IGF CultureWatch

My girlfriend Jenny and I were standing on a subway platform in Harlem. She had flown in from Chicago and had just gotten off a bus from LaGuardia - I was coming home from work in Times Square.

We waited for the train, facing each other, holding hands, talking, kissing occasionally.

A police officer approached us.

I felt a flash of anxiety. Was she going to tell us that we were disturbing other commuters? Was she going to say something that knifed our tender reunion?

"Ladies," she said. "You better invite me to the wedding." She pointed to her badge. "Dawn Matthews," she said. "21st precinct." She grinned.

This is what it's like to be in love in 2009, in the year of Gay Marriage.

It's very different from being in love in 1992, when - if I held the hand of my first girlfriend - it was a good bet that someone would shout "dykes" or worse as they passed us in the street.

Or in 2003, when my girlfriend and I were sometimes given dirty looks, and were once called "faggots" as we wandered the (very lesbian-friendly) streets of Andersonville in Chicago.

Then, all people could see was that we were two women and our love was wrong.

Now, people seem to only notice that we are in love, and it is right.

And we ARE in love - we are wildly, crazily, insanely in love, though it's been more than nine months since we started dating.

Jenny and I move in together this week. We had thought that I might move to Chicago for a few months earlier in the spring, but those plans fell through. So we kept up our relationship through video chat and email and long talks on the phone at midnight and monthly visits.

And whenever we've visited each other, someone has publicly applauded us for being in love.

There was that police officer. There was the chic African-American woman on a train who, once we had gotten up to leave, shouted out after us, "You go, girls! You're beautiful!" There were the gay men who applauded us when we walked into a Chicago bar because they had seen us kissing outside.

And there was the elderly white man at a Broadway theater who sat behind us with his wife and tapped me on the shoulder.

"Excuse me," he said. "I don't mean to disturb you. But I just wanted to say that you both have excellent taste in women."

This week, Jenny and I are driving her things to New York, so that she can live with me and my dog. We hope to get married once New York gets its act together and makes it legal. But in the meantime, we joke, we're going to lie on a blanket in Central Park and be in love.

And in 2009, that's OK. No, gays and lesbians don't have our full civil rights. No, we don't have marriage recognition in most states, or our relationships recognized by the federal government. No, we can still be fired in some states for being gay. No, we are not safe from gay bashing, or bullying, or Department of Justice briefs that compare our marriages to incest.

But America is becoming an ever more welcoming place to be gay, in small towns and big cities. People are focusing less on our gender and more on the strength of our relationships; they are seeing us less as stereotypes and more as human beings.

And that's good news for a lesbian couple who can't hide that we're in love.

It is starting to seem like a tautology that if the Obama administration is asked to weigh in on a question of gay rights, then it will come down on the wrong side.

It happened again last week.

Obama's Department of Justice crafted a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act that used all of the arguments of the anti-gay Right. Heterosexual marriages are "traditional," it said. Denying federal recognition to legal state marriages doesn't hurt anyone, it said. States don't have to recognize gay marriages performed by other states just like they don't have to recognize a marriage between an uncle and his niece, it said.

We do not have a "friend in the White House."

We do not have a "fierce advocate."

What we have is an enemy.

He is, sure, a wolf in sheep's clothing, wearing a glittering costume embroidered with "Hope," "Change" and empty promises. He is master of doublespeak, saying that he is against DOMA yet not protesting when a Bush-holdover presses a poison dagger of a marriage brief into our chests; he says he supports the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, but has yet to issue a Stop-Loss order to keep hunted gays and lesbians in their military jobs.

Leave gay rights to the states, he says. Leave them to Congress.

Barack Obama is no longer hurting us with benign neglect. Barack Obama's administration is now actively attacking us.

If George W. Bush had responded this way to Don't Ask, Don't Tell and DOMA, we would be rising in the streets. We would be protesting in front of the White House.

Barack Obama is not our friend. He is not our fierce advocate. He is someone who used our vulnerability and hope to get elected.

Joe Solmonese, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, wrote a beautiful letter to the White House expressing just this sense of betrayal. "I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones," he wrote.

Barack Obama has forgotten, perhaps, that we are human beings with families. He perhaps has made the erroneous assumption that we will wait our turn humbly, hats in hand, until he decides to be beneficent in the waning days of a second term.

We need to show him that we will not.

The world is a different place than it was five years ago or even six months ago. Establishment Republicans - Dick Cheney! Joe Bruno in New York! - are now coming out in favor of gay marriage. A majority of Americans favor the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Gay and lesbian civil rights are no longer a fringe issue. And gays and lesbians are no longer a minority who will be placated with hate crimes legislation in lieu of full and equal rights.

There will always be urgent issues competing for a President's attention. That's what being President is. But those other issues shouldn't make us back down. In fact, they should make us fight harder.

Health care? DOMA might make it impossible for our spouses to be our dependents in a federal health care program. The economy? Our families would certainly be better off if the money we paid to Social Security could go to our loved ones if we passed before they did. The war? America would have a stronger fighting force if it stopped ejecting perfectly qualified, long-serving soldiers just because they are gay.

We must stop giving Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. It is time to show him that we will not support a second term, that we will not support the Democratic Party, if this continues. We will not give a dollar of our money. We will not give an hour of our time.

We will Stonewall him and his administration. The time for being treated as the equal Americans we are has come, and we will not be pushed aside.

Illinois's civil unions bill, after passing a state House committee, was left to languish at the end of the session.

The bill is still alive, if barely: it can be passed by the state legislature anytime in the next two years.

It doesn't really surprise me that the bill hasn't moved this year. Despite neighboring Iowa's fantastic move to full marriage equality, Illinois's state legislature had other things to worry about, thanks to the corruption scandal surrounding Rod Blagojevich. It's also, despite it's tentative blue status, fairly conservative - note that the bill was for civil unions in a year when marriage is the biggest player at the table.

But that should have been its advantage.

Let's pause for a moment to consider this: Illinois is President Barack Obama's home state (at least as an adult). Obama has said - emphatically - that he is for civil unions, not marriage. And that he wants equal legal rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Why didn't Obama lobby for the bill?

Why didn't he say in a speech something like: "My own great state of Illinois is working now to further the equal rights of gay couples. I hope they pass the current civil unions bill."

Why didn't he call his former friends in the legislature, where he was a state senator, after all, and encourage them to do the right thing?

If he's not for equal marriage - and he's not (he prefers gays and lesbians to have "separate but equal" status instead) - why isn't he trumpeting the recent passage of domestic partnerships in Nevada, or partnerships in Washington state?

Easy. It's the same reason he hasn't moved on the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell military ban (which the majority of Americans support) and why he didn't issue a supportive statement on the Uniting American Families Act when it was being debated in Congress last week.

Gays and lesbians are not his priority. Which is why the only "accomplishment" his administration could claim in proclaiming the White House's support for Gay Pride month was this:

"I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions in the first 100 days of an Administration."

Except - ooops - the Advocate reported that this isn't true. President Clinton nominated Roberta Achtenberg as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity and Bruce Lehman as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, both within his first hundred days.

The White House's response?

"President Obama remains the first president to have openly LGBT candidates confirmed by the Senate during the first 100 days of an Administration."

Call me crazy, but that doesn't seem like "fierce" advocacy to me. Things got worse this week when the Supreme Court turned down the opportunity to review Don't Ask, Don't Tell - partly because the Obama Administration argued that it was a "rational" policy.

Obama has been mostly silent on our issues since taking office. Insiders tell us that he will keep his promises. They tell us to be patient. They tell us to wait.

Maybe they're right. Maybe not. Maybe the Obama Administration really is working like crazy behind the scenes to dismantle DOMA and Don't Ask, to support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Uniting American Families Act. Maybe they're just hoping if they placate us enough, we'll go away.

All we know for sure when it comes to this Administration is that hope is not enough. Promises of "change" are not enough. We supported Obama with our dollars and our labor, and it is time he supports us in return.

But until he does, the good people of Illinois - like good people all over the country - have to wait for their rights.

Years from now, Proposition 8 is going to be thought of as the tragedy that sparked a revolution.

We've seen it before. Stonewall, 40 years ago this month. AIDS 25 years ago. It has always been the case that our greatest community successes were built on the backs of what at first seemed like disasters.

Our strength is that setbacks prod us to work together even more closely.

Before last November, most gays and lesbians who wanted equal marriage weren't very active about it. We might talk to each other about inequality, but except for our activist wing, we weren't taking to the streets.

Marriage across the United States seemed like a pipe dream. When New England's Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders launched their 6 X '12 campaign - pressing for gay marriage in all New England states by 2012 - I almost laughed. No way, I thought.

At the time, only Connecticut and Massachusetts had equal marriage. California was taking it away. And New York, while it recognized marriages performed elsewhere, looked blockaded by religious Democrats in the state senate.

But after the November vote for Proposition 8, gays, lesbians and our allies started marching in the street. We started boycotting. We started writing letters. We started telling our stories. And it became clear: there are ramifications if citizens and legislators vote against us. We are paying attention. And we will act.

Then we started to see states jump forward with equal marriage. Iowa. Maine. Vermont. Soon New Hampshire. The District of Columbia started recognizing marriages performed elsewhere - and Maryland might go the same way in a few weeks. The Nevada state legislature overturned the governor's veto of domestic partnership rights. Pennsylvania is taking up a marriage bill.

Some insiders are even predicting that New York may vote for equal marriage before Pride.

What felt like a Sisyphean struggle a year ago now feels like a landslide. Even last week's California state Supreme Court decision felt something like a victory. The judges, in upholding Prop 8, ruled as narrowly as they could. Minority rights can't be taken away, they said. They can only be called something else.

Said the opinion:

"Instead, the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term marriage for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law, but leaving undisturbed all of the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple's state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

"Among the various constitutional protections recognized in the Marriage Cases as available to same-sex couples, it is only the designation of marriage - albeit significant - that has been removed by this initiative measure."

They didn't overturn the 18,000 marriages. And they didn't overturn gay rights. Gays and lesbians have all the rights of married couples, they said. Just not the word "marriage."

And yes, that's "separate but equal." But - good news! - that's SEPARATE BUT EQUAL. And in our country we have a 50-year understanding that separate but equal is not equal at all. Which means that the decision is even more likely to be overturned the next time voters head to the polls.

June is Pride month, and we have a lot to celebrate. We still have to fight. We still have to do the difficult personal and political work of reaching our to communities of faith and of color to reassure them that by supporting us, they don't lose anything.

Forty years ago this month, we had Stonewall. Now we have Prop H8. It is exactly what our movement needed.

We have this idea in the gay community that Christianity is against us. We think that every clergy member everywhere is combing the Bible on Saturday nights, trying to find new ways of convincing their congregations the next morning that gays and lesbians are not equal citizens, that we are condemned by God.

We imagine a Berlin Wall of churches between us and our full civil rights, poking their spires into the sky like impassable spikes.

We think that churches inspire people only to hate us.

We are wrong.

"On a range of policy issues, Mainline Protestant clergy are generally more supportive of LGBT rights than the general population," according to a report released last week from the progressive think tank Public Religion Research.

It says that 67 percent of Mainline clergy support hate crimes legislation; 66 percent support workplace protections for gays and lesbians; 55 percent support gay and lesbian adoption rights; 45 percent support the ordination of gays and lesbians with no special requirements (like celibacy). One third support same-sex marriage and another third support civil unions, meaning that only a third doesn't think that gays and lesbians should have full civil partnership rights.

When pastors are assured that churches will be free to perform marriages for gays and lesbians or not, according to the doctrine of their denomination and the feeling of their congregations, 46 percent support equal marriage.

Mainline denominations are those, like Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist and Obama's own United Church of Christ, that identify themselves as Protestant but are not born again or evangelical.

We tend to hear a lot about evangelical pastors - Rick Warren, for example - in the media, and a lot about evangelical and born again beliefs. But evangelicals, with their conservative, literal view of the Bible, do not equal all of Christianity.

And even evangelicals are starting to move leftward on gay rights (including Rick Warren, who has started publicly softening his previous anti-gay stance). The "New Evangelicals" think that their churches should focus on poverty and improving the environment. In 1987, 73 percent of white evangelical Protestants thought that a teacher should be fired for being gay, according to a Pew Research Center poll. This year, only 40 percent thought so.

Younger evangelicals are, like the rest of the country, more likely to approve of - or just not care about - equal marriage. Last summer, a Faith in Public Life poll found that 24 percent of evangelicals 18-34 support gay marriage, up from 17 percent just three years ago. That's a seven-point difference and that's huge.

For a while, I was in conversation with a minister of a small evangelical congregation who was trying to find a way to keep his church's theology while also welcoming gays and lesbians into the pews.

"Know that I'm not the only one," he said. "There are more evangelicals where I am than most people realize."

There are more religious leaders of all denominations who are for gays and lesbian rights than we realize as well. In New York, for example, hundreds of ministers have joined together as part of Pride in the Pulpit to advocate for equality and justice for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders.

"Religion" is not a monolith, especially in the United States. There are religious leaders who are for gay and lesbian rights and they are voicing their support in the pulpit.

Take my friend's pastor, a Lutheran minister who on Mother's Day said in his sermon, "I have a very hard time finding any reason to be afraid of what is happening in Massachusetts and Iowa and elsewhere. The institution of marriage is strong; it cannot be damaged by extending it to others who want to get married. On the contrary, marriage is strengthened by doing so."

Christianity is not out to get gays and lesbians, despite the popular perception. Not all churches are barring our way to equal rights. Indeed, some are opening the door.

By the end of Barack Obama's first 100 days, it became clear: gays and lesbians are not this president's priority.

He stopped mentioning us, except for two notable cases: the brouhaha surrounding the invitation of Rev. Rick Warren to give the inaugural prayer, and the call to Congress to support including sexual orientation and gender identity in hate crimes.

Then, at just about the 100 day mark, bloggers started pointing out something disturbing: WhiteHouse.gov had stripped its "civil rights" page of almost all things gay.

It narrowed down promises to the LGBT community from eight to three, and from a full half-page to a few sentences.

When bloggers called the White House to protest, some of the promises came back, including a full repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell - but talk of repealing the Defense of Marriage Act had disappeared.

What also disappeared was this moving quote from Obama himself, on June 1, 2007, when he was still in campaign mode and working for our votes:

"While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."

When blogger John Aravosis called the White House to ask what was going on, this is what he was told:

"Recently we overhauled the issues section to concisely reflect the President's broad agenda, and will continue to update these pages. The President's commitment on LGBT issues has not changed, and any suggestions to the contrary are false."

Well. Maybe we'd believe that Obama's commitment hasn't changed if we saw some action on our issues, instead of almost complete avoidance.

Obama made that call for hate crimes legislation, great. Of course, that was the easiest of our issues to get behind - it is supported by the majority of our police forces and attorneys general, after all.

And yes, he's facing big issues - the economic meltdown, two wars, now a retiring Supreme Court Justice. But in his first 100 days, he was somehow able to make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, lift Bush's ban on stem cell research, lift the traveling restrictions for Cuban-Americans to Cuba, and protect two million acres of wilderness.

In other words, he made significant, sweeping change in government and for some groups of people, change that is only tangentially related - if at all - to the economy, or to the wars.

We've seen change, all right. Good change. For others. But we haven't seen change for gays and lesbians and we haven't seen proof of commitment to our issues.

Campaign promises are campaign promises. It is not enough that Obama said he was our "fierce advocate" during the campaign. He needs to now show us that he is our president as well.

Richard Socarides, a former adviser to President Clinton, pointed out in the Washington Post that Obama has no gay friends close to him in the administration. He does, however, seem to have evangelical friends.

If it's true that you can tell a person by the company they keep, then we may be in deeper trouble than we know. We'll have to see what the next 100 days brings.

Obama is a good president. But we are clearly not his priority. He has forgotten, perhaps, that we are part of America's "founding promise." Which means we need to stop being patient, stop giving him time, and start raising our voices until we are heard.

On Good Friday, Jenny and I went to services at a Catholic church near Jenny's lesbian neighborhood of Andersonville in Chicago.

Jenny and I have had a lot of discussions about which denomination should be our church home. We take the decision seriously, because we both take religion seriously; Jenny grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school, and though I was baptized in that faith as well, I alternated between mass with my dad and the liberal (and gay-welcoming) United Church of Christ with my mom. As a young adult, I attended a (couldn't be more progressive) Unitarian-Universalist seminary briefly.

We both like the "high church" ritual of Catholicism - but we want children together, and neither of us wants to raise kids in a tradition that both tells girls that no matter how faithful they may be, they can never be priests, and that tells children of gay parents that our relationships and families are immoral.

"I don't want our kids to hear one thing in church and then have us say another thing to them in the car ride home," Jenny said.

But kids are still a few years in our future, so when we're in the same city, we try to go to church together, and we alternate denominations.

On Good Friday, then, it was a Catholic church - though Jenny was worried about taking me somewhere we might not be welcome on such a solemn holy day.

Most Christian churches have an alternate sort of service on Good Friday, the day they commemorate the death of Jesus on the cross. In Catholic churches, this means that there is no mass, so there is more flexibility in the service.

Even so, we were stunned to see a woman lead the service at this particular church. To see a woman standing at the altar. To see a woman holding up the Host during communion. To hear all the parts in the traditional crucifixion story - Pontius Pilate, voices in the crowd, and Jesus himself - read by women.

Most of all though, we were startled to hear the homily, which was all about social justice - and about how all should be welcome in the Catholic church despite theological disagreements, including gays and lesbians.

Jenny grabbed my arm. "What is happening right now?" she whispered.

We were awestruck - and by awestruck, I mean that I was moved to tears.

For an hour, we had a taste of what the Catholic church could be: a warm, welcoming, sacred home that focused on comforting those who are suffering; on righting the situation of those who have been wronged; and on welcoming those who have been excluded.

It was revolutionary.

"If this was what the Catholic church was everywhere, I would convert," I told Jenny, as we left the church holding hands, the priest smiling at us.

Some might argue that a Catholic church that treats women equally and recognizes the sacredness of gay and lesbian relationships is not the Catholic church at all - but I think it is a Catholic church that hews closer to its social justice roots, and closer to the basic principles of inclusion for all that Jesus himself espoused.

In any case, that church did a brave thing, just as it is always brave to ask people to see what could be, instead of insisting that they live with what is.

During the prayers, the women led us to pray for all who are excluded, for all who are hurt by unfair legislation. And afterwards, I added my own prayer - for the world-wide Catholic church to become more like this, to become its own best possibility.

University of Chicago students recently showed us how protests against hate should be done.

When the Westboro Baptist Church - the cult-like organization led by Fred Phelps - trooped to campus to declare Obama the anti-Christ (he taught at the law school), they were carrying their usual array of hateful signs. These, of course, included the slogan that seems to be their favorite: God Hates Fags.

Now, there's no arguing with Fred Phelps or his family. People have tried various tactics - yelling back; talking respectfully; being aggressively friendly and saying things like, "God loves me, but God bless you!"; singing songs like "We Shall Overcome"; and, one of my favorites, standing in front of them with giant angel wings so that no one can see their rabid posturing. When the Westboro Church came to Harvard, for example, signs said "Cambridge Pride," and "Jesus loves me, this I know - for God made me so."

But Chicago students tried something else. Making fun of the Phelpses.

When the Phelps family arrived, they were greeted with a party. Students roasted 'smores. There were dance and music performances. Best of all, students carried signs their own signs. But instead of saying things like, "We're Here, We're Queer," or "No More Hate," they poked smart fun. "God Hates Figs," some posters and handouts said (and they included real Biblical references to prove their point); "God hates the new Facebook," said another. And my favorite: "Cthulhu hates chordates."

This is very U of C. I worked at the university for years, and I was always struck by their wry approach to fun. Other colleges have drunken galas; Chicago has a scavenger hunt that includes math problems and classical references.

When I heard about the Chicago protest - and saw pictures that included faculty and staff members I worked with - I was very proud.

Especially since Chicago is not Berkely. It is one of America's more conservative Universities, even among the undergraduate population.

Mocking hate has a long history in the gay community. Camp, drag queens, the radical cheerleaders, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are all ways that we have fought back against our own oppression using sly humor.

What makes this new is that it wasn't just gay and lesbian students who were protesting - it was the entire campus. It was straight students. Better, it included straight fraternity boys. One frat hung a banner declaring "Straight Huggin" - and half-naked men danced outside to the song "I'm Coming Out."

The message: People who hate gays are ridiculous.

Chicago was shaming the Phelps family.

And this marks a sea change.

It used to be that gays and lesbians were shamed for being homosexual. Now, straight people who actively and loudly detest gays and lesbians are being shamed as being narrow-minded and socially inappropriate.

We saw this with the backlash over the Proposition 8 vote, when there were boycotts against businesses that had given money to the campaign to ban gay marriage. It was interesting to me that we didn't hear boycotts against businesses who supported gay marriage.

This new shaming of the anti-gay right doesn't mean that we will get everything we want. It will still be a fight to overturn the gay military ban. It will be a fight to keep gay Americans and their foreign partners together. It will be a fight to allow gay men to give blood, and to keep employers from firing employees because they are gay - and most of all, it will be a fight to get the next state to give gay marriage a chance.

But it's one more sign of profound cultural change. And we can thank the University of Chicago for that.

Last week, a Grand Rapids, Mich., television station decided to pull an hour-long infomercial called "Speechless: Silencing the Christians."

Whether this was a good decision for gay and lesbian civil rights or a bad one depends on what happens next.

On the surface, of course, it seems good. The infomercial, produced by the gay-hating, radical right wing religious organization the American Family Association, is a stream of misdirection, misinformation and outright lies.

Through interviews with leaders of a small number of far-right organizations like Concerned Women for America, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, the Media Research Center and the ex-gay group Exodus International, Speechless tells a story that would be horrifying if it were true: gay and lesbian activists are using violence and intimidation to keep Christians from practicing their religion.

Of course, it's not true at all. Gay people aren't trying to pass laws to keep Christians from marrying, or attacking them on the street because they're Christian, or firing them from their places of employment (which would be illegal anyway, under federal anti-discrimination law that we'd like to extend to ourselves).

These things happen to gays and lesbians all the time.

The infomercial is dangerous, because it feeds on fear and uncertainty with inflammatory language and stock video that tries to scare viewers into believing that if even basic anti-discrimination laws are passed, then America's children (who, interestingly, all seem to be white in the pictures flashed across the screen) are in danger.

What, exactly, they are in danger of isn't made clear. Open-mindedness? Independent thinking?

This sort of infomercial, though, sways opinions in the same way those ridiculous, hate-mongering internet forwards do - by feeding on people's doubts and prejudices by saying things that aren't true, but that people fear are true. So in the world of internet forwards, then-candidate Barack Obama was a Muslim terrorist. And in the world of Speechless, gay people are opening fire on places of worship (really).

When the Human Rights Campaign learned that the station in Grand Rapids planned to air the infomercial, they put out a call to action. The station was flooded with messages from angry gays and lesbians demanding the piece be pulled.

And it was.

What I like about the HRC's call is that it requested that a reasoned debate on hate crime be substituted for the deceitful infomercial. That seems fair.

But the other side, of course, won't see it that way.

In fact, my guess is that the pulling of the infomercial will only lend fuel to the AFA fire - now they'll be able to point to it as just another example of gays and lesbians - and the "liberal" media - trying to stifle Christian speech.

I also worry that the controversy over the Grand Rapids television decision means that many more people are watching Speechless on the AFA website than would have ever seen it on a small, local TV channel.

And yet, when faced with trash like the AFA infomercial, we can't do nothing. We know that lies like these affect real people in our community, giving bigots who fire us and bash us an air of legitimacy.

So what should we do?

First, of course, we need to counter the AFA's lies with point-by-point truth.

But it is not facts that sway hearts - it is points of commonality.

We need to do a better job of building bridges between the gay and lesbian civil rights movement and more liberal faith communities. We need to highlight the experiences of gay and lesbian faith leaders - like Gene Robinson, Mel White and Peter Gomes. We need to start flooding the airwaves with pictures of gay people attending religious services.

We need to end the lie that religion and gayness are incompatible.

I know that a lot of gay people will be uncomfortable with this. Many gays and lesbians, religious or not, have been hurt by religious institutions. But the fact is that America is a religious country, far more religious than other Western countries. And many gays and lesbians who grew up in America are religious, too. We attend church and synagogue. We go to Buddhist temples. We celebrate annual religious holidays. We pray.

Gays and lesbians shouldn't have to deny any parts of ourselves - not our sexual orientation, and not our religious affiliation, should we have one. We can be both religious and gay.

We need to show that gays and lesbians aren't silencing Christians - because many of us are Christian, too.

Josh DuBois might be called a New Evangelical. He is a Pentecostal pastor (with a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton) who believes Jesus is his personal savior.

But he also seems to put more weight on the social gospel (that is, that Christians should take care of the poor and the disenfranchised) than on the old Evangelical hammers of gays and abortion.

Now the 26-year-old has a new position: head of the new President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Under Bush, this was called the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, and it spent a lot of money pushing abstinence-only programs.

Obama's idea is different. The office will go beyond grant giving to find ways to partner with religious organizations to find solutions to social problems. Most notably, at least for gays and lesbians, the Faith-Based Council will forbid religious organizations from discriminating against gays and lesbians when they hire for programs that are taxpayer supported.

That means if a church applies for a grant to fund a program that feeds the needy, the organization can't refuse to hire chefs or program directors or secretaries for the program just because they're gay.

And yet - it's not enough just to prove fairness in hiring. Gays and lesbians are rightly suspicious of federal programs that purport to be "faith based." For too long, faith has been a tool of exclusion for us. We've gotten used to hearing political leaders tell us they want to take our rights away because of their own superior "family values."

We might also be suspicious of Josh DuBois. DuBois has been silent about his personal beliefs on religious right touchstones like homosexuality and abortion, but I suspect he's not a religious centrist, despite being a Democrat. Columnist Sally Quinn notes that DuBois was the person who first floated Rick Warren's name as a possibly inaugural speaker.

DuBois, who was in charge of faith-based outreach for the Obama campaign as well, also put together the program that featured Donnie McClurkin, an "ex-gay" gospel singer who has said that "homosexuality is a curse."

Yet I'm going to give DuBois - and Obama - the benefit of the doubt here. DuBois is young. I don't think he did these things to send a message to gays and lesbians - I think he did these things because he doesn't figure us in at all.

And maybe that's partly our fault.

Gays and lesbians have given religion over to the right. This is not good. There are many religions that have denied us our personhood; there are many of us who have been hurt by the religious traditions we grew up in. But gays are a diverse people, and there are many of us who are religious or spiritual - and we should not be ignored by a national program that should serve the whole country.

My hope is that gay religious organizations will approach DuBois's office about funding their valuable social service programs that assist homeless queer youth, people with AIDS, and other disenfranchised LGBT communities. And that we will all make noise about it until we know that our programs are being treated equally.

There are plenty of gays and lesbians who will disagree with me here. They think that religion is poison, and we are fools to drink it. We shouldn't want to be part of a club that doesn't want to grant us membership. They think we should fight the existence of a faith-based anything in the West Wing.

That is a battle we won't win, not this time around, not with a president who was partly elected through the voter turnout strength of the black church.

But in any case, seeking equity when it comes to this new President's Council isn't a referendum on religion. It's about fairness. Take the military as an example. I'm not too keen on the whole military-industrial complex. But if there are gay people who want to fight in the military, then I support their right of equal access. It is not for me - but I will not deny my gay brothers and sisters their own choice.

If there is a federal conduit for getting funds to religious organizations, then gay religious organizations should be getting equal access to those funds. Any President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships should not only be reaching out to Evangelicals - it should also be reaching out to us.