Canada is way ahead of the USA on gay civil rights as any informed person knows….marriage equality from “sea to shining sea” (as goes often sung “America the Beautiful” a very well-known (for Americans, that is) patriotic USA anthem that is almost our “unofficial national anthem”) in Canada but not in USA.

There things move with glacial speed in the USA and meanwhile we gays in the USA are not getting any younger and it is impossible to have a real future given by rights and protections for our life partners and ourselves in the 33 out of 50 American states.

1. MY church performs same-sex marriages. Prop Hate is a violation of MY freedom of religion.

2. “God’s Word” … WHICH Word? We have no primary sources … the Ark containing the Tablets of the Law mysteriously disappeared; we have no scrolls from the hands of Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul or anybody else. Most of the tradition was borrowed from other Middle Eastern traditions, principally Mithras, which also had a virgin-born suffering saviour who died and rose again; and from what little we know about their rituals, historians THINK that they also met to symbolically eat and drink the body and blood of their saviour-hero-warrior god.

There isn’t a Bible translation in existence that isn’t backed by the bankrollers of the translation, from St. Jerome’s Vulgate to the King James Version to the plethora of modern translations.

BTW: the word “homosexual” wasn’t coined until the 19th century, so translators who use it in their Bibles are BALD-FACED LIARS.

Not a terribly good recommendation for the infallibility and inerrancy of a book of myths, stories, and poetry (some of it pornographic … “come from Lebanon, my sister, my bride … come.”

Bud Burgoon-Clark
San Diego CA USA

If you wonder how anyone could adhere to such extremist views, including religion-based hostility towards gays, you might find that the following online book explains a lot. It’s a free download.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ – The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba

By the way, the author’s research into the authoritarian mentality was used by John Dean, the former Nixon legal counsel, in his book called Conservatives Without Conscience, in which he points out that the GOP has been taken over by fundamentalists and other right-wing extremists, and that authoritarianism now dominates conservative thinking.

And to the others here, seeing progress in Nepal is so encouraging; one state at a time, one country at a time, equal rights will prevail for ALL. EQUALITY period.