Amen, Mr. Pitts

Just picked this letter-to-the-editor in the Miami Herald up from Daily Kos diarist WhyWhat about a high-school debate on homosexuality (broadcast school-wide on three successive days during morning announcements). What the writer, Leonard Pitts, has to say in admonising school teacher Donna Reddick, who forcefully heaved the Bible into the rhetorical mix, isn't completely new under the sun (i.e., there are allusions to other Bible verses that we certainly don't follow literally any more). But it's said forcefully and frankly, and sums up a lot of my feelings toward the Christianist homophobes who are trying cleave this country in two. Give it a full read, but here are some tantalizing highlights:

The coup de grace, though, was you invoking Sodom and Gomorrah and telling students homosexuality was ''wrong according to the Bible'' because God ordered humanity to multiply, which gay couples cannot do.

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You're entitled to think what you think, no matter how stupid it might be.

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Put simply, I've had it up to here with the moral hypocrisy and intellectual constipation of Bible literalists.

By which I mean people like you, who dress their homophobia up in Scripture, insisting with sanctimonious sincerity that it's not homophobia at all, but just a pious determination to live according to what the Bible says.

And never mind that the Bible also says it is ''disgraceful'' for a woman to speak out in church (1 Corinthians 14:34-36) and that if she has any questions, she should wait till she gets home and ask her husband. Never mind that the Bible says the penalty for going to work on Sunday (Exodus 35:1-3) is death. Never mind that the Bible says the man who rapes a virgin should buy her from her father (Deuteronomy 22:28-29) and marry her.

I'm going to speculate that you don't observe or support those commands. Which says to me that yours is a literalism of convenience, a literalism that is literal only so long as it allows you to condemn what you'd be condemning anyway and takes no skin off your personal backside.

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You resemble many of your and my co-religionists, whose faith so often expresses itself in an obsessive focus on one or two hot-button issues -- and seemingly nowhere else.

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Just once, I'd like to read a headline that said a Christian group was boycotting to feed the hungry. Or marching to house the homeless. Or pushing Congress to provide the poor with healthcare worthy of the name.