by William Miller, 2-29-04

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On February 12, in brazen defiance of the Christian Coalition, God, and the Governator, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom permitted gays and lesbians to obtain marriage licenses, Two elderly lesbians, who had lived together for 51 years, became the first same-sex couple to get married.

Surely, I thought, God would not permit such an abomination to occur, especially on the day just before Friday the 13th. Was this all part of some sort of secret Satanic plot?

I waited with bated breath.

I expected San Francisco to get swept away by a 600 foot tidal wave or leveled by point-10 earthquake. Or maybe a plague of locusts, flies, frogs - or even pigeons. Worse, I expected all heterosexuals in California to abandon their wives, families, lovers, girl friends and the NBA Superstar Basketball Jam - and - led by the NBA all-stars themselves - stampede to West Hollywood to participate in a Bacchanalian free-for-all as all. This was, after all, exactly what all the tele-evangelists prophesied.

Certainly if God wished to take a stand on gay marriage, He had the perfect media event After all, the NBA was in town for the entire three-day weekend. I anticipated the moment - just at the most exciting second of the NBA All Star game - the announcer's voice... "We interrupt this broadcast for a special news bulletin "SAN FRANCISCO WIPED OUT BY HAIL of FIRE and BRIMSTONE!!!."

I am still waiting. But nothing has happened - except for a week of rainy weather, hardly unusual for this time of year. God did not turn Mayor Newsom into a pillar of salt, nor did heteros abandon the NBA basketball game in a frenzied pursuit of any one homo - much to the relief of every gay in LA, especially basketball fans.

Puzzled, I pulled out my Bible. I skipped all the fulminations in the Old Testament, which sound like something Taliban would dream up and which Christ himself frequently denounced. I also skipped the writings of Christ's apostles which are frequently either misguided or mistranslated. In stead, I concentrated on the words of Jesus Christ himself, as faithfully recorded in the Four Gospels

.Strangely enough, Jesus doesn't say anything about homosexuals - not even once. Perhaps I can understand. He seemed awfully busy performing miracles: walking on water, feeding the multitudes, and curing legions of sick people - without once asking them about their HMO's.

However, in spite of these preoccupations, Jesus nevertheless found time to castigate the wealthy. In fact he told the rich that their chances of getting into Heaven were about as slim as a camel passing through a needle's eye. He similarly attacked the Pharisees and the Sadducees - a sort of Biblical equivalent of the Moral Majority and the 700 Club- with equally damning fury.. But never once does Jesus condemn gay marriage.. Could this "sin of omission" really indicate God's true priorities?

The results of my research leave me strangely nonplused.. Perhaps God is more concerned about the plight of the billions of people condemned to lives of misery, poverty and despair than he is about two men who want to marry each other. Perhaps, too, God is more disturbed by the way so-called Christians condone economic policies which seem engineered to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Some how, too, the concluding words of a short story by Leo Tolstoy constantly come to my mind as if planted there by some divinely-inspired vision: , "Where love is, God is." Perhaps God, whose wisdom, love, and understanding surpass our ability to comprehend, is far more concerned about the love two people share with each other than with their sexual orientation.

In any rate, lacking any sort of theological training, I will leave it up to the righteous crusaders on the Christian Broadcasting Network to explain. And in the immortal words of the gay dramatist Oscar Wilde, "Pray, make your explanation improbable."

William Joseph Miller,
Los Angeles CA