With Salvation Army band music blasting from the car stereo at full volume, I rode the 45 minutes from Midway Airport to the Hotel Monaco with Daryl Lach, my long time friend, guide and “chauffer for the day.” En route he described the ghosts who haunted every Chicago neighborhood complete with vivid details of gangland slayings, high rise tenement, elementary school and sweat shop fires, winter storms off the lake that buried the city in snow or summer heat waves that killed the old and young alike. Sometimes there’s a price to be paid driving with an historian, archivist, and tour guide.

Daryl is the patient and all suffering man who for the past 12 years has collected the antigay print, radio and television rhetoric of the Christian Right. The hundreds of examples I use in Religion Gone Bad (and the carefully documented source for each and every quote) are a testimony to Daryl’s skills and determination as a kind of gay spy. It’s a wonder he’s not gone mad in the process.

Can you imagine listening to Dobson’s Focus on the Family or watching Pat Robertson’s 700 Club on a daily basis? Then throw in Hagee, LaHaye, Kennedy, Bauer, Perkins, and the other fundamentalist Christian leaders (including Benedict XVI) and you’ll understand why I love, appreciate and honor Daryl as a kind of saint, a weird, wired and witty saint who is also a registered nurse who tends to children on ventilators, a faithful son who cares for his mother suffering an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease, a child of the Salvation Army who though rejected by American Salvationists writes eloquently and prophetically for the British War Cry and on Friday and Saturday nights plays (and twirls) his tambourine as a finale to his stand up comedy at clubs around Chicago.

After dinner with Daryl, I entered my room at the Hotel Monaco to find a gold fish on a table near my bed that the concierge had provided so that I “would not feel lonely so far from home.” The instructions suggested that I name “my temporary pet” but trust the hotel to feed and care for it. I wished I had smuggled my dog Bentley on this book tour when I discovered that the hotel also provided every canine guest a dog box, a dog bed and a “turn down dog biscuit.”

In my room that night, I opened an alarming email article by Ethan Jacobs reporting for Bay Windows. The bold headline reads, “Family Research Council Plans Liberty Sunday Boston Broadcast.” Quoting FRC President, Tony Perkins, this Liberty Sunday simulcast (to be seen October 15 in homes and churches across the nation) “…will describe same-sex marriage as a grave threat to religious liberty in Massachusetts and beyond.” In a letter to his national prayer team, Mr. Perkins enlarged on the purpose of this live telecast just before the November 7 election from Boston’s historic Tremont Temple Baptist Church

“There will be preaching from America’s great pastoral leaders, testimony from civic leaders, policy experts, and everyday Americans whose religious liberties are already being trampled due to same-sex marriage and the homosexual agenda. Americans will see and learn why same-sex marriage and religious liberty cannot coexist. Religious liberty, the cornerstone of all our liberties, will die an untimely death if Bible-believing Americans fail to pray and act now to defeat the legitimization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and elsewhere.”

That same night I opened an email review of Religion Gone Bad by the fundamentalist Christian editor of the Dallas Observer, an excellent writer with a very sharp pen. Calling herself “Bible Girl” the editor summarizes her reaction to my belief that Christian fundamentalists are waging war against homosexuality and homosexuals in these words. “…the, well, fundamental problem with Mel White’s argument is that every good God-fearin’ Christian is out to get the gay community.” Later she adds with obvious sarcasm that “White believes that ‘fundamentalists’ are hell-bent on erasing every civil right enjoyed by gays and abolishing the separation of church and state in America.”

Frankly, she’s absolutely correct. I made that claim and I support that claim with at least 100 fear mongering quotes by fundamentalist Christian leaders themselves. Just re-read the words of Tony Perkins quoted above. In a telecast that will be seen in churches across America guest speakers will demonstrate

…that the “religious liberties” of “everyday Americans…are already being trampled due to same-sex marriage and the homosexual agenda.”
…that “Americans will see why same-sex marriage and religious liberty cannot coexist.”
…that “religious liberty, the cornerstone of all our liberties, will die an untimely death if Bible-believing Americans fail to pray and act now to defeat the legitimization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and elsewhere.”

When will we finally realize that fundamentalist Christians are spending millions of dollars to dehumanize LGBT people, demean our relationships, deny us our civil and religious rights, and drive us back into the closet or worse? When will we be angry enough (or frightened enough) to rally our own progressive forces and respond to their half truths, hyperboles and lies with truth? November 7 we have an opportunity to at least break their hold on the House and Senate. Register to vote. Donate to the candidate who will stand for justice. Put up signs of support in your front yard. Call party headquarters and volunteer to knock on doors or telephone voters in your area. If we don’t see progress on November 7, it will be a long time before we have that chance again.