If I want to read S.J. Perelman's Chicken Inspector No. 23 for the third time instead of some anguished, politically correct saga of a girl growing up in a trailer park in Kingman, Arizona, with an alcoholic mother who makes her straighten her naturally curly hair and won't let her date a Navajo boy or pursue her goal of becoming (naturally) a writer, I will. And I will laugh like a lunatic while doing it.

The Bible becomes a dead idol when we call the words between its covers inerrant, infallible, to be taken literally. This is not a dead book. It is alive. Open it carefully because the new truth that might come leaping out at you could change your life forever.

Creating fear and loathing of gay and lesbian Americans has proven, year after year, to be the most effective say for Dobson and the other fundamentalist Christian leaders to raise millions of dollars and recruit millions of volunteers to support their long-range campaign to take back America.

Gary Nixon and I have had a loving, committed, faithful relationship for twenty-five years (now over 30) yet we are denied more than a thousand rights and protections that go automatically with marriage.

The Scriptures have been misused to defend bloody crusades and inquisitions; to support slavery, apartheid, and segregation; to sanction the physical and emotional abuse of women and children; to persecute Jews and other non-Christian people of faith; to support the holocaust of Hitler's Third Reich; to oppose medical science; to condemn inter-racial marriage; to execute women as witches; to excuse the violent racism of the Ku Klux Klan; to mobilize militias, white supremacy and neo-nazi movements; and to condone intolerance and discrimination against sexual minorities.

It would be catastrophic if one day these fundamentalists Christians gain enough political power to enforce their literal understanding of Mosaic Law.

We cheer the presence of an openly gay woman or man on television there are large numbers of people in Virginia and other states who see these public affirmations as another step towards the country's oblivion.