Larry's Phat Page: News

An Open Letter to Barack Obama, President of the United States

Despite the promises you made last year during your campaign to end the legal fifth-class citizenship of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans, it has now come to light that your Justice Department has filed a legal brief that compares gay relationships to incest in a federal court case. Fifteen million Americans, myself included, are absolutely beside ourselves that you would so callously stab us in the back after we worked so hard last year to get your craven ass into office. I, for one, now regret my vote for you; at least I would have known where I stood with John McCain in the White House.

You and all the other spineless Democrat pieces of shit in Washington have until next November’s mid-term elections to fully open the military to service by GLBT Americans, add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and pass a law protecting us against the domestic terrorism that is hate crimes, or I will be personally seeing to it that my entire Democrat-leaning family stays home. This also applies to 2012, if you think you’re getting a second term.

Speaking of second terms, let’s review a little presidential history. The last time we elected a young, charismatic Democrat who made promises about civil rights during the campaign and then dilly-dallied on them once in office, who criticized those seeking their God-given rights as a distraction from “more important” problems in the world, he never made it to a second term. He was killed 34 months into his first term by an assassin who, by all contemporary accounts, was isolated and marginalized in his childhood just as many GLBT youth are by their own parents today. In case you don’t remember those two names, Barack, they were John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Face it, Barack, you’re already one of the most threatened presidents in recent memory. The rabid Reich-wing white supremacist movement wants you dead for no reason other than the color of your skin, and I sure as fuck hope you’re not under the illusion that they’re looking for any shot they can get. You would be a fool to be not taking the threat very seriously, in light of the Reich wing’s recent murders of Dr. George Tiller and the security guard at the Holocaust Museum. Given the threat you face, and the possibly quite prescient JFK parallel, why in fuck’s name are you putting political considerations above my civil rights?

Maybe it’s not political expediency; maybe you do just hate us as much as the Christofascists. If this is the case, I am so livid that I say the following: Fuck off, die, and join Jerry Falwell in the depths of Hell, you disgusting bigot.

You find that a little harsh, Barack? Well, after what your administration’s legal brief had to say about me and fifteen million other GLBT Americans, I’d say we’re about even.

Another month has gone by without an update here. At least it’s spring here now, so I don’t have to bitch about how much winter fucking sucks around here any more — well, at least until December. That said, it has been a pretty shitty April here, but that’s relative; I’ll take a shitty April over a shitty January any day.

A couple hours ago, while making dinner, I had another one of those moments where the light bulb really comes on, so to speak. In past weeks, as the legislature in Vermont and the Iowa Supreme Court have come to see the unconstitutionality and un-American-ness of denying the civil and legal rights of marriage to same-sex couples, and taken action to rectify that injustice, so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” have greatly ramped up their efforts to slander and dehumanize God’s beloved gay and lesbian children. Central to these efforts has been the continued pushing of the lie that homosexuality is a “lifestyle” which is “chosen,” as seen in their use of talking points like “volitional homosexual conduct.”

I suppose the argument could be made that there are two different views about what exactly defines human sexuality and sexual orientation. I admit that the phrasing I am about to use is a bit crude, but it is extremely succinct and really drives the point home. The question we face here is, is sexual orientation defined by what you are, or who you do?

I offer the following challenge to my single straight male readership that will prove my point. (I would prefer that married men not take me up on this, as, contrary to what “Christians” would tell you, I actually do value marital vows.) I challenge you to dump your girlfriend for, let’s say, two months, and make an attempt at pursuing a same-sex romantic relationship. I further challenge you to have sex with a man at least once, and preferably on a regular basis, during this time period. Now think about it, at the end of those 60 days, what will you be: gay or straight?

If you actually are straight, you’re going to struggle to feel any real sexual attraction to men during those two months, if not find it completely impossible. Your attraction to women isn’t going to go anywhere, and will be just as strong and vibrant as it always was at the end of the 60 days. You might come to find out that many gay men can do a better job of physically pleasuring you, simply because they have the same “equipment” you do and know what works for them, but you’re not actually going to feel attracted to them. You know as well as I do, when you think about it, that this is true.

Yet, so-called “Christians” would go on non-stop about how you had “fallen victim to the ‘homosexual agenda’” or some such claptrap. In their view, you have essentially become gay for those two months, your actual feelings and attractions notwithstanding. They would no doubt parade you around as a so-called “ex-gay” at the end of those two months, and use you as a cudgel with which to bash gays. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that you never were gay during those 60 days. You know that straight is “what you are,” not just “who you do” before and after my 60-day challenge.

It becomes clear, with any sort of real analysis, that the “what you are” view of sexual orientation is based in truth, and the “who you do” view held by so-called “Christians” is based in bigotry and hatred. It is even more shocking, then, when these same so-called “Christians” attempt to deflect this perfectly valid calling-out of their bullshit by projecting their intolerance and hatred onto pro-gay groups!

As many of you may already know, the annual Day of Silence was held in thousands of schools all across America last week. So-called “Christians” came out with their same old tired and predictably false rhetoric about how the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is “indoctrinating children into a ‘homosexual lifestyle’” through the Day of Silence. One of the accusations made by “Christians” is that GLSEN is somehow seeking to convince young people that even one same-sex thought makes them totally, permanently, and irretrievably gay. Tell me, doesn’t that sound like a “who you do” view of human sexuality — the totally incorrect view that I have already proven is held not by gays, but instead by so-called “Christians”? Does that furthermore not sound like projection on the part of so-called “Christians”?

I suppose that when you think about it, all of the anti-gay bigotry exhibited by so-called “Christians” makes sense in light of their illogical “who you do” view of sexual orientation. I don’t think that anybody would argue that who you do is a choice — I mean, if I really wanted to, I could screw women left and right. Who I do doesn’t prove anything to anybody who operates under the rules of logic, but in the parallel universe of so-called “Christians,” it somehow “proves” that I’m “choosing” to be gay.

From there, it’s no huge leap to call the innate trait of homosexuality a mere “lifestyle,” and once convinced that it’s merely a “lifestyle choice” instead of the 24/7/365 state of being it actually is, it’s quite easy to believe that we should be denied more than 1,500 legal and civil rights in America — and quite frankly, any claim to equal humanity and dignity. Truly, this “who you do” view of human sexuality is at the root of all the evil perpetrated by so-called “Christians” upon gays.

In our dealings with people, we must always make it clear that being gay or lesbian is what you are, not merely something you do. We are gay and lesbian all the time, not just when we’re going to Pride, having a couple drinks at the bars, or having sex. Perhaps the so-called “Christians” can never be reached — they do, after all, have the tendency to stick their fingers in their ears when confronted with facts that shatter their pastors’ talking points — but if we work hard enough at propagating the truth that human sexuality is defined by what you are, we will eventually render the “Christian” “who you do” view the belief of a tiny minority.

All right, I’m off to bed. Three more nights of work lie ahead of me, before I go across the state to Grand Rapids this weekend for history’s first ever all-gay road enthusiast meet. Stay tuned to my Flickr site for some pictures from that.

I return here tonight, some 61 days after my last update, simply because I don’t have the energy to do much else. Like I explained in my last update, I’ve been feeling very “meh” about keeping this blog up, but since I don’t feel like heading out to wash my rather filthy car tonight (I think I’ll save that for Saturday), here’s another entry.

I let the tenth anniversary of this section of my site pass by, on March 1, without an update or any fanfare. It’s pretty amazing how long I’ve been at this, more than a third of my life at this point; of course, I did disappear for over two years between November 2001 and late January 2004, and haven’t been heard from much in about the last year or so. I guess in a way, you can say that this section of my site has come full circle: the Michigan basketball team has gone from really sucky in my third post, to being in the NCAA Tournament field of 65 in this, my 494th post.

Despite having lost a great deal of the motivation for keeping this blog updated, I haven’t lost the propensity to take on controversial topics here. I intend to do that in two ways before I hit the sack tonight: first, I will expound upon a statement I made here on January 22, 2008 regarding an annoying behavioral tendency of so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’,” and second, I’ll say what I feel is being left unsaid about an alleged abduction and Amber Alert situation currently in the news here in metro Detroit.

You may recall that the aforementioned January 22, 2008 entry was essentially my response to a Kansas City-area woman named Brenda, who typed a bunch of Christofascist talking points and propaganda about homosexuality into my e-mail form and sent it my way. She came up with the idea that I needed to “truly meet a true christian person” [sic], and that the said “true christian person” needed to offer me “love and guidence” [sic] because I’m apparently “confused and scared.” You may also recall that I pointed out the following:

What this statement of “confusion,” and a later repeated use of it, represents is an attempt to belittle GLBT people as mental children, essentially. This is a manifestation of the “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” tendency to view everybody else as mental two-year-olds who they can scare like older siblings always try to do …

I promised to explain that further at a later date, but 14 months have since passed — until now. I can explain this behavioral tendency quite well, because as you probably know, I myself am an older sibling — some four years and eight months closer to gray hair and the nursing home than my sister — and I will admit that as a child, I was a textbook example of that kind of behavior.

The birth of a younger sibling is an event that can be quite traumatic for a previously only child, particularly if he/she is between roughly 3 and 7 (i.e., old enough to sense a change in his/her parents’ emotional attachment patterns, but still young enough where logic hasn’t developed enough to overcome the natural tendency toward self-centeredness). The parents quite naturally have to spend much of their time catering to the needs of the far more helpless newborn, and it can leave the older child bewildered, wondering what he/she could possibly have done to merit being forgotten by the very people he/she used to be able to depend on. (I know, I’m over-dramatizing it, but you know as well as I do that kids that age have a real flair for the dramatic.) The child often feels that there has been a massive power shift away from him/her, and toward his/her new sibling, because of all the attention the newborn requires.

One coping mechanism the older child tends to develop — and again, I was a textbook example here from maybe ages 5 to 9 — is to try to act as a sort of “third parent.” That is to say, by acting in a way that he/she believes will reinforce the parents’ discipline of the younger sibling, he/she thinks the parents will respond positively and that a power shift back toward him/her will result. Naturally, the parents and any outside observer see this as extremely pedantic, immature behavior, and it doesn’t lead to the kind of power shift the older sibling desires, to say the least.

Put so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” in the position of the older sibling, and any of their favorite attack targets — gays, sexually active single women, and non-religious people, to name just three of many — in the position of the younger sibling, and you kinda get the idea of where I’m going here. They think that by constantly quoting two hand-picked verses in Leviticus, they’re somehow currying favor with God (the parent in this analogy); but just as parents don’t care for the “help” offered by their older child, God doesn’t appreciate the pedantic, annoying six-year-old behavior of so-called “Christians” on their pet topics.

Just as the six-year-old tends to try to scare his younger sibling with threats along the lines of “just wait until Dad gets home!”, so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” seem to think they can scare us with threats and carefully selected Bible verses. The thing is, most of us aren’t the mental two-year-olds “Christians” would like to believe we are; we are able to think for ourselves, and we don’t appreciate fundamentalists’ constant efforts to belittle and dehumanize us. Ultimately, it is their behavior that destroys Christianity by turning everybody else off to it — not legalized abortion, or same-sex marriage, or any of the other canards they put out there.

Metro Detroit readers of this blog have probably been hearing all week about the Amber Alert issued for 15-year-old Justin Wainwright of Northville, MI, who was last seen Monday in Ohio and is believed to be in the company of 18-year-old Joshua Zohr. The media have reported the case as an abduction of Justin by Joshua, and have said that it is possible Justin is in “extreme danger,” but something doesn’t quite add up to me.

Typically, abductions fall into two categories: a non-custodial, though usually biological, parent essentially flipping the bird to family court and running off with a child, or a spurned lover, almost always male, kidnapping an almost always female partner as a form of abuse. It doesn’t exactly make sense that a 5’8”, 125-pound (173 cm, 57 kg) 18-year-old (Joshua’s reported height and weight) could drag a slightly larger 15-year-old, kicking and screaming, by force; usually, when teenage or older males are abducted, a group of abductors are working together, and the motive is usually ransom.

Here’s an entirely plausible scenario that the Wainwrights and/or Zohrs perhaps don’t want to admit: their sons are lovers and have agreed to run away together. The Wainwrights are known, through local media reports, to be the owners of a Novi, MI “fun park” (therefore, probably well-off) and to have sent Justin to Father Gabriel Richard High School in Ann Arbor (therefore, likely Catholic); so it wouldn’t be a terribly huge stretch of logic to assume they hold extremely conservative, anti-gay views, and that Justin felt the need to get away from that.

I’m not saying that this is beyond a shadow of a doubt what has happened here, but that it is a plausible idea that ought not be summarily ignored. The two families are claiming to have been gag-ordered by the police, and the cops aren’t saying a whole hell of a lot either, so all we have to go on at this point is speculation. Let us all hope Justin and Joshua do return safely to Michigan, whatever their motive for taking off might have been.

Well, it’s time for me to hit the sack. One more day of work, pulling a 12,000-gallon (45,425 L) bomb strapped to my back, and then it’s my weekend.

Well well, here I am to resurrect this “blog” section of the site from the dead after eight months. My last update, for those who have lost track, was made last May 26, and I have not been heard from here since. There are a few reasons for this, about which I will now go into further detail.

First and foremost, I have often times found myself lacking the time or energy after a long night of work to spend much of the night writing something. I have always had a bit of a tendency to go on at length in these entries, and the job I have been holding for a year and a half (as of next week) doesn’t really permit me to do that in the manner I used to like. I suppose I could spread out the composition of longer entries over multiple nights, but my tendency toward a short attention span would kill that plan in short order. Hence, I just haven’t bothered to write here in eight months.

Second, as those of you who have continued to follow this site have noticed, I have been active in other areas around here. My Flickr account was first opened last May 24, a week after I bought a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, and is up to nearly 400 pictures now, most of which have been shot since last May. I think buying that camera caused something of a shift in my creative focus, from the written form to the photographic art — I just haven’t felt any “mojo” to write much of anything, but have been busy behind the camera.

Third, I don’t know that I’ve had as much “red meat” in terms of topics to write about in the last eight months. Yes, there was the huge fight in California over the exceedingly unconstitutional Proposition 8, with upwards of $30 million of “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” and Mormon money which could have gone to poor or hungry or homeless people diverted to bashing gays, but I felt that the news coming out of that campaign could pretty well speak for itself. Also, I sort of have a feeling that I’ve already once said most everything there is to say about so-called “Christians” and their unceasing lies about GLBT folk, having covered their semi-solid male bovine excrement for years. I may yet come up with more inspiration to reveal their blatant falsehoods, but I think that well kinda ran dry for a while.

I tell you, I keep trying to tell myself ‘I like Michigan, I really do,’ but the weather this last week is starting to make me agree with asshole University of Illinois students and their “MUCK FICHIGAN” T-shirts seen anytime Big Blue faces the Illini in sports. As you can see, it’s barely in the single digits this morning, and this comes after I personally measured –13°F (–25°C) at sunrise yesterday morning. (Official weather stations nearby had it even lower, at –15°F or –26°C.) The temperatures came on the heels of a week which has seen over a foot (30 cm) of snow fall in several phases, the bulk of it last Saturday, and are being ushered out by a storm bringing us another 3” (8 cm) later today. I’m really hearing the Pacific Northwest calling my name louder than ever now — it’s getting likelier and likelier every Michigan winter that I’m going to pull the trigger on that someday. Now, UW football is another matter entirely …

Speaking of which, in closing, I’m just going to say that since I stopped giving a shit about the Detroit Lions years ago, I don’t care about 0-16. In fact, when a sports-fanatic co-worker recently asked me who I thought the Lions would hire as a coach, I told her, “who cares? They’ll still suck.”

Finally, after a month of May that has been consistently ten degrees (or about 6°C) below normal, we are beginning to see warmer temperatures here in southeast Michigan. We’re not by any means done with the cold, as tomorrow night’s low (technically in the wee hours of Wednesday morning) is forecast to be below 40°F (4°C) with frost possible a bit north of here. That is definitely not normal late-May weather in these parts.

In my last update, I said that I was going to write an update about how progressives need to start doing a much better job of taking their message to the grass-roots level. This post has been inspired by a billboard that I pass semi-regularly while working; it is located along eastbound Interstate 94 near milepost 154 here in Michigan, just barely west of the Jackson/Washtenaw county line, between the towns of Grass Lake and Chelsea. A Jackson-based anti-reproductive-freedom outfit rented the sign a couple months ago, and has posted the following unsubstantiated lie: “What if you’re wrong? 90% of women who had abortions say they were wrong!”

Beyond pointing out that this 90% claim is based on a pseudo-scientific, non-representative sample — that is, maybe 90% of post-abortive women into whom the Christofascists manage to get their claws will say under torture that they were wrong — I’m really not even going to address the claim. Instead, I intend to hold it up as a perfect example of how conservatives and Christofascists do a far better job of getting their Satan-filled message out to their grass roots. If progressives ever hope to actually influence the direction of this country, beyond maybe winning an election or two when people get tired of the Rethuglicans, this is a lesson that must be learned quickly and well.

Take a drive anywhere on the Interstates in rural, conservative America, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Interstate 70 in Missouri sticks out in my mind as a great example: every third billboard is some kind of Christofascist anti-choice propaganda, especially in the more rural parts of the route. Turn on your radio while you take the said rural drive, and particularly east of the Rockies, I would challenge you to find a station that isn’t one of (a) country music, (b) conservative political talk, or (c) Christofascist propaganda — believe me, it’s not easy to do. If you’re lucky, you might even see conservative and/or Christofascist operatives committing crimes against property, such as they did in Indianapolis a year ago to billboards rented by a gay-affirming church.

What do progressives, liberals, and Democrats do? They give speeches and press conferences, and then they figure that the media will take care of getting their message out for them. This worked in days past, perhaps, but one must bear in mind the three-decade Rethuglican campaign to push the myth of a so-called “liberal media” in revenge for the resignation of Richard Nixon. That, combined with a virtual media ownership monopoly by large multi-national corporations, has given the media a solidly conservative, pro-Christofascist, pro-Rethuglican bent — yet the Democrats continue in this utterly self-defeating strategy.

This must change. We must start getting our message out to the grass roots of America, in ways that are just as ruthless and shocking as those used by the Reich wing. In order to promote reproductive freedom, I would recommend billboards that show a silhouette of a woman with a coat hanger in one hand and a pool of blood between her legs. Hell, for that matter, use a real image of that — it’s not as if Christofascists have any compunctions about using real images of fetuses. It would also work wonders to deface and/or vandalize Christofascist billboards; for example, “LIES LIES LIES” on that billboard on I-94 would get the message across nicely.

On that note, I would recommend that we focus our efforts on billboards that are high off the ground and difficult for those not in the sign industry to reach. That way, we do two things: (1) we prevent vandalism of billboards containing our message, and (2) we force Christofascists and conservatives to rent the boards that are lower to the ground, where we can much more easily correct their untruths.

Mind you, I don’t intend that this be a one-medium PR campaign confined to billboards on freeways. We can make far more effective use of print and broadcast media, such as newspapers and television, than we are doing right now. In fact, on the topic of gay equality in America, I have sort of half-formulated scripts for a series of TV ads that can be run by our advocacy organizations, and I have the crazy idea to spend $6 million to run the first of the series at halftime of the Super Bowl — which is exactly when those who most need to see that message will be exposed to it. That would also be perfect timing in the year, because the Daytona 500 is two weeks later — believe you me, the NASCAR crowd really needs to hear the message that we’re here, we’re an integral, necessary part of society, and we’re tired of third-class citizenship. I might begin to detail those scripts this morning if I had more than 25 minutes left before heading to bed, but that will have to wait for another time.

I also promised I would say more about the recent California Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the Golden State. Again, time is short right now, but I did want to mention one thing that struck me about the dissenting opinions. Running all through the dissents was a visible undercurrent of Christofascist talking points: things like “millenia-old tradition,” “re-defining marriage,” “activist judges,” and so forth. What the three dissenting judges are implicitly admitting is that the only case against marriage equality is an explicitly Christofascist one — in other words, a constitutionally invalid one, given the First Amendment’s prohibition of laws respecting an establishment of religion.

OK, I have to be off to bed. Enjoy all your Memorial Day barbecues today, while I get to work hauling fuel around.

Some of you may have been wondering if I had gone to the great fuel-driver paradise in the sky, or if so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” thugs had murdered me for my exposé on Peter LaBarbera in my last update some 53 days ago. Those are all nasty rumors, I assure you, and I remain as alive and well as ever. There’s way too much to try to catch up with in one update, but I’ll do my best, in addition to doing yet another exposition of “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” hypocrisy.

On April 13, I started a new shift at work. It’s actually the same time of day as it has been since I started there last July, from 4:00 pm until whatever time I finish the assigned work, but now I work on different days of the week. Rather than my old Wednesday through Sunday shift, with Monday and Tuesday off, I now work Sundays through Thursdays with Friday and Saturday off. This would be great for a social life, if (a) I had the time between all the other shit to do on the weekend and (b) I much gave a shit about pursuing it. This change in shifts occurred because we added a second truck to our operation, and hired two new drivers to fill new shifts that were created with the addition of the new truck.

As I alluded to in the last paragraph, even my weekends have been insane for quite some time now. The first weekend immediately after my change of work days, April 18-19, was mostly lost with my car in a body shop, as some asshole had apparently pushed a shopping cart into my right rear door and dented it pretty good. Fortunately, the $250 cost to repair it seemed pretty reasonable, and more importantly didn’t even match my insurance deductible, so I won’t get my premium jacked up.

My weekend activities since then have included a visit to my 94-year-old grandmother in her nursing facility in Howell, MI, and poker at my friend Jay’s apartment, in the last weekend of April; an oil change on my car two weekends ago; all kinds of family shit last weekend for Mother’s Day and a cousin’s college graduation; and the replacement of my Gateway laptop two days ago with a new HP Media Center desktop. The laptop nearly died on me earlier this week, and has ever since been behaving about like Dick Clark right after his 2004 stroke, so I was worried about its continued health.

Frankly, I only bought the computer because of a deal offered by Circuit City this past week. They were offering 12-month no-payment, no-interest financing on the purchase of any digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera over $499, but it was something in the fine print of that offer on their web site that caught my eye: any other item in a purchase containing a qualifying item (in my case, the DSLR) would also qualify for the same promotional financing. I had been considering a DSLR as a long-range purchase, perhaps late this year or in 2009 after I had other debt paid off, but when I saw that I could do both a DSLR and a computer and not pay a dime for a year, I couldn’t pass it up. Without the deal, I probably would have had to string the laptop along until about September, hoping it wouldn’t completely die in the interim.

The insanity of my weekends will not go away for at least another few weeks. Even though I’ve asked for next Sunday off from work, thus giving me a three-day weekend, I will still have to go under the car again to rotate the tires, renew my apartment lease, and head to a family barbecue planned for next Sunday. The weekend after that will essentially only be one day, as the Friday (May 30) will be lost to a company safety meeting I have to attend in Findlay, OH. Two weeks after that, I’m playing around with the idea of a Chicago trip, as another “national” road enthusiast meet is being planned for that weekend. Perhaps by July, I might actually get to sleep in on a Friday afternoon/evening.

Although I know I’m easily a month behind the times, perhaps two by now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the whole controversy surrounding Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Naturally, conservative Reich-wingers have seized on one sentence out of a much longer and more complex sermon Wright delivered to his Trinity United Church of Christ congregation, while completely ignoring the greater point Wright was making. In fact, any correct analysis of the sermon proves Reich-wingers and so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” to be lying hypocrites, for the 37,236,834th time.

See, so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” like to pretend that they’re not Christ-despising bigots by invoking the catch phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” whenever they speak on the topic of homosexuality. Those of us with functioning brains have long realized that “love the sinner, hate the sin” is really code for “hate the sinner and do anything possible to deny him dignity and full membership in the human race, all the while putting on a ‘loving’ public face about it” — and now we have proof of that, in the form of the conservative “fundamentalist” response to Wright.

Read the Wikipedia entry on Rev. Wright, and you can clearly see a man who loves his country, but doesn’t care for some of things it has done and is doing. No man would serve six years in the Navy, and in fact participate in a surgical procedure on the President as Wright did for Lyndon Johnson in 1966, if he didn’t have the deepest patriotic love for his country. The part of the sermon that the Reich-wing conservative media won’t ever air — since airing that part doesn’t make Obama out to be a Manchurian candidate, and FAUX “News” can’t countenance your not believing he’s some secret Muslim out to hand us all over to al-Qaeda — listed a long litany of un-acknowledged American government crimes against non-white peoples, from the forced relocation of Native Americans and the Japanese internment of World War II to the Tuskegee experiments and the non-response to Hurricane Katrina. Clearly, Wright’s attitude is one of somebody who loves America, but hates the anti-Christian things it does, and wants it to be a better place for everybody.

Oh, but he can’t do that, to hear the usual Reich-wing suspects tell it. According to the likes of OxyContin-popper Rush Limbaugh, a certain huge-Adam’s-apple-bearer and attention whore who won’t be named here, and Sean Insannity, Wright is “anti-white,” “anti-American,” and “a traitorous, racist nutjob.” Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but that isn’t stopping the Reich-wingers and the masses of mindless drones from parroting the belief that Wright “hates the sinner” and is incapable of “loving the sinner and hating the sin.”

Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and I’m glad to finally see Reich-wingers and conservative “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” admitting that it isn’t possible to “love the sinner and hate the sin” — that it invariably ends up turning into the un-Christian position of hating the sinner too. Certainly they will now renounce their anti-gay views and positions and start pressing for full equality and first-class citizenship for their gay and lesbian brethren in the human race, right? I guess those 27 state constitutional bigotry amendments will soon be repealed, huh?

Nope, didn’t think so. So-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” are reprobate, inveterate liars and hypocrites, and in their warped world view, it’s better to stay on the path to hell that Jesus warned them about in Matthew chapter 23 than to admit they were wrong and start displaying unconditional, absolute affirming love to GLBT folk. If they actually had God within ten thousand miles of their hardened hearts, so-called “Christians” would, among other things, immediately drop their petition drive to add bigotry to the California Constitution and join in our revelry and joy over the California Supreme Court’s judicially and constitutionally correct decision on same-sex marriage — but of course, we know better, as it isn’t that hard to see Satan at work in their hearts and minds.

(Aside: I have reviewed about half of the text of the decision, and will have more to say about it in the future. So far, though, I can say that finally, a court has properly applied precedent and commonly accepted jurisprudence as outlined in my July 27, 2006 entry in this space.)

In fact, a look at the Gospels shows us that Jesus Himself condemned the “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude held by “fundamentalists.” In Luke 6:37, He warned us not to judge or condemn others, lest we be judged or condemned; later in that same Gospel, in chapter 20, verse 25, He reminds us that God’s judgment should be left to God rather than any earthly authority. The true Christian attitude, therefore, is something more like this: love the sinner and shut the fuck up about the sin — especially when, using correct Biblical scholarship, the Biblical evidence that it actually is a sin is flimsy at best.

I had better be off for tonight, but I’ll be back, hopefully in less than 53 days next time. I have at least two more update ideas in the pipeline, one of them being about how progressives need to do a better job of taking their message to the grass roots. To quote Keith Olbermann quoting Edward R. Murrow, “Good night, and good luck.”

In my last update, I promised a major exposé about so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christianity’,” and I’ve returned here with the goods. So-called “Christians” who make it their life’s work to hate God’s dearly beloved gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) children, often complain of poverty and troll for donations by invoking the boogeyman of a supposed “well-funded ‘homosexual agenda’.” However, as this exposé of one such prominent figure will prove, it is actually the “Christians” who are flush with cash, and they would really rather you didn’t know where that money went. So without further ado, let’s delve into the truth.

Loyal readers of this site will no doubt recall the name of Peter LaBarbera, the head of what amounts to his own cult of personality called Americans for “Truth”; I have mentioned him here on numerous occasions before. In fact, I thoroughly destroyed one of his favorite Satan-inspired talking points — a notion that GLBT folk somehow “hate God” — in this space last May. Well, he’s back at it again, having repeated the same charge without any corroboration on his blog last Tuesday. (Remember, then as now, I refuse to link to the figments of his imagination.) Since LaBarbera sees no problem with continuing to violate God’s Eighth Commandment by lying about gay folk, it’s time to tell the truth about him.

As Jesus told us in Matthew 19:24, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Apparently, Peter LaBarbera didn’t have that in mind when he chose to move his family to the wealthiest city of over 90,000 people in America and buy a $340,000 home in the fall of 2003. He made a down payment of $68,000, the money apparently coming from the sale of the LaBarberas’ previous home in Woodbridge, VA, and mortgaged the other $272,000 through Professional Mortgage Partners, Inc. of nearby Downers Grove, IL. That mortgage, and a home equity line of credit (HELOC) taken out January 23, 2004 in the amount of $32,000, would be combined and refinanced as a 30-year, $300,000 mortgage in March 2005. Not even nine months later, on December 6, 2005, LaBarbera and his wife Cristina took out yet another HELOC, this time for $50,000, from JPMorgan Chase Bank.

That’s $350,000 worth of debt, for those doing the math along with me. I’m not as familiar with HELOC terms as mortgage terms, so I’ll stick to evaluating the LaBarberas’ $300,000 mortgage. Let’s give Peter and Cristina LaBarbera the benefit of the doubt and assume they had, at worst, average credit when they took that mortgage; in 2005 with average credit, this would probably mean they got an interest rate of around 5¼% or thereabouts. A simple mathematical formula, available on any finance web site, yields a monthly payment of $1,656.61 for that set of terms ($300K financed, 30 years, 5¼% interest). Different interest rates would change the payment slightly; for example, at 6%, the payment would be around $1,800 per month.

But wait, that’s not all. Most mortgages that I’m familiar with require the homeowner to pay one-twelfth of the annual property tax bill each month, with those funds held in escrow by the mortgage company until the property taxes actually come due. DuPage County records show that the LaBarberas paid $6,629.58 in property taxes for the year 2006, or if split into 12 equal monthly payments, $552.47 per month. Whether Professional Mortgage Partners requires LaBarbera’s property taxes to be held in escrow or not, the money is finding its way from LaBarbera to DuPage County one way or the other, so it can be figured as a monthly housing cost.

Adding just these two things together — and remember, I’m not even getting into the cost of servicing that $50,000 HELOC — Peter and Cristina LaBarbera are paying $2,209.08 per month for their four-bedroom, 2½-bath, 2182-square-foot (202.7 m²) home and 12,320-square-foot (0.28 acres, 1,145 m²) lot. (They do have five children, so having four bedrooms isn’t entirely unreasonable; but I might suggest the use of this wonderful little invention called the condom in the future, as every additional child is a further drain on the finances.) If the HELOC terms are anything like the mortgage terms, it costs close to another $300 per month to service that debt, so when push comes to shove, the LaBarberas are probably out $2,500 per month for housing.

Let’s again give the benefit of the doubt and assume reasonable borrowing practices on the LaBarberas’ part, including observance of the so-called 28% rule. The 28% rule suggests that one’s housing costs should not exceed 28% of one’s net income. If this is the case, Peter LaBarbera’s net income is nearly $9,000 per month, or $108,000 per year. This is truly amazing, especially when he freely admits that slandering and smearing gays on a web site is his full-time job! (Look in the second paragraph after the list of gay advocacy organizations.)

(Just to give a little perspective, that figure represents double my gross income, and probably 275% of my net income. His Fraudulency King Chimpy the 43rd, Der Führer of the 43rd Reich, steals damn near a third of what I make to carry on his illegal occupation of Iraq’s oil wells. Since LaBarbera’s outfit Americans for “Truth” is registered as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, he keeps every penny of that estimated $108,000 per annum and therefore doesn’t contribute a dime to support our troops. Those with real jobs have to gross in the vicinity of $160,000 in order to net $108,000; we’re talking doctor and lawyer salary territory here.)

Peter LaBarbera and the majority of other so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” anti-gay types out there frequently insist that they don’t make nearly as much as employees of gay organizations, but LaBarbera’s public records prove that this is a lie — in fact, it shows that un-Christian, anti-gay hatred is really quite a lucrative business! Like Jim Bakker before him, LaBarbera is clearly using the “donations” for which he practically begs on his blog in order to carry on a lavish lifestyle for his family. My grandparents, who had a similar family situation with seven children, found ways to scrimp and save through three decades’ worth of child-rearing, and never lived pretentiously, often eschewing some modern conveniences — so if they could do it, so can the LaBarberas.

The fact that the LaBarberas chose Naperville, already mentioned as America’s wealthiest city, as their home is no accident — it shows that they put mammon before God. Since Jesus said in Matthew 6:24 that only one of those can be served, it becomes clear that Peter LaBarbera is not serving God. (We already knew that, of course, but now we have yet more proof.) But in any event, you can’t tell me the LaBarberas couldn’t have found a four-bedroom home for much less than $340,000 elsewhere in DuPage County, or in Chicago, or ferchrissakes even here in metro Detroit — they can be found here for not much over $200,000!

You also can’t tell me that Peter and Cristina LaBarbera couldn’t have stopped having children long before they got to five. Yes, children are wonderful, I understand, but from a purely financial standpoint, as I said, each additional one is another hit in the checkbook. I don’t know the half of how my grandparents pulled it off with seven kids, and I probably never will know. My parents undoubtedly gave my sister and me far more advantages in life, and spared themselves a ton of potential money headaches, by limiting themselves to two kids.

Ordinarily, most people would agree that buying a house beyond one’s means and/or having more children than one can really afford financially are just dumb decisions. Begging other people to help you out of the mess you created is childish (in that it shows an unwillingness to buck up and take responsibility) and slothful, on top of dumb. Slandering and defaming gay people on a web site in order to “earn” those “donations” from others — that is utterly beyond reprehensible. In fact, it not only borders on evil, it is evil.

Next time Peter LaBarbera goes trolling for “donations” on his blog, true Christians everywhere should tell him to ditch the house in Naperville and lose the luxurious lifestyle. He wouldn’t need a penny of other people’s money if he would only go out and get a real job. Then again, that political science degree he earned from the University of Michigan (excuse me while I go puke in response to that son of Satan’s pollution of my alumni pool) is pretty much worthless in the real world, as poli sci degrees tend to be, and besides, it’s just easier and more lucrative to sit at a computer and cyber-gay-bash all day. Beats working a real job and living a more middle-class lifestyle in Mundelein or Tinley Park, doesn’t it?

(Aside: Ann Coulter also graduated from U-M in the 1980s. What the fuck was in the water in Ann Arbor back then?)

I should give a bit more explanation as to how I found out all of this information. LaBarbera’s home address (which I am not divulging, for reasons I will discuss shortly) was discovered in a database of 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, and subsequently posted to a blog I frequent, about a year ago. I took note of it at that point in time, and starting last week, searched for it on public record sites. Most everything I found was publicly accessible on the web sites of the various local governments, including Naperville Township, the City of Naperville, and the DuPage County Recorder’s office. I have downloaded .PDF copies of the original mortgage documents that are on file in DuPage County’s offices in Wheaton, and can produce them with LaBarbera’s address redacted by me if anyone asks.

My purpose in doing this is not to bring upon, nor cause to be brought upon Peter LaBarbera or his family or property, any physical harm or threat thereof. That would be violating what I believe is a logical extension of God’s Sixth Commandment, “thou shalt not kill.” The aforementioned blog on which LaBarbera’s address appeared last year saw at least one death threat aimed at him in the comments, and I’m just not even going to go there. Instead, it is Peter LaBarbera’s reputation, and hopefully his cash flow and ultimately the continued existence of the gay-bashing blog that the said cash flow permits, that I am intent on damaging here. That is why I am not sharing his address with my readers — Peter LaBarbera deserves to have some assurance of protection against physical assault, even if he thinks that we GLBT folk aren’t worthy of the hate-crimes protections that would give us similar levels of assurance.

(It has also occurred to me that withholding his address here at this time can serve as a little bit of a hedge against LaBarbera or other so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” finding and posting my personal (i.e., non-public) information. I’m sure I have a few public records relating to my 2004 bankruptcy proceeding and a few traffic and parking citations, but the vast majority of that is already somewhere in the history of this section of my site, and wouldn’t exactly be “news” if reported by someone else. However, if LaBarbera or any other “Christian” individual or group pulls a Michelle Malkin on me — with the final discretion as to what constitutes private personal information belonging to me alone — I would then have no reservations whatsoever about sharing LaBarbera’s address with the world. Consider yourselves warned.)

Peter LaBarbera may claim to be for “truth,” as the disingenuous name of his web site would suggest. However, in doing this research, I have come to find out that there is a lot of truth that he would really rather you didn’t know. For ages, I’ve been making this clear as it relates to LaBarbera’s slanders and mischaracterizations of God’s dearly beloved GLBT children — the truth is that the vast majority of us are normal, moral, healthy, upstanding citizens, but if you listened to LaBarbera, you would think we were all diseased sexbots out to recruit “Christian” children or something. Now, by using information that anybody can access, I’ve shown the truth about Peter LaBarbera himself.

Count me as an American for truth — the real truth, not the lies of Peter LaBarbera and so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’.”

Somehow, I think that the Bible and all the old classic movies about the life of Jesus got it all wrong. The Gospels of Mark and Luke tell us that darkness fell over the whole land from the sixth hour to the ninth hour on Good Friday, and those wonderful 1950s film epics (case in point: Ben-Hur) often depict violent thunderstorms and rain during Jesus’ crucifixion. Nobody anywhere seems to have said anything about 8” (20 cm) of snow on Good Friday.

Thankfully, that has just come to an end here in much of southeast Michigan within the last hour or so. I spent almost two hours stuck in various places with the truck this past night, and used nearly 100 lbs. (45 kg) of salt extricating myself from those jams. Even two loads, rather than the usual three, still took me 10 hours — when I can usually get three done in somewhere between 10 and 11 hours in good weather.

This being a night in the middle of my work week, I really don’t have a ton of time to write here. However, I did want to make it known that I am collecting facts and working on a major exposé about a well-known figure in the world of “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” anti-gay bigotry. Suffice it to say for now that this exposé, when published, will forever put to rest the “fundamentalist” canard about a supposed “well-funded homosexual lobby.” I will show what kind of money these so-called “Christians” are really raking in from the donations they solicit on the pretense of “combatting the ‘homosexual agenda’,” and where those donations are going.

Until then, my friends, try to stay clear of the heavy snow here in Michigan, the flooding in the lower Midwest and Mississippi Valley, and the nasty high winds about to hit the Pacific Northwest … ah fuck it. Just go some place nice like Hawaii.

Another week, another entry — that’s about how it seems to go around here. At least the weather isn’t going to fucking suck this week, like it has continuously since about the middle of February.

I figured I wanted to make a short entry in which I define a useful new term. You have no doubt heard some so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” churches, individuals, and groups referring to themselves as “Bible-believing ‘Christians’” before, particularly in the context of the wars they have declared on scientific truth, sexuality, and numerous other topics. This use of “Bible-believing” is actually a code word for “fundamentalists,” intended to differentiate “fundamentalists” from those Christians who actually strive to emulate Christ’s example. That is to say, in the “fundamentalist” Borg, Christians who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick, instead of picketing abortion clinics and gay pride parades, are not “Bible-believing.”

(Of course, the truth is that those who put their best effort into following Christ’s example are showing their belief in the most important part of the Bible — the Gospels. It seems that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are absent from the “fundamentalist” Bible, though, as the latter only contains Leviticus, the Pauline epistles, and Revelation, so maybe that’s why “fundamentalists” would accuse even Mother Teresa of having been not “Bible-believing.”)

Turnabout is fair play, and I am going to create a term that differentiates true Christians — those who actually try to live by Jesus’ example in the Gospels — from “fundamentalists” and other conservative “Christians.” Those who actually try to do good for others are Gospel-following Christians, to coin my term. Gospel-following Christians accept their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender fellow children of God, and display unconditional, non-judgmental love to them and all people in the human race. Gospel-following Christians realize that the path to heaven passes through volunteer sessions at soup kitchens, serving hungry people, and not through picketing Planned Parenthood or rifling through Dumpsters outside abortion clinics. Gospel-following Christians do phone-banking for upcoming church blood drives, like my mother just did recently, instead of ranting non-stop about a supposed “destructive homosexual agenda” and insisting that GLBT folk have to “change” their God-given, God-ordained sexual orientation in order to be “saved.”

The best part about using the term Gospel-following to describe true Christians, as described in the previous paragraph, is that it’s the truth — it’s not some code word with a hidden meaning that actually conveys a falsehood. Ultimately, the “fundamentalist” use of “Bible-believing” truly means nothing more than an ego stroking for themselves and a put-down of everybody else. If “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” actually believed the Bible, they too would strive to live by the Gospels — but their actions clearly give them away as liars. Fortunately for them, as long as they are still alive, it’s never too late to renounce their hatred of gays and start following Jesus’ example — He is waiting for them to do just that, in fact.

OK, off to bed with me. Until next time, ciao.

As you know if you’re a regular follower of this site, I spend plenty of time exposing the agenda of hypocrisy and lies so frequently promulgated by so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’.” Well, they’re back at it again, so it’s time for me to review it all for you and reveal their true Satan-inspired motives.

You may remember back to the summer of 2005, when I devoted at least three updates here to the imprisonment of then-16-year-old Tennessee teenager Zach Stark in a so-called “ex-gay” residential facility in Memphis. Sadly, I don’t have further news of the now 18-year-old Zach, as he has kept his MySpace page in “friends only” mode ever since his ordeal; no, this story is about the man who led Zach’s Guantánamo experience, John Smid. Before I share the story, let me tip my hat to the story’s source, Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin.

Burroway attended the annual Exodus International conference in Irvine, CA, in June 2007, and recently posted this self-made video to YouTube. The video includes a recording of a lecture Smid gave at the conference, in which he spouted pretty much all the usual “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” anti-sex nonsense. However, at roughly 2:17 into the video, Smid unleashes this exceedingly creepy statement that actually shows just what hypocrites “Christians” are: (emphasis mine)

I’m sorry, but my wife’s vagina is enough! I’m gonna be honest — it’s enough. It is enough for me. If it’s not enough for me, that’s my problem. I have to be honest about that. God created her for my … for my fit — he created that, and I need to honor and respect my wife.

Very nice. We can see what John Smid really thinks of women — they are simply created to fit around a man’s penis, and as such, lack brains, the capability for independent thought, and rationality. That much is sickening enough, quite frankly, but what is perhaps even worse is the attitude that Smid is encouraging in boys with the “her vagina … is made for my fit” statement — I mean, that’s just the message we need to be sending to teenage boys. The last thing we need to do as a society is give teenage boys any more encouragement, explicit or implicit, to have sex when they’re really not ready to handle the consequences.

In fact, what Smid is doing here is showing one of the highest levels of hypocrisy I have ever seen. Most “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” at least purport to oppose teenage sex and the things that can come about as consequences thereof, such as teenage pregnancy or abortion. There is, at minimum, some logical consistency to that part of their message, even though they have fabricated whole-cloth the notion that those things are part of “Christian” morality (as nothing was said about them by Christ). On the other hand, Smid doesn’t care — a ton of teenage pregnancies and abortions, spurred on by the notion that “the vagina is made for my fit,” are all fine and lovely if it means bashing the homos.

It should be quite easy to see the extreme danger to society and the hypocrisy of such a belief. Then again, what are we to expect from a known Christofascist terrorist, and one of the said terrorist movement’s leaders at that?

Sticking with Burroway’s Box Turtle Bulletin as a source, let’s examine what another Christofascist leader, the obviously gender-confused Matt Barber of Concerned Women for America, is shitting himself about: (with a few edits made to remove Christofascist code words)

The Gay and Lesbian Leadership Institute is teaming up with [gay] groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, the Stonewall Democrats, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for an initiative called the “Presidential Appointments Project.” It is being billed as a “talent bank” for openly [gay] professionals who want to “set or influence” policies of a potential Obama, McCain, or Clinton administration. …

Matt Barber, policy director for cultural issues at Washington, DC-based Concerned Women for America, says the project puts to rest the notion that there is no “gay agenda.”

Hmmm … isn’t that EXACTLY what the Christofascists have been doing with free rein during the Chimpy mis-administration? Have the people appointed by this emperor king “president” not been setting and influencing administration policies, including a religious Armageddon in the Middle East, the denial of proven scientific truth such as evolution and global warming, the intentional dumbing-down of our children’s education (particularly on sex-related topics), and the enrichment of oil-company CEOs, based on their twisted, perverted mis-interpretation of Christianity? Why, it’s just SHOCKING AND UNTHINKABLE that gay and lesbian Americans might try to do the same thing!

If the Christ-condemned (see chapter 23 of Matthew) hypocrisy of Smid and Barber hasn’t been enough to make you puke, here’s even more from Chris Korzen of the group Catholics United. Recently, evangelical preacher John Hagee endorsed John McCain in the Rethuglican presidential primary; Hagee is known for past statements that the Catholic Church is “a whore” and that it cooperated with Hitler in the Holocaust. Naturally, this set Korzen, among others, off: (emphasis again mine)

By receiving the endorsement of an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church, McCain once again demonstrates that he is willing to sell out his principles for a chance to win the Presidency. We hope Senator McCain will take the principled position of publicly and unequivocally distancing himself from Pastor Hagee’s anti-Catholic comments. Intolerance and bigotry do not belong in American politics.

This from the very same Catholic Church in America that staunchly supported bigotry amendments now in place in 27 state constitutions? Does this mean that Catholics will now support the repeal of these amendments that make fourth-class citizens of their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters in Christ? If “intolerance and bigotry do not belong in American politics,” they have to — or they are condemned to Hell.

No, what this really is, in this situation, is Catholics not liking it when they get a dose of their own medicine. It was fine and dandy to do it to those faggots, but it’s “intolerant and bigoted” when done to them. Again, I might suggest that Catholics actually open the Bible, and see what Jesus had to say about hypocrisy and hypocrites in Matthew 23.

Finally, I intend to show one more way in which so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christianity’” is actually leading America down the path of destruction. As you no doubt know if you’re not a CEO or otherwise somehow among the top 1% of wage earners, our economy is teetering on the brink of a major recession and possibly worse. This economic despair has been fueled largely by a crisis in the credit markets, mostly because banks have been giving out huge amounts of credit to people who can’t handle the debt loads. Home foreclosures have skyrocketed as adjustable mortgage rates have increased beyond the ability of the homeowners to pay, and skyrocketing credit-card interest rates are almost designed to keep people trapped in debt.

“Fundamentalist ‘Christianity’” didn’t start the credit and foreclosure crisis, but it will contribute to making it worse. As I have pointed out here before, one thing “fundamentalist” leaders do quite well is demand money from their flocks, with the threat that they are headed for hell if they don’t open their wallets. Many such “fundamentalist” churches demand tithing, or the giving of 10% of one’s income (i.e., gross revenue) to the church; some mega-churches actually make it a condition of membership.

Let me use my own average monthly income and expense figures, which I won’t actually disclose, to make a point here. Ten percent of my gross revenue per month comes out to 44% of my net profits after all of life’s necessities are paid. Were I to be a “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” with a weak enough mind to actually believe all the hell-for-lack-of-donations threats, that would be nearly half of the disposable income I have each month!

We all know how shit comes up every month to eat into that disposable income. One of the kids just destroyed their winter coat on the playground at school; the car has to go in for work; or the carpet needs to be cleaned. With half of one’s disposable income being demanded by one’s church, under penalty of going to hell for eternity, things like that are probably going to have to be financed on credit. One will never be able to do anything with that debt, though, as long as one is giving half of his/her disposable income to the church. Eventually, this leads to out-of-control spiraling of debt, and foreclosures, defaults, and bankruptcies.

This real-world consideration doesn’t enter the thought processes of the so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” church leader, though. His greed sees to that. He needs the money to continue financing a lavish lifestyle for himself, or to carry on un-Godly pursuits like so-called “‘ex-gay’ ministries,” and the easiest way to get it is to convince his weak-minded flock that they’re all going to hell unless they pony up. In turn, the members of the congregation, burdened with this requirement, will turn to credit cards, home equity lines of credit, and second mortgages — none of which they can afford — to carry on their real-world lives, and when they default, so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christianity’” will have helped to wreck America’s economy for the rest of us normal people.

Again, I hope that all those of you in mainstream American society will begin to see “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” as the liars and hypocrites the vast majority of them are. If Americans would start coming to gay and lesbian individuals and groups for truthful definitions of gay and lesbian people and homosexuality, rather than listening to the blatant lies told by “Christians” with an agenda, the country would be a far better place. If churches would ask for donations from those members most able to donate, instead of requiring 10% of everybody’s gross revenue, our economy would be greatly helped. If we would stop just blindly accepting it as fact that people and things are somehow good or “moral” just because they’re associated with religion, we would take the largest strides ever taken toward peace and harmony on earth.

That’s it for tonight. I doubt I’ll do much between now and returning to work tomorrow afternoon, what with tonight’s weather forecasted to turn very nasty — we’re looking at possibly ½” (1 cm) of ice and then 3-6” (8-15 cm) of snow on top of that.