Now that Barack Obama has won the White House, Time must feel it's safe to call the magazine's "Man of the Year" an anti-gay rights bigot.

Such was revealed in an article posted Thursday entitled "The Problem for Gays with Rick Warren — and Obama."

Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer reports that New England liberals in the Phoenix chain of "alternative" newspapers are launching a "Take Back Barack" campaign (complete with ahem, a white hand holding a little black Obama doll. Where’s the PC police?) Boston-based Maloney adds: "Considering how vehemently these publications supported the former Illinois senator, this represents an abrupt turn of events coming rather soon after November's election." Will the media notice liberal disaffection, or try to keep it quiet? One blog complained about the Rick Warren prayer minute at the Inauguration:

So Rick Warren's been chosen to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration. Anybody else super-excited to see a rabidly pro-life, anti-choice, anti-gay evangelical cleric blessing Obama and the nation? Fine, so he cares about poverty and children in Africa. You don't have to turn over too many steeples to uncover exciting, progressive clergymen and -women who feel the same way about those issues, and who recognize that legislating things like pregnancy and partnership are never good.

The blogger suggests (among many names linked) the Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church of State. But wouldn’t he decline praying on the steps of the Capitol, just on principle? The irony would be too, too rich if he accepted.

While the media are fixated on the ire gay activists are directing at the president-elect for selecting Prop 8 proponent Rick Warren to give the invocation at the Obama inaugural, I've noticed little attention given to the fact that the man selected to give the benediction is pretty much the polar opposite of Warren on some key doctrinal matters related to homosexuality.

Rev. Joseph Lowery, a liberal United Methodist minister, has mostly been referred to in the media in connection to his work in co-founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the key organizations in the civil rights movement. Yet freezing Lowery in time as an icon of the 1960s civil rights era doesn't do justice to his status as a vocal clerical advocate of same-sex marriage and openly gay clergy.

Reports Cathy Lynn Grossman of the USA Today Faith & Reason blog:

Barack Obama has selected Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the president-elect's inauguration.

Based on yesterday's New York Times story about this and other inauguration decisions, you would think that complaints about Warren's selection represent a mere tempest in a teapot. The Times devoted all of one sentence (bolded) to the controversy:

Barack Obama has selected the Rev. Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor and author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, a role that positions Mr. Warren to succeed Billy Graham as the nation’s pre-eminent minister and reflects the generational changes in the evangelical Christian movement.

..... The choice of Mr. Warren, pastor of a megachurch in Orange County, Calif., is an olive branch to conservative Christian evangelicals. Mr. Warren is an outspoken opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage — litmus-test issues for Christian conservatives. In fact, his selection set off a round of criticism by gay rights groups angered by his support for California’s ban on same-sex marriages.