Jan 02, 2009   | COMMENTS     

NEW YORK (AP) — Pastor Rick Warren, chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to pray at his Inauguration despite his support of a gay marriage ban, said he doesn’t equate gay relationships with incest or pedophilia, but opposes redefining marriage just as any conservative Christian would.

Warren said that disagreeing with gay-rights activists on same-sex marriage does not qualify as hate speech and doesn’t mean he is anti-gay. He also said Obama chose him to give the invocation at the swearing-in to show that people with different views don’t have to demonize each other.

“We’re both willing to be criticized in order to try to bring America into a new day of civil discourse and to create a new model that says you don’t have to agree only with your side on everything,” Warren says in a video posted by Saddleback Community Church.

Gay-rights advocates were enraged that Obama had given the evangelical clergyman a prominent role at the Inauguration. Obama said he wanted the event to reflect diverse views and insisted he remains a “fierce advocate” of equal rights for gays.

Warren backed Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in his home state of California, where he founded Saddleback. He recently said that he opposes any redefinition of marriage, including a brother marrying a sister, or an adult marrying a child.

In his video, Warren insisted he wasn’t equating gay marriage with incest or child molestation.

“I have in no way ever taught that homosexuality is the same thing as a forced relationship between an adult and a child, or between siblings,” Warren said. “I was trying to point out I’m not opposed to gays having their partnership. I’m opposed to gays using the term marriage for their partnership.”

Police offer $10,000 reward in lesbian rape

RICHMOND, Calif. (AP) — Richmond police are offering a $10,000 reward for information in the brutal gang rape of a lesbian allegedly jumped by four men, taunted with anti-gay slurs and left naked outside an abandoned apartment building.

Detectives say the 28-year-old victim was attacked Dec. 13 after she got out of her car, which bore a rainbow gay pride sticker.

After one of the men struck her, the group dragged the woman into the street, assaulted her, forced her back into her car and took her to the burned-out building, where she was raped again.

Police say the attack lasted about 45 minutes and ended when the alleged assailants drove off in the victim’s car. Officers found the vehicle two days later abandoned elsewhere in the city.

“It just pushes it beyond fathomable,” said Richmond police Lt. Mark Gagan. “The level of trauma — physical and emotional — this victim has suffered is extreme.”

Authorities are characterizing the attack as a hate crime. Gagan said the victim lived openly with a female partner.

Virginia clinic pilots rural health care project

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — The University of Virginia’s Infectious Disease Clinic is piloting a text-messaging program in hopes of improving contact with HIV patients in rural areas.

The program was launched this summer when a social worker doing outreach work found that patients in rural areas missed appointments and fell out of treatment more often than those in urban areas.

As part of the program, patients are given cell phones that are limited to receiving tests, and calling health care providers and emergency contacts. The program is structured to see if the cell phones help keep HIV patients returning to care in line with treatments for longer than six months.