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I also think it’s to those folks that the gay community should direct our attention today and in the future, because they realize that all peoples of the world have evolved and are still evolving, and that our actions are just as important as our beliefs.

While a good number of them believe that gay people are sinners, because their interpretation of the Bible demands they do so, they all don’t believe we are evil child molesters or that our love threatens their own. They are more open to reason than the fundamentalists. Their lives are less sheltered and their boundaries no longer defined by the distance their goats roam.

Faithful yet pragmatic Christians are focused more on their own behaviors and on leading Christ-like lives than they are on the weather or on what gay people might or might not be doing at the moment. These Christians will beget tomorrow’s Christians, and so on and so forth. Each generation will be a product of a more fluid and much larger society — one that that has less room for ignorance and hypocrisy, one that demands more personal responsibility —than the one that came before. 

So, as gay people we can continue to waste our time playing tit for tat with the James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons of the world or we can enter into meaningful dialogue with those who understand we live in 2005 and not 70A.D. We can allow ourselves to be demonized in religious arguments that are based entirely in faith not fact, or we can challenge the reasonable to hold beliefs that are grounded in reality and supported by observable evidence.

What evidence? Our lives.

We’ve wasted so much time building our defense that we don’t recognize that we’ve had a solid offense all along. We can and should confront those who want to brand us immoral and evil by holding ourselves up to society’s mirror and saying, “Here we are. Please show us what we are guilty of that you are not. Prove that we are all monsters.”

If gay people are as bad as some Christians want everyone to believe, so much more immoral and abusive than straight people, then they should very easily be able to prove it. I want to see the evidence — real evidence, not scripture.

The scripture debate is nothing more than an exercise in futility. It’s interesting, but we never learn anything new. They point to Leviticus, we point to the absence of homosexuality in the Ten Commandments. They point to Sodom and Gomorrah and we remind them that Jesus never said anything about gay people.

He said, she said; they said, we said. Blah, blah, blech!

I want off that merry-go-round. Two thousand years have passed and everyone is still on the same horse.

It’s not too much to ask that the deeds of all men be measured by the same gauge, and that the gauge be a product of a more mature society than Peter, Paul and Mark knew.

Why has it always been the job of the gay community to prove we aren’t abhorrent? Why haven’t we placed the burden of proof on the people who say we are? Because they are armed with the Bible? Because they claim to know what God wants? I might buy that if I were in the first grade or living on the set of Little House on the Prairie, but I’m a thinking adult. I know that people who claim to know what God wants have said and done some crazy things in the name of “God” — like slaughter people in Crusades and and fly planes into tall buildings.

And I’m not alone. Others, including many modern Christians, shudder every time a fundamentalist know-it-all like Pat Robertson opens his mouth. They know Robertson is making a mockery of their faith and doing more harm than good. He has turned the Christian church into a giant whoopee cushion. He, and all those who tout family values want desperately for us to look to them for moral guidance, but refuse to show us any respect for the things we’ve accomplished while they’ve been passing gas in the name of God.