"The word homosexual was invented. It is an invented word. It goes back to the 1890s to a German psychologist. Second thing is that the word that was used in America was perverted one. And literally in England it was called buggery. Don't bug me." -Spicy and coherent rhetoric from the honorable Rev. Louis P. Sheldon.

The Blue Room of the Omni Shoreham Hotel is filled with the most hard line folks the Christian Right has to offer and on day one of The War on Christians conference Lou outshined them all in blaring disregard for human decency. Lou is one of the panelists on "The Gay Agenda: America Wont Be Happy". The only person I am more impressed with then Lou is the person who named the panel. You have to be a Pulitzer Prize contender to come up with a title like that.

In his address Lou covered more ground then I knew to be possible in 10 minutes. He alluded to--for reason I'm still not quite sure of-- Sam F.B. Morris being able to fire up the telegraph back in 1841 because he was a Christian and then launched into a call to arms to squash the gay agenda. He referred to the current protesting in L.A. and Dallas as a model the Christian Right should follow to shut down the sexualization of America. I can see it all now. A terrible explosion of hatred and paper machete as bible touting suburbanites try to stomp out the gay pride parade in New York City. I'm not sure NYC could recover from this kind of thing but my man Lou insists if we don't stop the gay's now then they will get our children.

The rest of the panel was full of fantastic one- liners that seem to be in abundance at this conference. A few of my favorites:
Fight for normalcy
That whorey euphemism 'sexual preference'
Homosexual is an adjective, not a noun
Not tradition marriage, but REAL marriage
My happiest moment came when Peter Sprigg, the moderator, quoted George Orwell saying, "Sometimes the obvious bares repeating". I couldn't believe his brutal honesty. I have always felt that these right wing loonies were mimicking the oppressive regimes found throughout Orwell's fictional works but I never thought I would see one of them admit and encourage it.

Day one was painful and hilarious simultaneously. It was also quite eerie at times because the man sitting directly to my right looked exactly like my grandpa. Two Nazi references were made, one comparing the growing "gay agenda" to the rise of the Nazi's. Later in the day in a conference on the ACLU a comparison was made between Hurricane Katrina battering on New Orleans physically and the ACLU battering New Orleans spiritually. Hurricanes, Nazi's, telegraphs, and Orwell all in one day. (Expletive deleted) bless America indeed. *


*ACLU has removed God from this sentence.