The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator confirmed Monday that McFarlane died Friday in Truth or Consequences but didn’t immediately release the cause.

A statement released by Tim Sweeney, president of the Denver-based Gill Foundation, where McFarlane once worked, said McFarlane committed suicide. McFarlane left a note citing back and heart problems that limited his ability to work and travel, the statement said.

“We will eternally be in his debt as a result of his many, lasting contributions,” Sweeney said.

McFarlane was executive director of the Gill Foundation from 2004 to 2008. Founded by software entrepreneur Tim Gill, the foundation funds programs advocating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights.

Earlier, McFarlane helped found New York’s Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Bailey House, a housing provider for homeless people with HIV, said Fred Saenz, vice president for communication of the Gill Foundation.

McFarlane wrote “The Complete Bedside Companion: A No Nonsense Guide to Caring for the Seriously Ill.” Saenz said that book grew out of McFarlane’s experience of caring for friends.

Jerome Schroeder says that he and his boyfriend were subjected to homophobic remarks by a couple sitting in front of them but that they ignored the insults.

About an hour into the concert, Schroeder tells The Rocky Mountain News, a police officer approached him and his boyfriend and told them they had to leave.

Schroeder says that the officer refused to give any explanation other than that the Pepsi Center wanted them removed. When Schroeder refused to leave, the officer arrested him on a charge of trespassing.

 Schroeder also claims the officer refused to give his name and poked him in the chest.

“The only explanation is that it was based on our sexuality,” Schroeder told The Rocky Mountain News. “There is no other explanation that makes sense.”

Schroeder said that the man seated in front of him repeatedly made homophobic remarks under his breath, but loud enough to hear. The man’s female companion complained that Schroeder had shoved her- something Schroeder denies.

“We had no interaction with the female,” Schroeder said. “I couldn’t even tell you what she looked like.”

Schroeder was held in jail for several hours before posting bail.

He has filed a formal complaint with the Office of the Independent Monitor alleging an “anti-gay attitude.” The complaint also said that Denver Police officers are not properly trained to handle situations involving sexual bias.

“The police that interacted with us at the Pepsi Center are the ones I’m most upset with,” Schroeder told The News. “They were disrespectful and very forceful.”

The Independent Monitor is a city agency that independently investigates complaints against police. It has the power to make recommendations to the Chief of Police over any possible discipline. The investigation is expected to take about two months.

The Denver Police Department has launched its own internal affairs investigation.

NORTHAMPTON, MA

Rose said: A friend and I stumbled across a pro marriage equality protest (anti prop in Northampton, MA. There was a moderately sized crowd (approx 100??) and several speakers, including a minister who’d performed many many marriage ceremonies since legalization here nearly 5 years go. The speakers were hard to hear from the back of the crowd, but the local Unitarian / Universalist church had a banner and many supporters and there were lots of placards – both pro equality and anti-prop 8 in content. One of the better ones said, “Can you believe we still have to protest this crap?” Great bunch of marching band drums and lots of rainbow umbrellas and a very vocal, happy crowd knowing they were helping in a nationwide effort. Did not see any local media.

SALT LAKE CITY, UT

freshee69 said: my husband and i went to the rally in salt lake city today and stood with thousands of our brothers and sisters to let our voices be heard. it was beautiful.

CHICAGO, IL

Ophidimancer said: I was there in Chicago when we took to the streets in a huge mass, chanting and waving signs. The turnout was amazing and more and more room had to be made for us. We totally dwarfed Dobson’s anti-rally and blocked traffic downtown for hours. Everyone stayed peaceful, at least the part of the crowd that I could see, even when people with anti-gay signs started picketing us, so that was good.

BOISE, ID

JD Morgan said: In Boise, ID (pop. 180,000) over 1,000 people showed up at Boise City Hall where speakers urged restraint to our anger and proposed that we forgive those who have trespassed against us. This protest was larger by far than our annual gay pride rally.

HOUSTON, TX

AR said: I attended the Houston rally today. It was very heart warming. However, I was deeply disappointed that more people didn’t come out for this. Ladies, you can come out in droves for a Melissa Etheridge concert or a Comets game. Where were you today?

KANSAS CITY, MO

Julia said: I attended the rally in Kansas City, MO. I am 65 years old and straight and had never attended this type of function before. I was very moved by the people and signs. I stood on the curb with the associate pastor of my church (MCC-KC) and held the church flag while across the street members of the ‘church of hate’ from Topeka, KS stood with the flag of our country on the ground under their feet and around their waist like a skirt. People passing in their cars either honked or gave a ‘thumbs up’ to us. I saw young people from GSAs in the area with their signs in support. One sign that I noticed said ‘I’m too old to wait for my civil rights’. A friend who is the mother of a gay son who was married in San Francisco went with me. We met another mother of a gay son who was married in LA just before the election. One of the speakers (a young man from GLISSEN) said that he had brought 10 straight allies with him (his co-workers). I am not good at estimating numbers of a crowd, but I’m sure there were close to 1000. I congratulate the organizers for their good work in bringing so many people together in such a short time particularly the people from the LGBT center in KC and PROMO.

Don said: I too was at the Kansas City Rally. Despite a cold day and an inadequate sound system the 1000 people did a great job of protesting our dismay yet not attacking anyone. I came with a 65 year old man whose partner of 40 years stayed home as he could not endure the cold and the standing due to arthritis. I was honored to be in their presence and call them friends.

My favorite sign was “I want my cake and to eat too!” superimposed over a wedding cake with same sex couple figures. Good job KC!

DENVER, CO

Michael said: Denver came out in mass – it was a beautiful day and every more encouraging at the throngs of people that came, chanted, and marched down 16th Street. I am proud of the gay community for coming together. For those naysayers that claim this will do little – our positive voice will do more than your negative one. At least we got up off the couches today to let the world know that we are not going to let them just VOTE away our civil rights. My hubby and I had our two daughters there, we spent a couple of hours last night making signs and talking about the significance of the rally. Our 10 year old was thrilled to be interviewed by the local media because of her “I love my gay dads” sign. If nothing more, the march left an impression on them and for that I am grateful!!!!

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

hugo said: This was amazing. I was in San Francisco. Truly inspiring. We’re gonna keep going. We need to take a more active stance, though. We’ve got to fight back and make our cases. Things will change. Just look at all of the people that came out in support for our cause. I’m VERY inspired and I can’t wait to see what happens in the future.

He put finishing touches on his speech Thursday morning, but also found time to shoot some hoops on a basketball court at the Denver Athletic Club.

He also spoke to a luncheon for female Illinois delegates. “I had this speech tonight. I wanted to practice it out on you guys. See if it worked on a friendly audience,” Obama joked. He didn’t actually give the speech.

“I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” he added. “It’s because of all of you that Michelle and I have this great honor of helping to lead the party and win back this White House.”

Aides said his address accepting the Democratic presidential nomination would be a “direct conversation” with Americans on what’s at stake and the risks of putting another Republican in the White House.

Obama, who first gained national prominence just four years ago in a speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention as a little-known Illinois state senator, was also expected to draw contrasts with rival John McCain and try to dispel any remaining concerns Americans might have about his capability to govern.

Republican McCain said in an interview that aired Thursday – but was taped on Wednesday – that he wasn’t ready to announce a running mate just yet, although he was expected to do so by week’s end, possibly Friday.

Obama accepts the Democratic nomination Thursday night at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High.

Three hours before the day’s program began, as many as 1,000 people were lined up at a pedestrian entrance to the stadium. On a hot, sunny day, security people were advising the crowd to drink a lot of water. Nearby street parking was going for as much as $80 a space.

“Senator Obama’s speech tonight will be as he himself has characterized it, more workmanlike, a very direct conversation with the American people about the choice we face in this election. About the risk of staying on the same path we’re on, the risk of just more of the same versus the change we need,” Obama spokeswoman Anita Dunn said in a conference call with reporters.

McCain appeared poised to name his running mate soon after the end of the Democratic convention, in hopes of curbing any bump in the polls that Obama might get as he and running mate Joe Biden and their wives begin a three-day bus tour of battleground states on Friday, beginning in Pennsylvania.

McCain, too, planned a rally in Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

He said in a radio interview that he was bringing to that event both former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, two of the leading names on his short list for vice president. But he cautioned against assuming that meant either one would be the pick.

“I haven’t decided yet, so I can’t tell you,” he told KDKA NewsRadio in Pittsburgh in an interview that was taped on Wednesday.

Another Republican mentioned often in vice presidential speculation, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, was in Denver as part of a GOP team criticizing Democrats. He deflected all questions about the possibility of being McCain’s vice presidential pick. As to his immediate plans, Pawlenty said, “I am scheduled to be in Minnesota tomorrow to be at the State Fair.”

McCain, in his Pittsburgh radio interview, praised Ridge, a longtime friend and frequent campaigning partner. “He’s a great American and a great and dear friend and I rely on him and I have for many years,” McCain said.

A Ridge candidacy could irk some conservative Republicans because of his stance in favor of abortion rights.

Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as an important battleground.

“This is not hyperbole: We cannot win without Pennsylvania,” Biden, who spent part of his youth in Scranton, Pa., told Pennsylvania delegates at a breakfast Thursday.

Obama hopes Biden’s blue-collar appeal will let him avoid a repeat of his Pennsylvania primary loss in the Democratic primary to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Obama stood ready to accept the Democrats’ nomination, the first black person to claim such a prize, on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.

The Democrats officially made Obama their presidential choice and Biden their vice presidential nominee on Wednesday.

The McCain campaign said it planned to air a new ad that will run in battleground states Thursday night around the time of Obama’s address. In it, McCain will look into the camera and speak as if he were talking directly to Obama, said McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker.

Obama played basketball Thursday morning at the Denver Athletic Club. He waved to supporters as he came out, wearing a Secret Service cap, a brown shirt and athletic pants.

He was also doing some final work on his speech, said campaign spokesman Dan Pfeiffer.

“Doing the speech at Mile High is an important point for our campaign. It’s symbolic of how Sen. Obama won the nomination. It will show how Obama wants to involve people who are not usually involved in the political process,” Pfeiffer told reporters.

Republicans, keeping up a theme they first used when Obama drew tens of thousands for an appearance in Berlin, derided the acceptance speech’s stage as befitting a celebrity with little actual accomplishment.

“This Roman-like facade, a facade with Roman columns, is a perfect metaphor or icon for the point that it’s an interesting production, but behind it there’s not much there,” Minnesota Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty told ABC.

Democrats have responded by noting that President Bush’s acceptance speech in 2004 also took place on an elaborate stage that included similar columns.

The drama of Obama’s long, emotional primary struggle against Clinton behind him at last, the Illinois senator’s convention speech will propel him into a tough sprint to Election Day.

A modern-day technological effort was under way to get most of those packed into the stadium to form the world’s largest phone bank – text-messaging thousands more to boost voter registration for the fall.

Obama accepts his party’s nod on a day few might have imagined decades ago, when King fought for civil rights.

“This is a monumental moment in our nation’s history,” Martin Luther King III, the civil rights leader’s eldest son, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “And it becomes obviously an even greater moment in November if he’s elected.”

Obama was just 2 years old when King addressed a sea of people on the National Mall in Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.

Adding a touch of celebrity to the convention’s final night, singers Sheryl Crow, Stevie Wonder and will.i.am were scheduled to perform, with Academy Award-winner Jennifer Hudson singing the national anthem.

At every LGBT event this week at the Democratic National Convention, gay leaders and friends had the same message: If you want marriage, an end to the military ban, and an anti-discrimination employment bill, you must vote Obama.

There was Barney Frank: “If Barack Obama wins and we pick up a few Senate and House seats, we will remove absolutely every legal expression of prejudice against us at the Federal level. Be part of it, so you can say you were there when we broke the back of bigotry.”

There was Howard Dean: “If we elect Barack Obama, we’ll get everything. Some people think that there’s no reason to vote, that the candidates are the same. But that’s a fallacy. If McCain wins, we get four more years of George W. Bush. ”

There was Sue Lovell, of Texas, a member of the Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Steering Committee for Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “I am a superdelegate. I supported Hillary. But people in my state look to me to be a leader. to vote for John McCain – to not vote for Barack Obama – is like the chickens voting for Col. Sanders.”

There was Melissa Etheridge: “It’s a dangerous thing that the media is focusing on, that the party is divided between Hillary and Obama. It’s not true. We have worked too hard not to be united fully behind Obama.”

Over the past few days, speakers have rattled off facts. Barney Frank said John McCain voted to impeach Bill Clinton and that “he’s not a friend of the Clintons and not a friend of the community.” Several speakers noted that McCain has never voted for a gay-friendly bill – including the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act.

GLBT leaders felt it was important to clarify the differences between Obama and McCain because anecdotal evidence suggests that many GLBT people are undecided about whom they will vote for in November.

The campaign is concerned, too – today they released a document to the press comparing Obama and McCain’s take on gay issues. Read a document from the campaign on Obama’s commitment to equality.

Police had to arrest two people before it was over.

The former first lady ceded the nomination that was almost hers in a prime-time speech to Democratic delegates, closing another chapter in a long, improbable political career that took her from supportive spouse to political powerhouse.

She was warmly embraced by delegates split between herself and Barack Obama in the primary. Any who were still angry over her loss were drowned out in applause when she opened her speech by declaring herself “a proud supporter of Barack Obama.”

She exhorted her backers – “my sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits,” she called them – to remember who was most important in this campaign.

“I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me?” she said. She urged them instead to remember Marines who have served their country, single mothers, families barely getting by on minimum wage and other struggling Americans.

“You haven’t worked so hard over the last 18 months, or endured the last eight years, to suffer through more failed leadership,” Clinton told the delegates. “No way. No how. No McCain.”

The line drew applause from Obama, who was watching on television from Billings, Mont., with supporters and reporters.

Clinton spoke on the eve of the delegate roll call in which both she and Obama will be nominated for president. But under a deal between the two camps, only some delegates will get the opportunity to cast a historic vote for either a woman or a black man before the split decision will be cut off in favor of unanimous consent for Obama.

Advisers to Clinton and Obama sent a joint letter Tuesday night instructing state delegation chairs to distribute vote tally sheets to delegates Wednesday and return them by 4 p.m. local time, just as the vote is scheduled to get under way.

The letter said Clinton would have one nominating speech and two seconding speeches, followed by Obama’s nominating speech and three seconding speeches – totaling no more than 15 minutes for each candidate. Then the roll call will begin, said the letter signed by Obama senior adviser Jeff Berman, Clinton senior adviser Craig Smith and convention secretary Alice Germond.

Still, many details were unclear – which states would get a chance to vote, whether Clinton herself would cut it off in acclamation for Obama and if floor demonstrations would be tolerated.

The dealmaking and lack of direction left Clinton supporters frustrated. Clinton fueled confusion by refusing to publicly instruct her delegates how to vote, though she said she’ll back Obama when the time comes. She planned to meet with her delegates Wednesday.

All the Clintons, a longtime royal family of Democratic politics, were on hand to pass the torch to Obama. Clinton was introduced by her daughter Chelsea, while her husband watched from a box seat above the Arkansas delegation. Not everyone with a ticket could get in to hear Clinton after fire marshals declared the hall filled to capacity.

The convention hall was brimming with delegates wearing Clinton gear. There were Hillary T-shirts, buttons and stickers. Some delegates brought signs promoting Clinton for president. Many wore white shirts to mark the 88th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

“My mother was born before women could vote,” Clinton reminded them. “But in this election my daughter got to vote for her mother for president.”

The Obama campaign gave Clinton her due. Before she took the stage Tuesday night, Obama’s campaign distributed “Hillary” signs throughout the Pepsi Center. But only sentences into Clinton’s speech, those signs were quickly swapped out for others proclaiming either “Obama” or “Hillary” on one side, and “Unity” on the other.

Some Clinton delegates weren’t ready for so quick a pivot.

“We love you Hillary!” some shouted.

Jennie Lou Leeder, a Clinton delegate from Llado, Texas, said Clinton “was so good tonight, I was crying.”

Did her speech help to unify the party?

“It’s not Hillary’s job to bring this party together,” Leeder said. “It’s Barack Obama’s job to bring this party together.”

Daniel Kagan, a Clinton delegate from Englewood, Colo., said he felt pride and sadness watching Clinton speak. He was proud of her accomplishments, but saddened by the realization that her campaign was truly over.

Nevertheless, Kagan said, the speech will help to unify the party.

“I know that it’s changed attitudes,” Kagan said. “I saw some of my colleagues standing up and applauding for Obama for the first time.”

It was the culmination of an emotional day for Clinton loyalists, still wondering how the final act would play out in Wednesday’s roll call vote and whether they would have a chance to give their candidate one last show of support.

Party leaders said they feared a nationally televised floor demonstration Wednesday that would underscore party divisions.

“It seems to be a little more of a problem than I anticipated,” former Democratic Party chairman Don Fowler told the AP. “All you need is 200 people in that crowd to boo and stuff like that and it will be replayed 900 times. And that’s not what you want out of this.”

Standing before thousands of delegates, almost half of them her backers, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton declared it time “to unite as a single party with a single purpose” and urged her followers to help elect once-bitter rival Barack Obama. “We are on the same team,” she said, after allowing the applause to build to a crescendo and linger, longer than usual – much like the Democratic primary race itself.

“Barack Obama is my candidate,” she said. “And he must be our president.”

But did she mean it? And would it matter?

True, her challenges Tuesday night were impossibly high, perhaps mutually exclusive.

She had to both promote her political future and unify her party. Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.

- Dec. 3, 2007: “So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One…or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate.”

- March 2008: “I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”

- Feb. 23, 2008: “Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified.’ The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”

There in no such thing as a perfect world, though the Clinton and Obama image teams tried their best to create one. Hundreds of “Hillary” signs danced before the TV cameras, bearing her breezy blue signature. Her misty-eyed husband, former President Clinton, watched from above.

By the time she was done, Sen. Clinton had delivered a strong, convincing affirmation of Obama and, just as importantly, a thumping of McCain. She did her part. Her husband takes the stage Wednesday and then Obama must make his case to the American people that he will be ready on Day One.

That there’s more to him than a single speech.

That he’s the perfect man for troubled times. She brought the party together, for one night anyway, and now it’s up to Obama to close the deal with voters.

Unlike Obama, she no longer needs to worry about her favorability ratings so there was no pulling punches.

“No way,” Clinton said. “No how. No McCain.”

She said McCain would be an extension of the Bush administration. No jobs. Poor health care coverage. High gas prices. Home foreclosures. “More war,” she said, “Less diplomacy. More of a government where the privileged comes first, and everyone else come last.”

In other words, Clinton seemed to say, even if Obama is everything she said during the campaign, he’s still a better candidate than McCain. The speech was as much of an attack on McCain as it was an embrace of Obama. “We don’t need four more years of the last eight years,” she said.

The crowd, Obama and Clinton delegates alike, loved it.

She took the high road Tuesday night because it was also her best road politically; if Obama wins, she still emerges as a central voice in American liberalism, replacing the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy. And if Obama loses, as Hillary said he would during the campaign, she is blameless and the party can turn back to her without guilt in four years.

Behind the scenes Tuesday, the Obama and Clinton camps struck a tentative deal that would allow some states to cast votes in a roll call before somebody – possibly Clinton herself – cuts short the tally and asks the convention to nominate Obama by unanimous consent. This was her price for ending her historic bid for the presidency in a manner that, however messy, still left Obama in a stronger position than Kennedy left Jimmy Carter in 1980, when the Massachusetts senator extracted platform concessions and shrank from the traditional unity show at the final gavel.

But she did extract her price.

The bill came due Tuesday. The crowd. The applause. The promise of a vote Wednesday, and a speech laced 17 times by some variation of the pronoun “I.”

“You never gave up,” Clinton told her delegates, a phrase that so perfectly fits her. “You never gave up. And together we made history.”

The head of a large African-American denomination challenged the party on abortion. An Orthodox Jewish rabbi raised his voice about school choice. A thirty-something evangelical Christian author warned against Democrats who mock believers.

Although well aware that party officials have political reasons for reaching out to them, several faith figures taking part in convention events say they want to go beyond talk about how faith and values inform longstanding Democratic policies. They are also calling for change on core Democratic issues, which could create tension.

“It’s important that people of faith are being listened to just like other constituencies, that we’re not marginalized,” said Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which has pressed the party to support policies aimed at reducing abortion rates. “Just because we’re participating in the process and engaging people who may not agree with us doesn’t mean we’re just a mascot.”

Religion has played a visible role at the convention, starting with an interfaith service and continuing Tuesday with the party’s first caucus meetings for people of faith.

Beneath “Pro-Family Pro-Obama” placards, a range of faith leaders – and Joshua DuBois, Barack Obama’s religious affairs director – framed poverty, climate change, human rights and abortion as not just policy causes but moral ones.

“Let’s be honest: Religion has been used and abused by politics,” said Jim Wallis, an evangelical and editor of Sojourners magazine. People of faith, he said, “should speak prophetically more than in a partisan way.” Wallis is not endorsing a candidate and will also appear on a panel in St. Paul, Minn., next week during the Republican convention.

Wallis said religious voices lobbying Democrats have gotten results, including language in the platform that aspires to reduce poverty rates by half in the next decade. Religious groups also had a hand in crafting platform language that pledges to support women who decide against having abortions; that was possible in part because the platform also strengthened wording supporting “a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion.”

One tenet of the Obama campaign’s religious outreach is connecting to religious communities beyond the usual liberal-leaning constituencies that support Democrats – and that’s where some of the challenges have come from.

Donald Miller, a 37-year-old author from Portland, Ore., is little known to most voters but revered among many young evangelicals for his best-selling spiritual memoir “Blue Like Jazz.”

Miller was a loyal Republican but said he left the party, in large part, because he thought Republicans pandered to evangelicals on abortion and gay marriage to win votes without accomplishing much.

Democrats are “reaching out to us, and I’m not naive as to why – they want our votes,” said Miller, who gave a two-minute prayer to close Monday’s convention session. “But they won’t get them and keep them unless they continue the momentum of adopting policies that promote the sanctity of life.”

Miller cited progress along those lines – including on abortion. His other priorities – poverty, global warming – also reflect a widening evangelical agenda that might benefit Democrats, if not in large numbers in November then in future elections. Miller also said he’d leave the party if some Democrats keep mocking people of faith.

“I’d like to see Obama address that – say that voice is no longer welcome,” he said.

Others invited to take part in the convention – including Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America – make clear their participation isn’t an endorsement.

Even so, it’s significant Weinreb was invited to deliver a keynote address at the interfaith service. He sides with Republicans – and apart from most Jewish leaders – in support of government assistance, such as tax credits, for parents who want to put their children in private schools.

Weinreb did not pass up an opportunity to speak at the service “for freedom of choice in education” – and he later credited Democratic officials for putting no restrictions on what speakers could say.

That freedom also was evident when Bishop Charles Blake, head of the 6 million-member Church of God in Christ, spoke of “disregard for the lives of the unborn.” Blake, who called himself a pro-life Democrat, challenged Obama to adopt policies to reduce abortions and chided Republicans for not caring about “those who have been born.”

“Are we being used?” Weinreb said of faith leaders at the convention. “I certainly didn’t feel used. Obviously, politics is politics. I don’t want to be naive. I also don’t want to be cynical.”

Critics of the Democrats are skeptical. Tom Minnery, a senior vice president with the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, said Democratic voting records don’t back up the religious rhetoric.

“The party wants the voters,” said Minnery, who attended Tuesday’s faith caucus. “But not the values.”

But Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, after speaking at a luncheon hosted by the nonpartisan Faith and Politics Institute, insisted that the party’s outreach to faith communities is sincere, and that voices will be heard.

“The majority of our party people, they are people of faith,” he said. “When we get elected, we don’t check our faith at the door. We may not wear it on our sleeve.”

For months now, she’s lifted her husband up by downsizing him gently, while grappling with her own critics. Sure, he’s the orator who electrifies the faithful by the tens of thousands. But he snores, and smells not so good in the morning.

Sure, he’s got what it takes to be president, she offers. But he’s “just a man.”

A tall woman with an outsized personality of her own, Michelle Obama has toured the community centers, church basements and ballrooms of the land, pulling in a crowd of 50 here, 2,500 there, and mixing it up with cozy TV chats and glossy magazine features.

Monday night in Denver, the stage is hers at the Democratic National Convention for a prime-time speech introducing the potential first lady to her largest TV audience.

If part of her function has been to reveal the husband and dad side of the man addressing the masses, she also needs to show she’s just a woman, just an American, just a patriot.

She’ll be joined by her daughters, Malia and Sasha, her mother Marian Robinson, and her brother Craig Robinson, who will introduce her.

In the primaries, she was dubbed “the Closer” for her ability to persuade the undecided voters walking in to come on board before walking out. Now she’s the opener, the first-night star called upon to testify about her husband’s vision and values, and perhaps settle some doubts about herself.

The critics have come out early, to a point where Barack Obama told people to “lay off my wife.” The Obama campaign created a Web site solely to counter innuendo about both of them, and first lady Laura Bush came unexpectedly to her defense.

A summer AP-Yahoo News poll found the public hasn’t taken to her yet. Respondents were more apt to dislike her than Republican candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy. But mainly, Americans don’t know either woman well.

Michelle Obama’s playful fist bump with hubby when he sealed the Democratic nomination was taken in some quarters as a nefarious gesture.

Republicans in Tennessee and Washington state circulated video making hay with her statement that the campaign made her proud of America for the first time in her adult life. She said she meant pride in the political process.

Barack Obama called such attacks “low rent.” But that video won’t be going away.

“People aren’t used to strong women,” Michelle Obama remarked on ABC’s “The View.” That proposition is arguable, given the country’s history with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, her activist years as first lady and her hard-charging, last-voter-standing primary campaign.

But, like Clinton, Obama can incite strong feelings for and against.

Her lack of pretense comes with a certain resistance to political packaging and she’s expressed the surprise of the newly famous that a comment here or a gesture there can create such a fuss.

The even-keeled Laura Bush told her through the media that “everything you say is looked at and in many cases misconstrued.” The first lady also said Michelle Obama must have meant she was “more proud” of her country than before, not proud for the first time.

“That’s what I like about Laura Bush,” Michelle Obama said in response. “There’s a reason why people like her. It’s because she doesn’t, sort of, you know, fuel the fire.”

She wrote a thank you note to “Dear madam first lady” and made clear she’d learned a thing or two from Laura Bush. “I’m taking some cues.”

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a family of modest means.

Fraser Robinson was a Democratic precinct captain who worked swing shifts at the water plant. His wife Marian raised the kids in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of her aunt’s house, where Michelle and Craig slept in the living room, converted into two tiny bedrooms and a study area.

She fought her way into Princeton, and later to Harvard Law School, and began dating Obama while working at a Chicago corporate law firm. They’ve been married for 15 years.

She left corporate law for community service positions and later became an administrator of the University of Chicago hospitals. Daughters Malia and Sasha are 10 and 7. The couple reported making $4.2 million last year, their days of financial struggles well behind them.

Even so, she’s proved an adept solo campaigner with blue-collar audiences and with women, able to make a connection with voters whose lives are an economic struggle. She laughs easily, hugs a lot, hangs tight after the speech and watches her sarcastic streak.

“I wake up every morning, wondering how on the Earth I’m going to pull off that next minor miracle to get through the day,” she told a Chicago crowd.

She talks about work, workouts, parent-teacher conferences, hair appointments, the burdens of campaign travel, the plugged toilet that her husband left her to deal with one day.

“With the exception of the campaign trail and life in the public eye, I have to say that my life now is really not that much different from many of yours,” she said.

Those are, of course, huge exceptions. But for the opener, the closer and everything in between, expect to see much more of Michelle the American everywoman. The one who, it turns out, has a daughter born on the Fourth of July.