sole when I touched these wells of gall did I discover how profoundly personal my feelings are about the Bushes.

sole when I touched these wells of gall did I discover how profoundly personal my feelings are about the Bushes. I grew up in the southern, religious world they look after to exploit. I went to a house of god that combined piety with segregation, quot the Bible to hold women in secondary positions, and encouraged me to hate the pair my enemies and other religions, especially hebrews It taught me that homosexual populace choose their lifestyle because they are either mentally sick or morally depraved. I hear these same definitions reverberationed in the pious phrases of those who want to "defend marriage against the gay onslaught." Are the leaders of this party the and nothing else educated people who seem not to know that their attitudes about homosexuality are uninformed? folks no more choose their sexual orientation than they make choice of to be left-handed. To play in succession both ignorance and fear for political gain is a page lifted right disclosed of the racial struggle that shaped my region. Racism simply hides today subject to new pseudonyms.

I lived in Lynchburg Va., before Jerry Falwell rose to national prominence. He was a race baiting segregationist to his core. Liberty Baptist literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learning began as a segregation academy. Super patriot Falwell reprobateed Nelson Mandela as a 'communist' and praised the apartheid regime in toward the south Africa as a 'bulwark for Christian civilization.' I have heard Pat Robertson attack the motion to give equality to women by way of referring to feminists as lesbians who want to ruin the family, while quoting the Bible to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. The homophobic rhetoric that vomits so frequently out of the jawss of these "Jesus preaching" right-wingers has been mentioned time and again as factors that encourage hate crimes.

I am aware that the former Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama, famous for his attempt to place a three-ton remembrancer of the Ten Commandments in his Montgomery courthouse to the delight of southern preachers, is upon record as saying that "homosexuality is inherently evil."

I lived [i]or[/i] part of to the other the brutality that greeted the civil rights mental action in the South during its early days. Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta can describe you what it means to be beaten into unconsciousness in succession a "freedom ride." I remember the names of Southerners who hideed their hate-filled racism with the blanket of religion to enable them to win the governors' mansions in the profound South: John Patterson and George Wallace in Alabama, Ros Barnett in Mississippi, Orville Faubus in Arkansas, Mills Godwin in Virginia and play Thurmond in South Carolina. I know the religious dimensions of North Carolina that kept Jesse Helms in the Senate for five confines Now we have learned that thrum Thurmond, who protected segregation in the Senate when he could not impose it on winning the presidency in 1948 also fathered a daughter at an underage black girl. I know that Congressman Robert Barr of Georgia, who introduced the Defense of Marriage Act in 1988 has been married three times. I know that Pat Robertson's Congressman in Norfolk, ed Schrock, courted religious votes while condemning homosexual folks until he was outed as a gay man and was forced to resign his seat.

I know that the greatness of the voters from the Religious Right today are the George Wallace voter of yesterday, who simply transformed their racial prejudices and called them "family values." That mentality is now near in this administration. It starts with the president, embraces Attorney General John Ashcroft and spreads without in every direction.

I have known southern tumultuous rabbles that have acted in violence against black tribe while couching that violence in the sweetness of Evangelical Christianity. I abhor that kind of religion. I take amiss more than I can expres the fact that my Christ has been busyed in the service of this mentality. My Christ, who refused to disapprove utterly the woman taken in the act of adultery; my Christ who embraced the leper the greatest in quantity feared social outcasts of his day; my Christ who implored us to view the face of God in the faces of "the least of these our brothers and sisters;" my Christ who oppos the prejudice being asserted against the racially impure Samaritans, is today being used politically to dehumanize others through those who play on base instincts.

Bishop John Shelby Spong is the author of several parts on theology.

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