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Sometimes the message of God gets twisted in the wrong hands
If I've learned one thing over the years it's that we all hold differing views on almost everything. No, not almost everything -- absolutely everything.

Take this. A couple of weeks ago I was stopped by a nice, smiling, inner-peace-loudly-showing couple wanting to know if I planned to see the Rev. Billy Graham's Rose Bowl revival.

Actually, I was. And I don't mean to say that I am somehow superior or that my beliefs trump their beliefs. But you know how some people say that they have "gaydar," the ability to spot gays a mile off? Well, I have "Christiandar."

First, let me say that I am Christian, have been since birth, which provides a wonderful opportunity for the more spiritually realized to ask, "But have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

Anyway, the couple handing me the Billy Graham materials both possessed "Catholicdar," the built-in ability to smell papists a mile off.

Precisely because Catholics of my generation generally don't go around proclaiming their acceptance of Jesus Christ as our personal savior, that's usually the very first thing that comes up with people who want to save us from worshiping plaster statues and such.

Only in this case it was the second thing that came up. When I joked, "It would be nice to see the Rev. Graham while we're all alive," the woman corrected, "You mean, before we are all called home."

If by that she meant heaven or some other well-subscribed-to concept, then we were more or less in agreement. It's the precise wording that gets in the way....

...Still, I could better understand this routine Christian willingness to damn others than I could the people hemmed in by police-erected steel fences outside the stadium on Sunday, the ones with placards reading, "God Hates Fags."

Here's another thing I've learned -- never get into a Bible-quote-throwing contest with anybody who absolutely knows who God hates. Still, I saw a terrible contradiction in the first two words of that statement. But maybe that's just me.

It's unusual, the signs actually disgusted me. How would they make us feel if we substituted any other awful word for our fellow man (you know them all, pick one)? Just because calling someone a fag might be protected by the First Amendment, is that reason enough to do so?

Nearly as disturbing to me, since I had a kid with me, were the stick figures on those same signs picturing one man bending over and another standing directly behind him.

Thank the Lord, my boy is protected from bare breasts on TV. But if he had any doubts about the word fag and a certain kind of sex, it ended with people who came to this revival inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. This is the same bunch that wanted to erect in a Wyoming town where a young gay man was murdered a monument reading, "Matthew Shepard Entered Hell Oct. 12, 1998; age 21 in defiance of God's warning: 'Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination, Leviticus 18:22.' "

Two thousand years after the fact and it comes down to my-way-or-no-way, God Hates Fags and -- this is just my feeling -- Christ in tears.