I love this story. Perhaps the Republicans' chickens are finally coming home to roost after decades of stoking the flames of intolerance among white heterosexual Christians. Another wedge not mentioned in the article is between conservative Catholics, who are becoming more ardent in their desire for amnesty, and non-Catholic Republican traditionalists. Maybe the issue of immigration won't just divide the Republican coalition, maybe it will shatter it.

The impetus to keep gay people from marrying is the same one that doesn't allow them to serve openly in the military and has opposed every piece of gay rights legislation for the past thirty-five years - when the law begins to show an iota of regard for the humanity of gay people bigotry against them begins to be eroded and that's intolerable.

Romans weren't divided from one another on the basis of religion. Theirs was an amorphous polytheism that could absorb anything that didn't threaten the state. Americans of different religions, though generally polite to one another, don't socialize. Romans had no concept of biological race or ethnicity. Americans do, hence a disruptive inclination to favor one's own group - African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, etc. This seems to impede us from taking actions that would contribute to the common weal. In these respects we may be worse off than the Romans.

I'm an Obama supporter but this latest obtuse comment reminds me of his appearance on Larry King, perhaps a year ago, when he said "I don't think gay people should be abused more than necessary". That really took me aback - more than necessary?. I do wonder if Obama really is ready for prime time. I don't want to wonder because the two alternatives are so unappealing.

No serious white person and certainly no one who would consider voting for Obama believes he shares Wright's simplistic anger-distorted views. What we don't know and it seems we may never find out is the degree to which McCain shares the far more frightening and far more potentially consequential views of his aredent supporters, the reverends Hagee and Parsley. The former of whom is a fervent believer that the "end times" are now unfolding in the Middle East while the latter is a Christian Dominionist who would dearly love to see our Constitution and Bill of Rights shredded to be replaced by some sort of Old Testament Sharia Law. What an outrageous double standard and misplacement of where the real concerns ought to lie.

I think too many liberals today project their very modern sensibilities - the equality of women, equality of people of all races and the still to be achieved equality of gay people -onto the hippies. There were hippies,of course, who fought for these things ardently but there were also a greaty many just along for the thrills. The average male hippie had a sexist mentality, and didn't shrink from expressing it, that would give a Republican-voting truck driver of today pause. A person today is far more likely to receive a respectful hearing on the rightness and value of gay rights from an evangelical Christian than he or she would have from the typical hippie and Charles Manson, to use an egregious example, had little trouble collecting a band of followers while espousing the most appalling racism. Ah, but then there was the music. That incredible music.

Uh oh. I fear they're wading into liberal moral relativism. Hmm. Here I thought the Bible and the Word of God was supposed to be as clear-cut as a cell phone manual.

I read your posting five times over and can't make heads or tails of it.

After 25 years of having every rational idea shot down because it doesn't comport with "faith" and the sensibilities of all those people living in the "heartland" who supposedly spend all their time baking apple pies and listening to Lawrence Welk a few million of us are getting increasingly fed up as we see religious hypocrites leading our country down the drain.

Name the issue. If it fits anywhere in the constellation of "culture war issues" you can be sure the Straight Talker's positions have been all over the map. Fundamentally he just doesn't care one way or the other about any of it. No one, neither liberal nor conservative, who does care should trust him.

Even as an Obama supporter there is some reason to believe he instinctively lumps all whites together or at least all whites but the most affluent and educated. There are tremendous differences among white people, to say the least. I grew up in the 60's and 70's in a growing suburb of Chicago that had only recently been a small rural town with feed stores where chicks and ducklings were for sale. On my few blocks that made up my world as a child there was my own basically secular and lapsed Catholic family from the University of Chicago, there was the semi-rural Protestant family who still hunted and had hundreds of animal heads in their basemement to show for it. There was the stiff Lawrence Welk family who worked for AT&T and were determined that all their children would be geniuses. There was the resentful family of Yugoslav decent whose father repaired cars who felt everyone but them was getting a break. Then there was the old Midwestern Catholic family with eight children still so connected to their rural relatives that they still plucked their own chickens in their kitchen. Quite a stew it was. America is complex and it's very foolish to generalise before an audience of donors in San Francisco. Especially when San Francisco has become Republican code for Gay. I know. I'm gay.