Religion editor Lisa Miller talked to scholars who say neither Jesus or the Bible ever explicitly define marriage as between one man and one woman.

“The Bible’s view of marriage is nothing like the way we view marriage today,” Miller told 365gay News. “There are all kinds of ways to interpret it because the Bible was written three or 4,000 years ago, for a world that looks completely unlike our own.”

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham predicted the predictable backlash in his column, and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention soon followed up.

Here’s how Newsweek laid out the religious case for gay marriage.

“There are four or so verses that are quoted over and over and over by the religious right against homosexuality,” Miller told 365gay News.

“Two of them are in Leviticus, two of them are in Paul, and there’s a verse in Genesis. I went to those verses and I talked to scholars about them, progressive scholars, and I said, is there another way to interpret this, besides just condemning homosexuality as an abomination?”

“The argument I’ve been getting the most is the Adam and Eve argument. Marriage is between a man and a woman,” Miller said.

“There’s a verse in Genesis that says when a man leaves his family he should cleave to his wife and they should become one. The problem with that verse is that it was written in a universe where men were polygamists, and as one Bible scholar I talked to said, you know he should cleave to his wife but how many wives?”

As for Leviticus, where passages refer to sex between men as “an abomination,” Miller said that’s part of a book of rules for a world very different from today.

“This was a very particular world and there are all kinds of rules in there about blood sacrifices and the best way to kill an animal. You have to say, look these rules just don’t apply themselves anymore. We don’t do weird haircuts, we don’t do blood sacrifices…. why do we have to take these two verses about human sexuality so seriously when three pages later there’s instructions on the best price to pay for a slave whether it’s a man, woman, child or old person? Let’s be real about how useful this book is to us.”

Miller pointed out that while there is no passage in the Bible that refers to sex between women, she thinks the discomfort with gay marriage is grounded in discomfort over gay sex.

“The scholars I talked to especially about the verses in Paul say that the condemnation of gay sex in Paul is really a condemnation of the worst kind of craven, licentious, debauched behavior that in fact Paul was talking about the behavior of the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero, who everybody in the first century would have known were just bad, bad people. His condemnation of it is a condemnation of a sort of general wickedness and promiscuity, and that in fact what Paul argued for, is family stability.”

“Get married, don’t get divorced. That was a big thing for Paul, stay together. It’s actually a socially conservative argument. Get married, stay married, it’s good for society, it’s good for kids, it’s good for families. Love and the experiment of trying to stay loving even through difficult times is a very Christian endeavor. Let’s try to give that to everybody.”

Miller said she was most moved by what she learned about the Bible’s true message of inclusion and love.

“The message of Jesus is to reach out to everybody. God loves everybody. A priest quoted to me Psalm 139 which is, ‘I am wonderfully and fearfully made.’ It’s a Psalm about how God sees inside you, your most secret self, even the parts of you that you don’t show to the world. And it’s a wonderful argument for gay marriage. It’s like, God loves all of us, in all of our beauty, in all of our imperfection. Why would he discern between us based on something like sexual orientation? He wouldn’t. I found that a very moving argument and it was inspiring to me.”

Watching the Republican National Convention I felt like I sparred a few easy rounds while sitting on the sofa. Ever hear of couch-boxer?

“Opportunity rises when children are raised in homes and schools that are free from pornography, promiscuity and drugs; in homes that are blessed with family values and the presence of a father and a mother,” Mitt Romney said. “America cannot long lead the family of nations if we fail the family here at home!” He didn’t mention gay marriage specifically, but he threw a punch just the same.

I dodged and had an impulse to jab, but it’s difficult to return a punch to a television set.

John McCain, said a grinning Mike Huckabee, “doesn’t want to change the very definition of marriage from what it has always meant throughout recorded human history.”

I ducked, and felt another urge to jab with my left.

“John McCain believes in the sanctity of human life from conception. He believes in the sanctity of marriage and family life. John McCain is the leader America needs. Viva John McCain,” Tommy Espinoza told the delegates.

And I dodged again, with no place to land my counterpunch.

McCain himself, in his acceptance speech, made reference to judges who legislate from the bench, a reference to the conservative’s complaint that activist judges are pursuing a liberal agenda that includes same-sex marriage.

It was a soft right hook.

A few of the jabs smarted as conventioneers echoed the policies in the GOP’s platform, which states that homosexuality is incompatible with military service and contains a 390-word plank on “preserving traditional marriage.”

But not one speechmaker delivered a knockout punch — although there were some below-the-belt jabs from the floor by delegates interviewed by cable TV reporters.

After 12 years writing for the GLBT media and covering GLBT issues, maybe I’m well conditioned against gay bashing. After all, I trained in the gay press when Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were big-time brawlers in the anti-gay arena. By their standards, the fighters in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul/Minnesota were bantamweights.

Sure, Mitt Romney would like to wear the heavyweight belt worn by Robertson and Falwell, but he’s what’s known in boxing lingo as a palooka — a lousy boxer, a 10th-rater who lacks conviction.

So I barely worked up a sweat watching the convention, and was puzzled I didn’t need to put up my dukes when Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin took the stage. Pundits predicted she’d deliver a culture wars speech. She spoke some about her family, but not of right-wing family values.

Missing last week in Xcel — at least for the television cameras — were the heavy-duty, fat punches of previous conventions. Just think back to Sheri Drew’s invocation at the 2004 GOP convention: “Those who support gay and lesbian families are no different from those who supported Adolf Hitler in the years preceding World War II.” That was a haymaker.

With the jabbing and poking, dodging and ducking, it seemed the GOP was pulling anti-gay punches.

Log Cabin Republicans maintain that with John McCain and Sarah Palin heading up the ticket the Republican Party might retire from the fight.

“Sen. McCain is a different kind of Republican. He understands the GOP lost its majority in Congress in 2006 largely because the Party focused on divisive social issues. Sen. McCain knows the politics of fear and division will damage our party and our nation so he’s focusing the GOP on unifying core principles such as limited government, fiscal responsibility, and a strong national defense,” LCR president Patrick Sammon said, announcing the group’s endorsement of McCain.

Maybe, as LCR asserts, the party’s getting tired, the fight’s getting old.

Or maybe last week was just a bit of sparring and, regardless of how McCain wants to fight, the title bout is yet to begin.

Lace ’em up, maybe to go the distance.

It’s no surprise that teenagers have sex—even evangelical Christian teenagers, and especially very good looking ones, in Alaska, where there’s not much to do but hunting and fishing and…well, you know.

And it’s certainly no surprise that sex makes babies.

But when a conservative politician who advocates abstinence education has a very public failure of abstinence in her own family, revealed just a few days after she’s announced as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, it’s bound to get people talking.

If nothing else, the social and political contours are interesting. Right-wingers admire Palin’s principles, but some wish she would put aside her political ambitions to tend to her family. Left-wingers reject this idea as anti-feminist, but they also reject Palin’s politics.

Let me make two things very clear.

First, Bristol Palin is not running for office; Sarah Palin is. Bristol Palin, like all expectant mothers, should be wished well—especially since she finds herself pregnant during the frenzy and scrutiny of her mother’s vice-presidential campaign. She deserves our compassion, as does her new fiancé.

Second, Sarah Palin is no hypocrite—as some uncharitable commentators have suggested—for embracing her yet-unwed pregnant daughter.

There’s no inconsistency in believing both that we should teach abstinence until marriage and that we should support those children who become pregnant anyway. There’s no hypocrisy in striving for an ideal that you and your loved ones occasionally fall short of. You don’t stop endorsing speed limits just because you (or your kids) sometimes lose track of the speedometer.

The fact is, Sarah Palin’s rejection of comprehensive sex education deserves criticism on its own merits. Her family’s behavior has nothing to do with it, aside from adding anecdotes to the statistics suggesting that “abstinence only” doesn’t achieve what its proponents hope and claim.

For example, abstinence advocates are fond of citing studies by Yale’s Hannah Brückner and Columbia’s Peter Bearman, who show that adolescents who take abstinence pledges generally delay sex about eighteen months longer than those who don’t. What the advocates don’t mention is the researchers’ finding that only 12% of these adolescents keep their pledges, and that when they do have sex, they are far less likely to use protection.

In other words, the failure rate of condoms pales by comparison to the failure rate of abstinence pledges—88%, if you believe Brückner and Bearman.

But it’s not Sarah Palin’s rejection of comprehensive sex education that’s bugging me here. What’s bugging me is the right-wing reaction, which for the most part boils down to “Nobody’s perfect, life happens, but you love and support your children and grandchildren.”

That, of course, is the proper reaction.

But it stands in sharp contrast to their usual reaction to gay kids, their rhetoric about “Love in Action” and “Love Win[ning] Out” notwithstanding.

For example, contrast the right-wing reaction to Palin’s grandchild with their reaction to Dick Cheney’s grandchild Samuel—son of his lesbian daughter Mary. At the time, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America announced that Mary’s pregnancy “repudiates traditional values and sets an appalling example for young people at a time when father absence is the most pressing social problem facing the nation.” She was hardly alone in such denunciations.

Now here’s the same Crouse on Palin: “We are confident that she and her family will handle this unexpected situation with grace and love. We appreciate the fact that the Palins…are providing loving support to the teenager and her boyfriend.”

There are differences in the two cases to be sure. Bristol plans to marry the father, and thus will provide the baby with a “traditional” family (in one sense); Mary won’t. Bristol’s pregnancy was probably accidental, whereas Mary’s was certainly deliberate.

On the other hand, Mary’s child arrives in the home of a mature and stable couple; Bristol’s in the home of a young and hastily formed one.

But the sharpest difference in the cases is the contrast in right-wingers’ compassion. It’s the difference in empathy, a trait that’s at the core of the Golden Rule.

They tell heterosexuals: abstinence until marriage—and if you fail, we forgive you. For gays, it’s abstinence forever—and if you fail, we denounce you.

For heterosexuals, “Nobody’s perfect, life happens, but you love and support your children and grandchildren.”

For gays, not so much.

John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.

For more about John Corvino, or to see clips from his “What’s Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?” DVD, visit www.johncorvino.com.

This year offers a similar disparity between the parties. The Democrats proved at their Denver convention to be GLBT supportive while the GOP in Minneapolis will most likely rail against equality for gays in their effort to bring home their socially conservative base.

It was made clear by the major Democratic stars –Ted Kennedy, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barak Obama — that we, the GLBT community, are included in their vision for America. In Minneapolis, I suspect the few references to the existence of GLBT people will be as a threat to the family, with some speakers explicitly calling for a federal Constitutional Amendment to prohibit equal marriage rights. It is unfathomable that a gay person – except the most delusional – would be comfortable voting for such a party, no less trolling and tripping over conservatives in the convention hall.

McCain’s first nod to the conservatives came when he plucked a tyro from the tundra to serve as his gunning mate, er, running mate. Alaska’s moose stew-loving governor, Sarah Palin, energized social conservatives who quickly aborted their ostensible concerns about national security for their narrow desire to secure the termination of Roe v. Wade. They were so thrilled to have Palin on the ticket, that the Family Research Council excused her teenage daughter, Bristol, for her out of wedlock pregnancy. Imagine the uproar from these Moral Majority types if this had instead been Chelsea Clinton!

Like a comedy sketch, John McCain’s wife, Cindy, said on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, that the inexperienced Palin was qualified to handle a resurgent Russia because, “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia.” Isn’t that a bit like saying I’m an expert on Cuba because I grew up in Miami?

If Palin’s resume were any thinner, it could be a Vogue runway model. Prior to her two-year stint as Alaska’s governor, Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, an Anchorage suburb with 7,000 residents – which is probably less than the number of people who live on my block in Brooklyn.

Considering McCain is 72 and has had past health issues, Palin was a reckless and potentially ruinous choice.  McCain’s main appeal was his experience, but elevating Palin makes it infinitely more difficult for McCain to credibly make this argument.

Let’s be honest, this is tokenism and selecting Palin as a substitute for Clinton is reminiscent of President George H.W. Bush nominating Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court replacement for the legendary Thurgood Marshall.

This pander pick will win over few Clinton supporters following her eloquent, unifying speech in Denver. It is ludicrous to think that these educated women will be enthusiastic about Palin, who is anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-environment and who even supported arch conservative Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign. Indeed, Buchanan told Chris Matthews on Hardball that Palin was a “brigader for me in 1996.”

Unfortunately, I still get a lot of e-mail from misinformed gay people who think that John McCain and Barack Obama have the same record on GLBT issues simply because they both oppose allowing gay people to marry. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Obama is light years ahead on our issues and a vote for McCain is a tragic mistake that will usher in four more years of discrimination and humiliation. I suggest those in doubt visit a new website, “LGBT For Obama,” that highlights the superiority of the democratic nominee’s record.

In November, we can wake up to a new day where job discrimination is outlawed, openly gay soldiers are able to serve our nation with the dignity they deserve, GLBT people are finally included in hate crime laws, our families are offered a measure of protection and America will have a moderate Supreme Court for years to come.

Or, we can rise to a dark November morning that ushers in four more ugly years of persecution, right wing demagogues on the president’s speed dial, invisibility for our families, Arabic translators kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation and a retrograde and a reactionary Supreme Court that sets our movement back decades.

The GLBT community needs to unify and rally around the Obama campaign as we did for Clinton in 1992, or we will live in a regime that rules like its 1892. The choice for the future is clear and stark. We must mobilize in swing states and win or the GOP will be taking gratuitous swings at our families for the next four years.

Unite the Party: Hillary and her increasingly irrational supporters need to get a grip and move on. The election was hers to lose and she did so by not planning past Super Tuesday, giving Obama a string of caucus victories that propelled him to victory.

As a result of this monumental strategic blunder, Obama pulled ahead and Clinton fought back, turning this once warm and fuzzy primary into a political brawl. I know feelings were hurt and egos were bruised. There are also many women who are bitterly disappointed because they wanted to see a woman president.

The incessant whining of Clinton supporters, however, is beginning to work the last nerve of Democrats who actually want to win. Obama and Clinton’s policies were often so close as to be nearly indistinguishable. It is simply inconceivable that one could support Clinton and then opt for McCain – unless race plays a pivotal factor in the decision.

That’s right, I said race. How else could a Clinton-supporting woman now vote for John McCain, who will put Roe v. Wade in jeopardy? How could such a person who professes to care about women’s issues vote for McCain when it is obvious that a barrier breaking black man will do more to help a woman get elected as president in the future? It does not make sense unless there is an ulterior, underlying motive.

I think the party will unite because Hillary has even more to lose than Obama. If she (or Bill) is blamed for a loss, it will be career suicide. People who might be natural supporters of a forthcoming Clinton candidacy will shun her if she is perceived as the jealous villain who put McCain in the Oval Office.

Define Obama: On Monday, Michelle Obama was transformed from a Republican-created cartoon of an angry black woman who disliked America, into a working mother with strong family values. Barack must be as successful as his wife in marketing himself to the American people.

By the end of the convention, voters must feel like he is tough enough to keep them safe, feels their economic pain and has the judgment to overcome reservations about his experience. He must also connect with the burping fools slurping beers on wobbly barstools who want to be reassured that Obama is warm enough to share a cold one.

Fortunately, Obama is a gifted orator who could read graffiti on a bathroom wall and make it sound like the Gettysburg Address. He must flash every bit of his effulgent brilliance – or his candidacy may be a flash in the pan.
Caricature McCain: How can McCain keep our house in order when he can’t even count the ones he has?

This is the type of question that must be ruthlessly raised at the convention. McCain needs to be defined as an out of touch George Bush clone who is past his prime and surrendered his dignity to win the GOP nomination.

I can’t tell you how many people I have met who say they, “miss the John McCain” of 2000. The onus is on the Democrats to relentlessly drive home the point that this “maverick” no longer exists and has been replaced by a party hack that is the candidate of the past. McCain should be portrayed as a dangerous, hot tempered curmudgeon who barely understands the Internet, wants to reignite the cold war and is not forward thinking enough to get us out of Iraq, much less propel America towards future economic or military greatness. And, as a Bush enabler, he is as responsible as anyone for the miserable failures of the past eight years.

Finally, McCain is going to the well too often on his POW experience. Democrats should remind voters that the McCain of 2000 was humble about his heroism and did not use it incessantly as a campaign talking point.

Gay Issues: Democratic National Committee Treasurer, Andy Tobias, set the tone when he said at the podium, “As a gay man I yearn for a president who believes in equal rights for all Americans.” Ted Kennedy also included GLBT people – and Obama or Biden should follow his lead. This would mark a sharp contrast with the upcoming GOP convention, where a concerted effort will be made to bring home social conservatives at the expense of GLBT Americans. If the Democrats can shave off enough GLBT people on the fence, they might win Florida or other swing states.

The 2008 Democratic convention must defy convention by combining Obama’s signature brand of hope with hard knocks against McCain. If the Democrats let this strategic moment pass, our nation will be stuck in the past and doomed to repeat history.

This conclusion is true if we are still defining “presidential” as a cocksure windbag who bonds with the common people by pandering to the lowest common denominator.

On cue, the media judged the candidates by how fun they’d be at a barbecue. McCain was lauded as a “commanding figure” while Obama was derided for coming across as “professorial.” In today’s politics, if you demonstrate your I.Q. your career may be through and a candidate can now admit having smoked marijuana, but not that he has experimented with arugula.

In 2000, the media gave Bush an easy ride because he was affable, but have learned nothing after his presidency turned out to be laughable. We watched Bush strut in his flight suit on an aircraft carrier with a gigantic banner claiming “Mission Accomplished.” When it was clear that the mission had hardly begun, Bush thumped his chest and challenged the insurgents to “bring it on.”

Well, they obliged and now thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead.

After nearly eight years of alienating the world with cowboy diplomacy, the media portrays Obama’s tendency to be humble as a political stumble. Meanwhile, McCain talks tough to the Russians as they continue to rush into Georgia.

At the forum, without hesitation he said he is going to defeat evil. But how does he plan to make good on his shallow sound bite with our military tied up in Iraq and our economy on the rocks?

Vladimir Putin has shrugged off the McCain crowd, essentially saying, “You and what army is going to stop us?” McCain must be acting like a galloping stallion because he knows of secret battalions that can be called on to defends the budding democracies in the Caucasus region.

At the forum, McCain also got a big hand by vowing to continue Bush’s policy of ensuring that tycoons can live nearly tax free. Such economic policies combined with Republican deregulation have sold out our country and helped fuel the rise of China – which not only has more gold medals, but owns much of America’s gold. Perhaps McCain remains so bubbly and blissfully unaware of the housing bubble because he has several million-dollar homes. Yet the media still builds him up as the common man ready to storm the gates, even though he has more in common with Bill Gates.

Of course, the enablers of America’s decline are Evangelical Christians who eschew their economic interests in favor of their bizarre moral fetishes. This penchant for the puritanical was exemplified by Warren’s voyeuristic question asking each candidate, “What would be the greatest moral failure in your life.”

Predictably, this carnival of confession and moral spectacle accomplished nothing and failed to reveal any juicy new “sins” that were not already on public record. Fresh from discussing the implosion of his marriage – a huge biblical abomination – McCain spoke out against gay people marrying. In the backdrop of this event was a low level controversy where Jonathan Crutchley, the co-founder of the gay cruising site Man Hunt, gave a $2,300 donation to McCain. This was odd, considering McCain reconfirmed at the forum that he favored Supreme Court judges who had cast votes to outlaw sodomy – the very Man Hunt product that had made Crutchley rich.

Horrified, the other Man Hunt co-founder, Larry Basile, pressured Crutchley to resign as chairman of the company. While Crutchly has been reined in, a new Harris Poll shows that Obama has only 68-percent of the GLBT vote.

Sadly, 2008 is looking much like the last two elections, where a compliant media joins forces with chest thumping evangelicals and closeted homosexuals to further degrade America’s greatness. If McCain is inaugurated, we will all be invited to the barbecue on his million-dollar Arizona ranch, blissfully unaware that our future is the roasting pig with a rotten apple sticking out of its bloated mouth.

Of course, the further we sink into irrelevancy, the more faith forums we will see – even as the rest of the world loses faith in our ability to lead the world. While Rick Warren is an improvement over Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, he must teach evangelicals there is a better way than the selfishness of modern conservatism, or it will go down as his biggest moral failure.

Joey Ramelli and Megan Donovan were forced to drop out of high school and complete their education at home after being harassed by their classmates during their sophomore and junior years. The students taunted them with antigay slurs. Ramelli was assaulted, his car vandalized.

Lambda Legal recently defended the jury decision in their favor in a California court.

K.K. Logan attended high school in Indiana, where his classmates and teachers supported him when he wore clothes typically associated with girls his age.

But when Logan attended the prom wearing a dress, the principal blocked him at the door. Lambda Legal has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Logan arguing that the school violated his First Amendment rights. It’s heartening to know that many of his classmates and neighbors were on his side.

And recently at a Florida high school, 17-year-old Brittany Martin and other students who formed a gay-straight alliance (GSA) were told they didn’t have the right to meet on school grounds, a right that other student organizations were given. The ACLU took the case to federal court and won on both Equal Access Act and First Amendment grounds.

Lambda Legal has had similar victories.

When a group of students in a Salt Lake City high school were told they couldn’t form a GSA, we stepped in as lead counsel for a coalition of groups that filed suit against the school district for violating the Equal Access Act. And in California, we fought and won a case on behalf of Anthony Colín and others, after the Orange Unified School District Board denied the students permission to meet. These victories and others like them support students and allies who are working together to make schools safer places where all students have the chance to pursue an equal education — and be themselves.

But even where state laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity are on the books, the fight is not over. Lambda Legal filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief to protect a state law in California that is threatened by a lawsuit brought by antigay organizations Advocates for Faith and Freedom and the Alliance Defense Fund, which seek to block their enforcement.

And in New York, we spoke up when two different school districts argued that the state Human Rights Law that prohibits discrimination does not apply to them. One district has already dropped its challenge in response to our letter.

School is the place where young people learn history and geometry — and how to be in the world.

They also learn how the world around them works, and they don’t miss much: they see when teachers, parents, administrators and elected officials stand up for fairness — and when they don’t.

Back-to-school blues should be about the small stuff — not about the fear of violence or discrimination, whether on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, race or any other factor. We will soon issue an enhanced version of one of Lambda Legal’s most popular educational booklets, and we’re especially proud of the title: every child should be able to return to school and be Out, Safe and Respected.

Try the party platforms on for size.

Both parties are at work on their 2008 platforms — the Democrats, with their convention set to begin Aug. 25 in Denver being further along than the Republicans.

What do we know about the national Democratic Party platform?

We know that a recent draft does not contain the words “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual” or “transgender,” but the platform is the most inclusive in the nation’s history, earning it the praise of GLBT activists from the Beltway to the Corn Belt.

Much of the praise comes for the passage titled “A More Perfect Union,” where the party for the first time explicitly commits to ending discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity.

“We believe in the essential American ideal that we are not constrained by the circumstances of birth but can make of our lives what we will,” the platform reads. “Unfortunately, for too many, that ideal is not a reality. … We have more work to do. Democrats will fight to end discrimination based on race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age and disability in every corner of our country, because that’s the America we believe in.”

The platform also calls for the passage of hate crimes legislation, the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning gays and lesbians from openly serving in the Armed Forces and the establishment of equal rights and benefits for same-sex couples and their families. For the first time, the party has included in the platform opposition to the federal Defense of Marriage Act and “all attempts to use this issue to divide us.”

The Democrats’ platform, to be voted upon at the convention this month, builds upon platforms of the past:

• The 2004 plank that promised an “ironclad” commitment to civil rights, including “equal treatment” of all servicemembers and banning workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.

• The 2000 plank proclaiming, “We support the full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of the nation. This would include an equitable alignment of benefits.”

• The 1996 plank stating, “Today’s Democratic Party knows we must renew our efforts to stamp out discrimination and hatred of every kind,” and vowing to pass employment protections.

• The 1992 plank that promised “an end to Defense Department discrimination,” and the aggressive prosecution of hate crimes.

• The 1988 plank that stated, “We believe that we honor our multicultural heritage by assuring equal access to government services, employment, housing, business enterprise and education to every citizen regardless of race, sex, national origin, religion, age, handicapping condition or sexual orientation.”

• The 1980 plank the said, “Violent acts of bigotry, hatred and extremism aimed at women, racial, ethnic and religious minorities and gay men and lesbians have become an alarmingly common phenomenon. A Democratic administration will work vigorously to address, document and end all such violence.”

The Democratic Party’s platforms wear like platform shoes compared to the Republican Party’s platforms of the past. Gays and lesbians who sought to try on a GOP platform from 1980 probably ended up in stocking feet — the first mention of sexual orientation came in 1992 and it was far from lofty.

The GOP’s 1992 platform supported “the continued exclusion of homosexuals from the military as a matter of good order and discipline,” and opposed “any legislation or law that legally recognizes same-sex marriages and allows such couples to adopt children or provide foster care.”

Under a section on “promoting cultural values,” the 1992 Republican platform said the party stood “united with those private organizations, such as the Boy Scouts of America, who are defending decency in fulfillment of their own moral responsibilities.”

The party remained firm in its opposition to lifting the ban against gays in the military in its 1996 platform, as well as lauded Republican leaders for passing the Defense of Marriage Act.

The 2000 Republican platform, the document of George W. Bush’s uncompassionate conservative era, stated, “We do not believe sexual preference should be given special legal protection or standing in law,” and “we affirm that homosexuality is incompatible with military service.”

Four years ago, Republicans did little to modify — or modernize — the platform on GLBT issues. The platform actually more aggressively opposed GLBT equality, containing a lengthy passage on the party’s opposition to government recognizing same-sex unions and pledging to promote Bush’s proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

There is little to suggest the Republicans will adopt a gay-friendly platform at its national convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul next month. In fact, there’s little to suggest that the GOP platform will be as promising on GLBT issues as the Democratic platform was 28 years ago.

So, if you still are shopping around for a political party, I remind you of an old proverb, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”