What have I done to deserve this? All of us who are internettally connected get spam, I would guess. I've got reasonably good filters that keep most of it at bay; a few pieces get through, and they're generally so obvious that I can just delete them sight unseen. (Anyway, a good Nigerian 419 spam is always worth a chuckle.) Lately, though, I seem to have popped up on the mailing lists of more unsavory characters... Tom Harkin keeps sending me self-congratulatory mailings detailing stuff he's done for me that I didn't ask for, and Richard Viguerie (and his pal, Mark Fitzgibbons) have decided that I'm some sort of bosom-buddy of theirs – every few days, dire warnings of lefty treachery and the imminent collapse of what's left of the Republic show up under their names. And more recently, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from someone I'll identify as "Mark" that consists entirely of foul rants along the lines of:

...and so on, for several pages. I guess he's trying to drum up some controversy and drive some traffic to his moribund blog; no help here, fella – move along, do your fearless high-school rebel routine somewhere else. (And "Mark" isn't even your real name! Ha-ha!)

Anyway, once the Viguerie spam started, I began wondering what action of mine could have prompted my starting to get his Write letters! Send money! Apocalypse nigh! mailings. How did I get to be considered a fellow traveler?

We here at the Casa don't subscribe to anything more rock-ribbed and conservative than National Geographic*, don't send money to political causes, only occasionally fire off irate letters, (and those are across the spectrum), don't even visit the crankier, more partisan web sites or engage in any hot troll-on-troll action in the comment sections of popular blogs (well, I don't know what Moira gets up to when I'm not around...)

My suspicions increased greatly when, about 2 weeks ago, I got a piece of postal mail (the kind with a stamp, and envelope, and all that) addressed to me, personally, that started off:

It was pretty clear from the tone of what followed that whomever did the mailing seemed to assume that I would agree with this sentiment, and the "writer" of the letter was arguing, as one Christofascist homophobe to another, that gosh, wasn't all this judging and condemning... un-Christian?

I'll be brutally frank here; they wouldn't sit next to us, because we wouldn't be in the church, because we don't belong one or go to one. So my power to welcome anyone to a church is zero, and while I apparently seem to be a raging God-bothering bible-thumper, I am, in fact, not.

The next week, another letter came, same format, again addressed to me; this time it was the traumatic autobiography of a gay man and his experiences growing up in a fundamentalist church. He ended:

Again, what I do or don't think Christian teachings are is kind of moot here; or rather, it's as relevant as my opinions of the teachings of Islam or Shinto. I was beginning to feel as though I should contact the senders to let them know they could better direct their bulk-mail postage towards people closer to their target audience, say, church-going Christians, maybe. Who were these people?

The mail came from a group called Faith in America, Inc. (hereafter 'FiA'), an organization run by Jimmy Creech, a pastor who was booted out of the United Methodist Church in 1999 for presiding over a gay marriage. Their main goal appears to be to "...end legal and spiritual discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people in America and to gain full and equal rights for those citizens..."

Ex-pastor Creech's own name was on the next letter that arrived, this time on FiA letterhead. In it, he laid out the group's position: Stop saying homosexuality is a sin – it makes gays feel bad; Stop "demeaning their humanity" and "denying them full and equal citizenship"; churches promoted slavery, but slavery was bad; ergo, saying homosexuality is bad is equivalent to promoting slavery and Jim Crow.(A paraphrase.) And by the way, we're having a a big Town Hall Meeting in Your Town next week.

Ahh, so maybe they don't necessarily think I'm some raging fundie; maybe they just blanketed the town. (But Moira didn't get any... why not?) So now I feel sort of like I've been listening in on someone else's conversation (or monologue, really); it's hard for me to imagine anybody with less influence on those nasty Christianists than myself. Personally, I don't think they'll have much success; as far as I can tell, from my bitter,cynical perch, interpreting the Bible is an exercise largely flavored by an emphasis on the parts you like and playing down those parts you don't. I don't see how they're going pry conservative Christians away from "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind..." any more than American Catholics have been able to budge the Catholic church on ... well, a variety of issues. (Creech does admit, "True, there are a few biblical negative references to sexual activity between men..."). Also, the whole "Real religions don't teach things that make people feel bad" seems kind of theologically suspect, too.

Anyway. I'm broadly sympathetic to FiA's general goals, though I suspect I'd start disagreeing with them pretty quickly on the policy front. I'm not at all convinced that homosexuals in this country are "denied full and equal citizenship", for instance, or that the inability to marry whom you want is equivalent to denial of suffrage. But if they can help keep the Federal Marriage Amendment out of the Constitution, more power to 'em.**

 *And they're all a bunch of Socialists now anyways.
**Up to a point.

Posted by David Fleck at 28 May 2007 02:12 PM