There is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough.

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.

What's great about it is that you see, the great struggle for gay people is that the politics is just not going to work for us.

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.

Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.

Homophobia whether internalized or externalized is really fear; it's not hatred, it's fear. It's fear of the truth about ourselves.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.