12-22-08, 9:59 am

Symbols mean a lot. Take the American flag, for instance. It was a symbol of a broad, national struggle against British imperialism.

It was a symbol of national unity in a struggle to end slavery and preserve a nation.

When members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s, wore American flags on their uniforms, they regarded the flag as a symbol of international working-class resistance to oppression.

When several hundred of us Americans marched behind an American flag in the parade of nations at the opening of the 2005 World Festival of Youth and Students in Caracas, Venezuela, we carried it proudly as a symbol that in the US, too, there is being waged a struggle for human liberation.

But historically, the ultra right, including its latest incarnation in the Bush administration, has used the flag as a symbol of power and domination. Most recently, they have used it as a gag to silence those voices that disagreed with Bush's drive for endless war and the detention of people who looked like they didn't belong.

No less symbolic and contested is the decision of whom President-elect Barack Obama has chosen to lead the nation in prayer at his inaugural on January 20th. The choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation reflects not just Obama's values; it is a reflection of us as a people.

With his apparently obsessive effort to demean LGBT people and to devalue their struggle for equality, Warren symbolizes a deep and abiding homophobia lurking behind and within the euphoria and joy most Americans have expressed since we knew that we had set our country upon a new course on November 4th.

Warren's views and his presence at this decidedly national event, this introduction of a new president, represents the old order we are still struggling to leave behind. It is ironic and shameful that a man so full of hate will pray to a God who, in Warren's own religious tradition, commanded all people to love one another as themselves.

There is no doubt that the homophobic views expressed by Warren and others like him are directly linked to the rise in violence aimed at LGBT people as recorded by law enforcement authorities in the recent period.

There has been a lot of justified anger about the selection of Warren to deliver this prayer.

In the political scuffle, however, another inaugural voice has gone mostly unnoticed. Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, a civil rights icon and supporter of marriage equality, will deliver the inauguration's benediction.

Interestingly, in some religious traditions the benediction is the most important prayer of the service. It is the prayer during which the one speaking with God uses the occasion to exhort and encourage the congregants to good deeds, perhaps even to struggle for a better world.

Lowery, who survived throat cancer, notoriously has refused to be silent in the presence of power. In 2006, during funeral services for Coretta Scott King and with George W. Bush sitting just a few feet away, Lowery thundered against the immoral and illegal war in Iraq. In 2005, in services honoring the life of Rosa Parks, Lowery put Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on notice that she must use her influence in the Bush administration to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

The inaugural prayers, if they must be read as symbols of values and beliefs, should be read in sum. They should also be read for what they are – symbols of a general dilemma and struggle over the meaning of democracy in this country.

To simply pin responsibility for this struggle and its outcome onto the shoulders of Barack Obama is a huge error, though he deserves his share. It sidesteps our responsibility for what we are: a society divided by hate, struggling to overcome this hate.

Perhaps Obama's choice in this matter is little more than political decision to bring people of differing views together into a national event that is larger than just his own personal success on on November 4th. But, perhaps, it is also a mirror that will be held up for all of us to see who we are as a society and as individuals.

That Dr. Lowery will have the last word may be the most important symbol of all.

See Lowery's speech at Coretta Scott King's funeral here: