings are blithely ignored by the same opinion-holder whenever they equally condemn his own self to this unbearable torture because he wears wool-blend suits or eats shellfish; or when these same writings condemn his own young children to the the same fate for saying a curse word; or when the same writings claim this same deity sent his favorites on murderous rampages to capture slaves. Such "opinion" must be accorded only the shallowest form of courtesy, not the kind of genuine respect we accord to a worthy "difference of opinion" based on reality, reason and logical sense. Respectable opinion is created at the point where the road of reason eventually dwindles into paths of subjectivity. Anyone who veers off that road too soon, into fuzzy side paths, creates opinion based on suspicion, bias and other irrelevancies when objectivity is still easily accessible. The mere fact that Warren holds such a wobbly "opinion," and the fact that he has a perfect right to hold it, does not make it an opinion worthy of anything greater than our disgust. Second, Columnist Underwood also seems to confuse the inaugural with "the table." Surely we all agree that people like Warren should have a place at the table. We don't shun half the population because they are in the lower 50 percentile of this or that. But the inaugural is not the place where opinions are evaluated, classified & sorted; it is a celebratory event where, one would think, ALL can revel in a renewed hope for a better future. How celebratory would this occasion be for Irish-Americans, if a restaurant owner, who everyone knew had a no-dogs-or-Irish-allowed sign in his window, were elevated to such a high position of visibility in this celebration? Surely only people who don't like the Irish (or gays or blacks or paraplegics or women) would wonder why they’d find this so upsetting. “Why can't all those Irish-Americans simply respect the restaurant owner's opinion? He has a right to it!” - Larry Hallockhttp://www.sanmarcosrecord.com/features/local_story_003132837.htmlshapeimage_3_link_0

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