I go where I'm invited. And all I can tell you is if we accepted every invitation we had, I'd be away every day of my life.

...secular journalists... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women.

It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."

So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy.

I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.

Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.