Lou Sheldon: America's most homophobic Christian?
• Homophobia
I've tended to think of the Rev. Fred Phelps as America's homophobe supreme. But the Westboro clan is really impotent, unimportant and weird. Even the right-wing homophobic, anti-gay Christians disown them.
But there's the Traditional Values Coalition, Reverend Louis Sheldon who are becoming increasingly bitter and determined to block the loving marriages of gay men and women. American fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity at its most homophobic, paranoid and deadly.
A demographic that George Bush and the Republican Party are actively courting.
"They're the most active anti-gay group there is," says Chris Anders of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They're the one group out in the trenches, doing door-to-door knocking, hounding members of Congress."
This calling has consumed Sheldon since 1972, when as a Presbyterian pastor he learned that a gay rights group had introduced what he calls the "Homosexual Manifesto" at the Democratic National Convention. It was "all in there -- domestic partners, teaching in public schools, they wanted it all," he recalls. "That's when I realized I had to wake up."
Back then it was "not believable," he recalls. And then elements of that plan started to happen -- universities embracing transgender students, adoptions by same-sex couples, and then May 17: the day gay couples could marry in state-sanctioned services for the first time. "Open season on our children," Lafferty calls it, envisioning a future of kindergarten teachers in beards and skirts, propping pictures of their "spouse" by the shiny red apple.
For the Rev. Lou Sheldon And His Daughter, Marriage Means Only One Thing