Is where your friends are engaged in making SEAN OF THE DEAD gingerbread zombies.

That may not be everyone’s assessment, of course.

You may have heard of Project Angel Tree, which gathers and distributes Christmas gifts for the children of convicts. I think that’s a good idea.

What’s not so good is that the Friends Congregational Church in Texas has been told, after 10 years supporting the program, that Angel Tree will no longer accept gifts the church donates. The reason, according to the church, is that Angel Tree’s sponsors—the Prison Fellowship organization—object to Friends Congregational accepting gays in their congregation, which the Prison Fellowship considers incompatible with scripture.

Even if that were true, is that really a good reason to turn down donations? Much as I oppose the Iraq War, I’m pretty sure the Marine Corps will still take my money for Toys for Tots.

Even if Prison Fellowship believes, like the pastor in my previous post, that God will judge America based on how we deal with homosexuality, is God really going to be upset because a gay person gave a child a toy for Christmas? Will it contaminate Prison Fellowship with gay cooties? Does Prison Fellowship object to donations from everyone who does things incompatible with scripture, or just gays?

And is there any way in which turning down the donations advances the cause of anti-gayness, or is this just some strange, pompous form of purity—”We’re so Biblical, we won’t even help gays give to charity!”

In any case, this seems more in the spirit of the Grinch than anything else.

According to the Daily News this morning, a group pushing to add a No Gay Marriage amendment to the Florida Constitution is close to having enough signatures to putting the amendment on the ballot.Two points in the article caught my eye:
•Pat O’Neill, a preacher from South Walton Church of Christ, told the News that “God judges nations based on their righteousness … this nation will stand or fall based on its support for homosexuality.”
I can’t help thinking that if God lets a nation stand when the president does his level best to legalize torture, invades a nation that wasn’t threatening us and locks innocent people away, sometimes for years, he’s not going to get that disturbed about people sleeping with members of the same sex. Because who we sleep with is a lot less unrighteous than who we torture.
The fact so many conservative Christians think homosexuality trumps all of those probably explains why one survey this year found that a majority of young Christians say “anti homosexual” is the phrase that sums up Christianity in America.
•The ballot language says that this amendment “protects marriage”—from what? Gay storm troopers who are going to charge in and force you into same-sex relationships?
No-one has ever come up with a coherent explanation for how gay marriage threatens straight marriage.
Some people say it cheapens marriage, but I can’t see how two gays who want to be together for life cheapen the institution more than, say, ABC running The Batchelor or Age of Love, or convenience marriages that get you better tax write-offs or military benefits.
For some specific individuals, the threat appears to be that if gay marriage was an option, they might give in. Anti-gay preacher Ted Haggard, for instance–the one allegedly involved with a male prostitute–describes his own sexual drives as a demon he’s been battling with his entire life. How many more like him are out there?
For others, maybe demonizing homosexuals is safer than tackling, say, adultery, which does a lot more damage to marriages and families. In most communities, and certainly in most conservative churches, there are going to be a lot more adulterers than gays; if religious activists went after cheating spouses with the same intensity they do homosexuals, they’d generate a lot more flak. Overall, hating gays must look a lot easier.

So a friend of mine recommended zinc for my laryngitis so I went out and got some zinc supplements–but of course, I couldn’t have too many of them since even one is 300 times the normal RDA for zinc.
I swear to God, I didn’t know they made zinc-based cough drops until someone told me today!

My voice is currently sliding into laryngitis, so I just conducted an interview writing all the questions on my laptop and having the interviewees read the questions off. I think they found this a little weird.

My assessment: A mixed bag, some good, some bad.

The good: Romney’s statement that “no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin. As Governor, I tried to do the right as best I knew it, serving the law and answering to the Constitution. I did not confuse the particular teachings of my church with the obligations of the office and of the Constitution – and of course, I would not do so as President. I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.”

I count that (and similar statements elsewhere in the speech) as good not because of any particular objection to the Latter Day Saint–it would be a good statement whether Romney were Catholic, Lutheran, Muslim, Wiccan or Scientologist. As someone put it earlier this year, candidates put their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.

The bad: Romney says he won’t describe his faith’s “distinctive doctrines.” because that would constitute a religious test for public office something banned by the Constitution. Then he goes on to say that he believes in Jesus as the Son of God–which is a pretty distinctive doctrine, since it’s not shared by anyone who isn’t Christian.

Saying “I won’t discuss my beliefs,” then discussing his beliefs means Romney does want to be judged on his beliefs, but only the beliefs that will help him: Conservatives should accept him for the beliefs they have in common, and just ignore all the distinctive views of the LDS Church. In a sense, Romney’s saying he doesn’t mind religious tests for public office as long as he can pass them.

The bad (again): JFK’s speech (posted below) was one I think would be acceptable even to atheists and agnostics (not being either, I can’t say for sure); not so Romney’s. Over and over again, he talks about Americans as a people of faith, the necessity of religion to maintaining freedom, on making laws and policies based on the moral convictions shared by all people of faith. No place for unbelief there, even though many American citizens are atheist/agnostic–more, in fact, than belong to Romney’s branch of faith.

I don’t know if Romney believes atheists can’t be real Americans–a view expressed by the first president Bush–or if he’s simply pandering by implying the same hatred of “secularism” expressed by many on the religious right. He did, after all, say we “should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge.” Neither “In God we trust” nor the Pledge of Allegiance were creations of the Founding Fathers, but both have become hot-button issues for the religious right.

But whether pandering or sincere, that aspect of his speech rubbed me completely the wrong way.

In response to my recent column on the death penalty—and columnist Ron Hart’s view that executing innocent people is just “the price of doing business”—Destin resident Chris Young wrote to the paper (published yesterday) to say I was “unfair” and “hysterical” about Hart’s “satire”; that I’m unreasonable to require 100 percent infallibility in death-penalty cases; and that I ignore Hart’s point that recent studies show “as many as 40 people are saved from murder by one execution.”
My response? Taking it from the top:
•Hart made jokes in that column, certainly, but he’s quite obviously serious that the death penalty is a good thing, and that we shouldn’t be so careful and prissy in applying it. The satire is entirely directed at the “liberal knee jerk reaction” that thinks there might be drawbacks to shoving every accused person into an electric chair and pulling the switch (that comment, by the way, IS satire—Hart didn’t say that. Just in case anyone else can’t tell the difference).
So where’s the unfairness? Hart claims, and apparently believes, that the death penalty is such a good thing, executing innocent people is acceptable (and Young says he agrees); I disagree with his view and said why. That’s how debate works.
•Young argues that if I want 100 percent infallibility in the death penalty, we should give up on having any laws at all, since there’s always going to be errors.
First off, an error that leads to death is, obviously, worse than an error that doesn’t, so I think it’s reasonable to require a higher standard when the government kills people than when it, say, hands out speeding tickets.
In the second place, I didn’t say there had to be 100 percent infallibility in death penalty cases—I agree that’s not possible—but we should be trying our best to approach that level of surety.
Hart, on the other hand, wrote that the system works so well we needn’t worry about any of that; like so many death-penalty supporters, he doesn’t see any need (as far as I could tell from the column) to push for greater accuracy in the system. As I pointed out, that attitude blows off the lives of every innocent person who wound up on death row.
As for the studies, the New York Times reports the range of deterrent effect runs from 3-18 people saved per execution, not 40—and the logic and facts of the studies have been criticized and dismissed by others. I will freely admit I don’t know the merits of any of the studies and counterstudies (this is the kind of field where statistics can be juggled like colored balls), but I doubt Young does either since his only response to one study on the number of innocents who’ve gone to death row is that it’s “a liberal statistic.”
Even if the deterrent studies turn out to be accurate, that wouldn’t change my view: Executing innocent people is a bad, bad thing, and we should bend over backwards to prevent it.
I would think that was something everyone, pro- or anti-death penalty, could agree on. But Death Penalty PC would, it seems, much sooner duck the question.

A letter to the Daily News Tuesday says that “our children are taught that it’s not right or ‘legal’ to pray in school. We’ve removed prayer.”
No matter how many times conservative Christians make this claim, it’s not true. Children have the right to pray, to hold prayer groups (assuming equivalent secular groups are allowed to use the campus), to say grace, to read their Bible in breaks. When administrators have objected to a legimate expression of faith, the courts have ruled against them—and the ACLU, contrary to the conservative delusion that it’s trying to wipe out all religion, has often fought for the Christian students caught up in these cases.
Drive a stake through it’s heart and let this nonsense stay in its grave.

Any of you familiar with the case of Amanda Knox, an American student in Italy charged with the murder of her British roommate?
A far-right Italian political party is using the crime as Exhibit A in a campaign against immigration—or as they put it, the “immediate repatriation by force of every foreigner who is not in Italy for work useful to our nation.”
It’s not really a surprise to see the right wing in other countries can play the immigrant=criminal card, but it’s kind of odd to see an American as the face of the unwanted foreign hordes.

My short story “Others Must Fail” is now available for free download from the online magazine Semaphore.