Or Wow! I found a calm, rational, pro-civil rights conservative Christian!

This person's basic argument is that if conservative Christians want civil rights protections to protect their rights to their beliefs and practices, then they must support civil rights for all, even those with whom they strongly disagree. I went to this person's main site, Musings on Christianity, Homosexuality, and the Bible, and found that it's a woman who has made it a personal mission to learn and think about homosexuality. She's married, a mother, and a "conservative Bible-believing Christian". While she does believe that "homosexual acts" are sinful, she does not believe that sexual orientation is a choice. She seems to be a kind, compassionate, intelligent, thoughful, genuine person. Wow, how refreshing. Following is a great excerpt from one of her other essays:

If I only had a dollar for every time I have felt embarrassed by other Christians, or at least by those who have tried to pass themselves off as such.

I remember one night watching the news coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard. Matthew Shepard, I'm sure you recall, was the gay college student who was lured out of a campus bar by two other men pretending also to be gay, then was robbed, pistol-whipped and tied to a crude fence in the middle of a lonely field in Laramie, Wyoming. By the time he was found 18 hours later, bleeding and still tied to the fence, it was too late to save him. He died in a coma five days later.

The tragedy was immediately seized upon as an opportunity for people to vent their opinions about hate-crimes and homosexuality. And as I watched that night on television how the aftermath of Shepard's death was quickly degenerating into an ugly shouting match between "Christian fundamentalists" and "gay activists," the television news camera panned a frenzied crowd and focused on one man picketing with a sign: GOD HATES FAGS!

At that moment my husband turned to me and said, "Why do we have to call ourselves Christians? Isn't there some other label we can use, to distinguish ourselves from people like that?"

Now this wouldn't be surprising coming from a liberal Christian, but this is a conservative Christian! Her essays are well-written, thoughtful, and very human. The only "bad" thing about her site is that there isn't more on it! I guess she's gotten busy with other things, because she hasn't added to it since 2002. But what's there is quite valuable.

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