The FAGAT Guide

The FAGAT Guide: "A Catholic anti-gay activist this summer decided to take an interesting step against us. Michael Hein of Augusta, ME, filmed this weekend's Southern Maine Gay Pride March. For those of you who have seen the New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles versions, the Portland one is about 15x less wild, and 100x less sexy. But Hein's goal was still to post the video online, as an example to other churchgoing Mainers of the immoral and outlandish behavior in which our people participate.

Quite frankly, it's a pretty good idea. During Pride Marches, many LGBT people take the opportunity to show how different and colorful we can be. For the rest of the year we go to school, we work, we go out, we take care of our families, and we worship just like everyone else, in relative obscurity. Our nightlife is relegated to small, out-of-the-way pockets of our cities, where straight people don't have to confront us in large groups. Except for this one day a year when we can march down the main thoroughfares of the places we live, and remind people that we are not exactly like them, and we're not ashamed.

To outsiders this can look intimidating, freakish, and even morally corrupt. So there will doubtless be many Catholic Mainers whose anti-gay fervor will be strengthened by watching Hein's video. We're guessing the focus of the clips will not be on P-Flag, Gay Veterans, Stonewall Seniors, or the LGBT University Students.

We wonder, though, whether the viewers and makers of this video will remember - while they are getting their hate juices boiling - the words of Leviticus: 19.

'Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself:'

See, we never asked you to think we were the same as you. We just asked you not to judge us. Seems like someone else had the same request, about 2,000 years ago."