Via Andrew Sullivan…  This quote from Jim Wallis makes a good follow up to my last post actually…

My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they’re glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too—their rights, their relationships—and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.

I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think.

Yes, it’s bullshit.  But it brings in the bucks.  Gay rights wasn’t even a blip on the radar of the religious right until Anita Bryant showed them that it made the fundies come out to the polls in droves, and open their wallets wide to anyone who said they would smite the queers for Jesus.  And as long as it keeps making them money, they’ll keep right on waving the gay bogeyman, no matter how obvious it is to everyone that even they aren’t swallowing the bullshit they’re spreading about homosexuals.  The fundies have no conscience, and the con artists who are praying on them have no shame. 

‘Twas ever thus in the business of hate mongering.  I could feel sorry for the little old granny ladies who throw their social security checks at these con men…except for this knife in my heart, and in so many others’, with their names on it.  Kinda like those little brass name plates you sometimes see on the backs of pews.  Remember, every small tithe of $500, allows us to buy enough stones to properly execute one homosexual in accordance with biblical teachings.  These stones are hand polished in our Christian owned and operated factory in Ecuador, and every one has a copy of The Lord’s Prayer hand engraved on it.  For an extra $500, we’ll add the personal dedication of your choice (30 characters or less…remember spaces count the same as letters).  Give one as a gift.  Use it to remember a dearly departed loved one…