Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

Not that he was planning to attend, but Barack Obama should know that my sister's inauguration night party—the one for which she was preparing Obama Punch—has been canceled. The notice went out over the weekend, by e-mail and word of mouth, that Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation had simply ruined the party. Warren is anti-gay, and my sister, not to put too fine a point on it, is not. She's gay.

...

She's been in a relationship with another woman, the quite wonderful Nancy, for 19 years, and she resents the fact that [Rick] Warren has likened same-sex marriage to incest, pederasty and polygamy.... There you have the thinking of the man Obama has chosen above all other religious figures to represent him in this most solemn moment. He likens my sister's relationship—three children, five grandchildren, so loving as to be envied and so conventional as to be boring—to incest or polygamy.

The conventional thing to say is that Obama has a preacher problem—first the volcanic Jeremiah Wright and now the transparently anti-gay Warren. But the real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something.

This was apparent to me almost a year ago when I reported that Obama's church, the Trinity United Church of Christ, had given a major award to Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam.... I never for a moment thought Obama viewed Farrakhan any differently from the way I do. But I also thought that as a U.S. senator, as a presidential candidate or even as a mere citizen, he had an obligation to denounce the award—maybe quit the church. Do something! He did nothing.

Now we have a repeat of that episode. This time it is not Obama's preacher who has decided to honor a bigot, it is Obama himself.

Read the whole thing here.