For those with the stomach for it, comments are visible now in my archives. The Nov. 20 post that has some people up in arms is here.

I hesitate to link to anyone else at the moment for fear of bringing pool-pah down on others, but the comments by epenthesis on Dan's post are infuriating. I never said I thought her murder was a "good thing", and having to defend myself from homosexuals whose reading skills are on a par with National Review readers isn't something I should have to do.

My posting was sarcastic, and anyone who takes a post titled "Is it good for the gays?" as a statement of my position needs to just calm down. James said "The woman who did such great evil", not that she was evil.

Homos need to stop being such wimps. I shall not beg for a place at the table by swearing my allegiance to God, Apple Pie and the Ten Commandments before I post on such topics. Mr. Benedetto writes:

I think that if gays are going to continue to have any credibility in politics, our sympathies in cases like this are going to have to lie first and foremost with the victims. And that's one upsetting thing about Barry's and James's posts: until the criticism started to roll in, the only sympathy they expressed was for the wrong person.

...

Barry and James could have said what they had to say much better than they did, but they instead let their emotions get the better of them and ignored the most important truths of the case. They brought the outrage on their own heads.

I shall begin to preface my remarks with such niceties as soon as all monotheists (shall I refrain from calling them "sky god worshippers"?) posting on our sites, or writing about their faith, or invoking faith during their political speeches, preface theirs with apologies for:

• Falwell on 9/11
• Use of the "gay panic" defense
• The Catholic Church's silence in the face of the Holocaust
• The behavior of the Catholic Church during Argentina's "dirty war"
• The bishop of Philadelphia lobbying the city council against a domestic partner law
• George W. Bush and the Texas GOP on sodomy laws:

  Gov. George W. Bush has publicly supported the sodomy law, calling it a "symbol of traditional values" and said that he would veto any attempt to overturn the law legislatively. The state Republican Party platform also explicitly opposes the decriminalization of sodomy, stating that "the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society" and "contributes to the breakdown of the family unit."

• The Catholic preference of death by AIDS over the use of condoms -- shared with most fundamentalists

I could go on posting more examples -- involving birth control, people who say they aren't anti-gay but donate to anti-gay churches every Sunday, etc. -- but people with a brain will get the point.

Don't even get me started on people going to Lebanon, a country that went through a religious-based 15-year civil war, to convert Muslims. If you want to go help the less fortunate, do it. People that tempt poor children with toys to indoctrinate them into their cult are beneath contempt.

Over 200 years ago, a very wise German named Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote a play called Nathan the Wise about religious tolerance. I recommend reading it to remind ourselves of the ideas of the Enlightenment that the forces of religion fight to destroy. A full text in translation is available here.

I don't think I want to stay on this topic any longer. We shall now return to our regular coverage of art, culture, and pretty things.