Most abominable sin

Friends have emailed and sent me facebook messages for the past week or two, saying, "Can't wait to read what you'll have to say now that Fred Phelps has gone to his just reward."

Well I don't want to be known as the guy who writes about dead people and Phelps is hardly worth spilling ink over. I wrote about Nelson Mandela after he died because he led a life of purpose, courage and conviction. Just the opposite of Phelps, who could have used his position for good, but chose to waste his life on hatred.

So what am I supposed to do? Write about how funny it would be if Fred Phelps met Freddie Mercury at the Pearly Gates?

Oh, but neither of them will see the Pearly Gates, you say. The rhapsodizing Voice of Queen won't make it because he was gay and we know they're all going to hell. And Mr. God Hates Fags won't be there because he was so full of hate, protesting at military funerals and the funerals of the children who were shot to death in Newtown.

Oh no, we're nothing like him.

Sure we think, as Phelps did, that God's gonna burn all the fags in hell. But we're not carrying around signs, saying that. We love the sinner, we just hate the sin. Funny, how that phrase always gets used in regard to one sin. Not murder, rape or blasphemy, but, well, you know, sodomy.

The worst sin anyone could commit? I don't know, why did the old man from "Duck Dynasty" say, "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there"?

For some reason, that's the sin the religious crowd likes to single out. Why are they having some conference at a Wichita church on the sin of homosexuality? There's starving children in the world. I'd call that a sin. How 'bout a conference to orchestrate some plan for feeding the multitudes like Jesus did? Oh no, we'd rather obsess over something people do in their private lives that isn't hurting anybody.

Speaking of starving children, World Vision, an international Christian relief organization that performs good in the world had to reverse its course on allowing gays in its organization or lose funding from the conservative Christian establishment.

Well, that's Christian. Withhold urgent life saving materials until they agree to uphold your bigotry. Sounds about right. Hopefully, the relief won't go to any gay children.

I am Christian, but in my view Christianity has nothing to do with the Christian Right. To me, it means things like loving your neighbor, following the Golden Rule, accepting the gift of grace and showing grace to others. I'm not saying I'm completely free of prejudice, but it's something I try to quash within myself. I had one encounter with Fred Phelps in college and I saw how far prejudice can go. I don't want anywhere near it.

But hey, that's just my opinion. I'm probably being overly cautious. People are certainly free to view being gay as the worst abomination under the sun. Heck, maybe they're the real victims in this increasingly godless world.

They're nothing like Fred Phelps.

Putin pricks

I was sitting at a Wichita Spangles the first damn time I heard it. The wife's Fox News loving family members taking cruelty within their sweet loving embrace. I'm not knocking them. My family has whackos too.

"I kind of like Putin," the sweet-voiced lady said.

Why was I not surprised?

"Some of his policies, I think, are pretty good."

I had an idea which policies she was talking about. It was around the onset of the 2014 Winter Olympics and Obama was making a statement in opposition to some of Putin's pet policies by bringing folks like Brian Boitano and Billie Jean King to Sochi.

Or maybe it's the way he likes to jail dissidents who dare to speak out against authoritarian tyranny. You know, like he did to that rock n' roll band named for a riot and a woman's vagina? Because if there's one thing the right-wingers in my wife's family (and my own) like, it's some Big Tough schoolyard bully laying the smackdown. There is nothing the sweet little feminine women of the family (with all their PTO-like pictures of Ann Romney on fakebook) like better than an alpha-male throwing his manly bulk at a bunch of godless, liberal pukes.

My grandma was a farmer's wife, embodying those good old qualities of Christian kindness the little mom's club pretends to represent now with all their "likes" on the pictures of your damn kids. Grandpa Guy was a dyed in the wool Democrat, somebody who thought FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society were good things. Not like the good Christians on fb who will accept church charity if they must, but brag of how they would let their children starve before they accepted a dime from that Food Stamp president. (Unemployment compensation is all right.)

Anyhow, back to Grandpa. I was 8-years-old, he told me, "Be a Democrat all your life" and I'm doing it, which makes me an anomaly in my family since Dad and some other family members forgot where they came from. Sure this column will make me about as popular with my relation as literary giant Robert Lowell was with his relatives after publishing his book 1960 book of confessional poetry, Life Studies. But that's a matter for I-don't-give-a-shit.

I'll stick with Grandpa and the politics of human kindness. Putin's granddad was a cook for Stalin. Putin was a KGB spy for the totalitarian Soviet government. Conservatives, I've found love him. But I thought that's what they hated about Obama. Isn't liberalism the equivalent of communism and don't the Tea Baggers want the commie bastard to step outside the White House with his hands up?

"Mr. President, you're not a king." "We have a dictatorship in the White House." "I think Obama could be the sixth head of the beast from Revealation."

Really? I thought he was some wimp in mom jeans. Even if he does wear maternal denim, so the hell what? If he wore low rise, the Putin-lovin', Teabaggin' with Jesus crowd would just rant about the presidential ass crack emanating socialist jeans.

None other than the thick-skinned Sarah Palin was on Faux News, dissing Obama as a wimp, while waxing over Putin's masculinity. She knows so much about Russian foreign policy. (Hell, she can see Putin sending in the troops from her own backyard.) Palin likes the tough guys like her washed up rocker friend who shit in his diaper to avoid the draft in Vietnam.

The shitter and the quitter

Then you have O'Reilly and Hannity going on about their boy. Putin without a shirt on. Putin has muscles like Conan the Austrian Barbarian. Putin makes a decision and people react, kind of like when Hitler made the decision to implement Kristallnacht. Putin hunts tigers and wrestles grizzly bears.

What'd'you know? Some of the biggest fag bashers on Fox "News" expressing a come-in-your-pants man crush on Vladimir Putin? When are they going to talk about what his body must look like in the Russian shower?

Let's not forget the Fox team, the Tea Party, the Christian Right, the Aryan Brotherhood - they love America and everything it stands for. Sure the U.S. has issued sanctions against Russia for it merciless invasion of the Crimea in the Ukraine and they hate the U.S. president more than they could ever love this country, anything or anyone else, but they love America all right. They just prefer the bully their country is opposing.

Sweet, sensitive little men and ladies liking cute little pics of our kids and gleefully posting slogans of pseudo-Christian love.  God is good  Also, they love Vladimir Putin as he's a reflection of everything

they really are