Gene Robinson, the gay bishop Barack Obama invited to his presidential inauguration, has criticized the president-elect in the past. But he’s on board with the transition team’s insistence that his invitation was long planned, well before the Rev. Rick Warren scandal … even though he wasn’t actually invited until recently. (Obama maintains they had planned to invite him all along.) Here appeared tonight on Rachel Maddow’s show — which locked him in to a “speak to us and nobody else” arrangement — saying, “I do feel very confident that this president-elect understands us [the gay community] and stands with us in the issues that are important to us. Of course, we’re going to hold his feet to the fire about that.”

“But as a religious person, no one had a bigger tent than Jesus, and I must say I think the whole notion of the big tent, where every human being is acknowledged as being a child of God and frankly, as worthy of our respect and concern, that sort of vision I believe is Barack Obama’s vision as well, and I long for a government that respect the dignity of every human being, especially those who are less fortunate.”

And regarding Obama’s 1996 full support of gay marriage, Robinson says: “As you know, all the Democratic candidates stopped short of endorsing gay marriage. What I do believe about this new president is that he believes in equal rights for all American citizens. And in the end, I hope that that’s where America will move in terms of gay marriage. Certainly as a religious person I will support anything that shows us to be equally valuable to each other and to our government.”