The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Pam has a great post responding to Rick Warren's little problem with the truth on Larry King Live last night, where he claimed to have never compared same-sex marriage to incest or to have opposed Prop 8 (video after the jump).

It's not really surprising; Rick Warren is an egomaniac who's concerned with how others view him first, everything else second. That criticism has been leveled against him repeatedly before we gays even knew his name. He loves to be a respectable, normal human being who can give his opinion on subjects and no one will ever doubt that he's a Very Serious Person.

Which is why the storm of criticism last December shook him so much - his self-esteem, his credibility, indeed, his whole scam rests on the idea that he's a "moderate" member of the Religious Right. And it was the first time that some of his more extreme statements and political endeavors were getting any coverage at all.

So now he's lying about his past statements because, I think, he actually regrets making them and thinks that he should have just stuck to volunteer work and religion and books instead of delving into politics. Then again, he was emailing churches all over the country and telling them to work for Bush's reelection in 2004 and no one noticed that he may have had a partisan agenda. So why should he have thought 2008 would be any different?

Here's the video:

The Rick Warren we see in that video is the most genuinely pathetic Rick Warren I've ever seen. I can imagine how he obsesses about being loved by everyone, and how much he's been thinking about the events in late December and early January and how deeply they affected him. His statements are in clear contradiction with statements he made last year in interviews and on video (he's obviously not ready for the Age of YouTube), but the fact that he lied so nonchalantly shows just how much all of this has been tumbling through his head.

He knows the jig is up and people are onto his game. He knows that people think he's just another Jerry Falwell now, and that was exactly the point of the outcry last year. While Larry King shouldn't have just let Warren off the hook there, especially since Warren made it all about marriage and the controversy was definitely not all about marriage.

Warren's dodge on the question about Iowa shows that he's been burned and he's going to be a little more careful about entering political frays from now on. If that's the new generation of Evangelicals, then bring it on.