While friends and lovers mourn your silly grave, I have other uses for you, darling. I love the dead.
During my time in the entourages of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, I never saw either of them attack and punish those who disagree, as Dobson does on a regular basis.
If there is any one message the Bible delivers, it is the message that God loves outcasts and that Jesus was born into the world an outcast to rescue and renew outcasts from religion gone bad. He was born poor and died poor, yet the legacy of love he left us, the legacy of inclusion and acceptance and understanding, will endure forever.
Real love cannot be silent in the face of injustice.
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.
A few years ago I switched to an entirely different kind of New Year's resolution. Instead of vowing to improve, I pledge to do a better job of accepting my bad habits - to stop worrying about failing to be the person I used to imagine I could be.
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.
I think I would have had an easier time of it if I had had training much earlier. Because when I got to the training, it was in my late 30s and I already probably had every bad habit a singer could have. In fact, it still goes on. It's un-training those habits and retraining new ones - the breathing, the relaxation, the tongue, the lungs, the everything.
The cow to me is a sermon on pity.
It matters not that giants of tribulation torment you. Your prayerful access to help is just as real as when David battled his Goliath. see 1 Samuel 17.
Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading.