Archbishop outlines reasons for gay marriage, sorta

     Several readers last week accused me of being “obsessed” with same-sex marriage, as if the U.S. Supreme Court weren’t right now debating what the New York Times calls “one of the great civil rights issues of the age.”
     It isn’t just me. When I asked on Facebook for suggestions what I should ask Archbishop Blase Cupich when he stopped by the newspaper Thursday, the first suggestion was: “What are his thoughts on civil rights for LGBTs, regardless of Church teachings?”
     A good question. But awkward. I was in no rush. As our hour was winding down, I diplomatically observed that his predecessor, Cardinal George, had strong views on this topic; where did he stand? Cupich’s answer was elaborate, but I’m going to share it in its entirety:
     “In Washington state there was a referendum on this and, my position was very clear. First of all I didn’t want anybody using this debate to in any way demean or denigrate people who have same sex attraction — gay people, lesbians, bisexual, trans — I didn’t want to be part of any of that, because there were voices in fact to demean people. My issue was, not against somebody, but what are we doing in re-defining marriage? Because marriage traditionally has been that union by which we continue the next generation, and there was specific code of law that would support families that take the risk and the responsibility of bringing children into world and preserving the human race. My argument was, what are we doing in not giving those kind of special laws and protections to that group of people who do something to benefit society.”
     Let me interrupt here to point out two things: first, in the 2012 referendum he refers to, Washington State voters approved of gay marriage, 54 percent to 46 percent. Second, that his answer would fit perfectly had I asked, “Hey, is it a good idea to scrap marriage entirely for straight people?”
     The archbishop continued:
     “There was a domestic partnership law in the state of Washington which gave the same rights as marriage, the bill was to just rename it and make it all marriage. I objected to it because I think there’s something unique about the marriage between a man and a woman.”
     Here, I did object: it isn't as if gay couples don't raise kids (kids whom, I didn't have the chutzpah to mention, often are the products of failed heterosexual relationships, adopted from unions that fail for reasons other than being undermined because gays are allowed to wed in 36 states and the District of Columbia).
     "For instance, I found it interesting the new marriage law in Washington state placed within the code the same requirements that a heterosexual couple previously had, that is, the law against consanguinity marriages, in terms of relationship."
     ["Consanguinity," by the way, means blood relations.]
     "That's there because of the genetic deformity that could result in consanguinity marriages. But that's being imposed on gay couples and you wonder: Why? That gives a hint there's something different and unique about heterosexual couples coming to marriage, for society. I think families are so much in trouble, they're under so much pressure, it does take a risk to bring children in the world, to educate them, to preserve the human race, I think society has a vested interest in specially helping those couples do that. That was my argument."
     To me, everything the archbishop said, except for his conclusions, is an argument for gay marriage. First, the risks of incestuous children—not a huge social ill, certainly—is not a concern for same-sex marriages. Second, he emphasized the difficulty of raising children. As the father of two teens, I can vouch for that. But you know what makes it even tougher? Society refusing to acknowledge the full validity of your union.
      Assuming Cupich isn't slyly advocating for gay marriage, and I don't think he is, the core of his argument hangs on an unspoken, unsupported assumption: He's implying a harm; that we need marriage to help straight couples, and gays wreck it, ineffably, by their participation. But there is no harm. The only harm is imaginary and self-inflicted, the exact demeaning degradation he adjured at the start of his remarks. Someday an archbishop will acknowledge this. But that day is not today.

I guess they're for Brian Urlacher

     On Tuesday, a publicist invited me to "Come meet former Bears player Brian Urlacher." 
      I'd say I ignored the invitation, but I might never have seen it. I don't recall seeing it. I get a lot of email. On Thursday, she asked again, more personally: I tend to notice my own name. It's a failing.
     Brian Urlacher...well, I know he's a Bears player, or was. She spilled the beans on that much in her invitation. And he's ... bald. I remember that much.
     Thus drains my entire knowledge of the man. I vaguely remember him leaving recently. Something about a contract. That would explain the "former Bears player" part.
     So the honest answer was, "God, no." Particularly not late on a Friday afternoon. But I am a newspaper employee, still, and take my responsibilities to my publication seriously. A team player, in my own right. So I stepped out into the newsroom. I have an opportunity to talk to Brian Urlacher, I said to the sports folk, should I? Is there anything you'd like to know? The sports department said there was.
      Okay, I told the publicist, who told me that, as with Aladdin and the lamp, I would be allowed three questions ("Your last question should be to ask for three more questions," said a wag in sports) and could she know what those questions are? This is sometimes requested by the biggest celebrities and most important captains of industry, and normally I wouldn't do it in this situation. But I have no knowledge of the man, as I said, and didn't want to divert my schedule—we were to talk at 4:40 p.m. on Friday—only to have him refuse to answer some question on a verbotten subject. Or get mad. He's a big guy.  I knew that much.
      "We're wondering whether the Bears are going to retire his number, and what his relationship with the Bears is now," I said, repeating what I had been told to inquire about. She instructed me that I was not to ask about his personal life—I assume it must be interesting; which is why he didn't want to talk about it, and I honestly replied that I have no interest in his personal life, managing not to add, "or his professional life."
     That was acceptable,and I arrived 15 minutes early, checked in—this was at the Microsoft store on Michigan. Urlacher was running late, as is celebrity's privilege, so I wandered into the tall, narrow, North Bridge mall, where I hadn't been in years. A vigorous young Israeli woman tried to hand me some kind of facial creme. No thank you. A guy hawked time shares. "Let's not waste your time," I said, wishing I had put it, "Let's not waste our time." There was Nordstrom's, and I went into the men's section on the second floor.

   There I noticed this rack of shirts. Let me point out that they are not in a glass case, or behind a velvet rope. The rack is right next to the aisle, near the mall entrance. You practically bump into it.
     The above is known as "foreshadowing."
     I happen to be in need of dress shirts, as the collars on a few of mine are fraying from repeated use over a period of years. And I like Ralph Lauren, I own a number of their shirts, paying as much as $30 apiece for them at places like T.J. Maxx. Quite a bit, but I feel they're worth it, just for the psychic boost that the Ralph Lauren label brings, giving me the pleasant delusion that I am of the pony and pied-a-terre set when I put one on.
     Of course I would expect to pay more for these, in an actual Nordstrom's, not even a Nordstrom's Rack. But heck, I have my job, still. Perhaps I would splurge on an expensive shirt. I looked at  the label.
     The shirts cost ...
     You know, when I told this story to my wife, I asked her to guess. She hummed in thought, pursed her lips, looked up, and, reaching into the upper limits of her imagination of luxury, said, "$175."
      Now your turn to guess. Got it in mind? 
      Three hundred and fifty dollars. These shirts are $350 apiece. I looked around at the store in disbelief, as if expecting an audience, snickering. The place was not depopulated. People were trying things on, hurrying here and there. I felt as if I had discovered a crack in the universe, in my universe anyway. This was like opening a restaurant menu and seeing they are charging $27 for a cup of coffee. At some point, while I was busy doing other things, the world leaped past me.
      The middle class must really be hollowing out. When I was a young man, I shopped at Mark Shale and Neiman Marcus, Marshall Field's and Lord & Taylor. True, I looked for sales, but I was in the store, and paying full price was not unthinkable. Now the first price tag I look at makes me feel like a bum being shooed away from the kitchen door by a haughty maitre d'. I not only can't imagine my paying that, I can't imagine anyone paying that. And I have a pretty good imagination. 

Postscript

     Oh, and Brian Urlacher was very polite and pleasant and answered my three questions, but I must have asked the wrong questions, because the answers were not remarkable, certainly not as remarkable as those shirts. I did take a picture.

     

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Man this job is fun, sometimes. Over the past week, I spent time talking to both Archbishop Blase Cupich and former Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher (the former was more interesting and circumspect, the latter, nicer and more candid). I had lunch with Bill Daley by complete accident. We happened to be sitting at the same table at a luncheon at the Union League Club, which I visited shortly after touring this singular place, a short drive from Chicago. Journalism might be in trouble, but it's still here, and weeks like this, you just want to look up at the sky and say, "Aw geez, does this really all have to go away?"
     To be honest, I thought of using a less revealing picture. But this one really pleases me—it reminds me of my father's paintings—and I figured, somebody is going to guess it anyway, they might as well guess it from this dramatic photo as from something more oblique. 
     So where is this? Winner receives one of my not-dwindling-as-fast-as-I'd-like stock of 2015 blog posters. Place your guesses below.  Good luck.
     

There's a word for that

     Call me a sap. But my heart bleeds for people handing out stuff on the street. Talk about a tough job. The public ignores me, too, but I don't have to watch them do it. These poor folk have to stand there, like a rock dividing a stream, while indifferent humanity flows around them, spurning whatever pathetic scrap they're trying to give away, inevitably some green flier about a barber shop opening or new deli.
     Unless of course it's a mini granola bar. Samples! Then a crowd form as if they've never eaten, reaching out with one hand while pointing at their open mouths with the other, going "Oh! Oh! Oh!"
     Food or flier, I grab their offering as a matter of principle: what's the harm? And sometimes I am rewarded, such as with a small, ticket sized coupon: "roti: MEDITERRANEAN GRILL. Win Roti every day for a year."
     Cool. Prizes. I eat there. Decent salads. On the back, under "Random Acts of Roti," four instructions. 1) Go to a web site. 2) Enter a password. 3) "Write Down Prize Code." and 4. "Bring this card to Roti for free Food or Drink!"
     OK. It's a quiet day. So I go to their site, It wants my name, email address .
     I enter my info, and am informed I have won a free fountain drink.
     Hmmm...I usually don't even order a fountain drink. But all right. I take my coupon to Roti, meeting a buddy for lunch last week. While we wait in line, I explain my sense of violation at surrendering my precious data only to have Roti spit some cola on my shirtfront: I had been hoping for rice pudding.
     "Information rape," he laughs. I'd never heard that phrase.
     "Is that a thing?" I wonder. He's younger. Maybe he has a handle on the lingo.
     "No, it was just something I said."
     Information rape. That seems a useful concept to toss into the aether, to describe dupes who fork over their data and get little in return.
     I immediately felt the chill. While "rape" in my Oxford Dictionary is defined first as "The action or an act of taking a thing by force, esp. violent seizure of property" and doesn't mention forced sex until the third definition, that won't help me when I'm dragged into the electronic public square by angry feminists ready to deliver punishment for seizing their word and re-purposing it.
     I understand their argument: you're watering down a horror to give oomph to the commonplace. I wince whenever any random bad thing is described as a "holocaust," and Michelle Obama's push against obesity becomes a genocide of fat people.
     But I don't fall ravening upon them. It's a free country, sort of. People are allowed to use language. I think the delicacy over what the newspaper requires me to call "the N-word" is an insult to black people and an affront to history that we'll look back on someday and cringe, the way we view Victorians putting skirts on piano legs.
     Yet how could that argument stand up against somebody's pain? Somebody looking to offload that pain, and what better recipient than a person who seems insensitive? I don't want to be that guy. And yet. If I say I'm crazy for the Bulls, people coping with the mental illnesses of their loved ones will complain they're being insulted. Best to tread carefully. When it comes to those trying to share their anger, as with people handing out fliers, I sympathize with their plight too much not to just take it with a silent nod and keep walking.

CORRECTION: In Wednesday's column on the fall of Saigon I giddily reported that Lyndon Johnson was the only president not to seek a second term, somehow overlooking James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and maybe others, the way this week is going. I did fact check, or thought I did, but bobbled that in a manner too involved to be worth recounting. Nor did I realize it was Eisenhower who first sent advisers to Vietnam, in 1955. I regret these errors.

Ancient Romans remind us: gay marriage nothing new

     I listened to as much of Tuesday's Supreme Court oral arguments about gay marriage as I could stand.
     Because if you don't recognize the humanity of gay people, then allowing them to marry seems arbitrary. Thus Justice Samuel Alito wondered why couldn't, oh, four people marry? The implication being, once you open the door to these non-people, anything is possible. I'm surprised he didn't add, "or a person and a chair? Or a person and a tree?" 
     Most maddening was the invocation of tradition, of justices who normally scorn precedent from other countries suddenly groping to Ancient Greece, to tribal societies, as if the collective hatreds of the past add up to fairness now. As if ancient Babylon were now our moral compass.

     "This definition has been with us for millennia," said Justice Kennedy.  "As far as I'm aware, there's never been a nation or a culture that recognizes marriage of the same sex." 

     Umm, if it please the court, au contraire, you ahistorical asshats. I would like to enter into evidence a  column that ran in the paper 10 years ago and is, sadly, as if ripped from the headlines. Plus a link to Juvenal's second satire, which is no big flippin' state secret. The truth is that gay people got married to the degree that whatever repressive society they found themselves in would permit. 

     'I have a ceremony to attend," lisps one of Juvenal's loathed fellow Romans, more than 1,900 years ago. "At dawn tomorrow in the Quirinal valley."
     "What is the occasion?" chirps his dainty pal.
     "No need to ask," says the first. "A friend is taking to himself a husband; quite a small affair." And off they trot to the ceremony.
     Like a good many Americans, apparently, Juvenal hated gays—he hated lots of things but had a special hate for homosexuals.
     That is the beauty of the classics. They remind us that the issues we tie ourselves into a knot about, and consider evidence of our own fallen state, are really the evergreen issues of history, only we don't know it because we're too busy trying to shove our religious dogma down strangers' throats.
     A handy people to hate

     Homosexuality was open and tolerated in Rome, and, perhaps for that reason, Juvenal can barely wait to launch into them in his Satires—a quick introduction damning the clatter and corruption of the empire and then, boom, the entire second satire, a rant against gays for their effeminacy, their brazenness, and the very existence of guys such as Gracchus, the former priest of Mars, who has the audacity to actually marry somebody, who "decks himself out in a bridal veil" and weds in a little ceremony.
     Anything familiar here? The similarities are quite stunning. Grumpy old Juvenal—the patron saint of crusty pundits—ridicules the short crew cuts of these queers, "their hair shorter than their eyebrows," and presciently predicts our exact situation regarding gay marriage.
     "Yes," he writes. "And if we only live long enough, we shall see these things done openly: People will wish to see them reported among the news of the day.''
     I guess we're there now, what with the marriage announcements in the New York Times, and after the Massachusetts court all but ordered the flowers for gay marriages in the Bay State this spring by pointing out that—sorry—there's nothing in our sacred Constitution that specifically permits denying people their civil rights based on sexual orientation.
     That may change. We seem to be gearing up for the vast, expensive and time-gobbling exercise of ripping up our nation's bedrock—our operating code, to use computer language— all so we can protect ... what is it exactly? So we can preserve ... umm ... I guess so that conservatives will feel better.
     Odd. We oppose gays based on our morality, based on our Bible. So did Juvenal. He waved morality and he worshipped Zeus. We point to nature—they can't have kids! So did Juvenal. He was horrified by gays because of what he saw as womanishness, and a violation of nature. Juvenal offers up the monstrous image of women giving birth to calves and lambs and then shudders, "horreres maioraque monstra putares" -- "you may be aghast and consider such men even greater freaks."
     That's saying a lot. The thinking man, rather than plunge into the political maelstrom emerging from Massachusetts, might instead wonder why we as a nation would want to beat ourselves up, in exactly the same way, over exactly the same people, as Juvenal did in 85 A.D. Haven't we made any progress?
     Bigger fish to fry

     And don't say the Roman empire collapsed of decadence. We're about 500 years short of matching their record. The Romans collapsed because they ignored the gathering peril. Which is what we are doing. I don't care half as much about gays tying the knot as I do with our country—and all its problems—somehow avoiding wasting the next five years on picking over this timeless hatred.
     Juvenal was a failure, reduced to living off scraps. I think that's why I like him. He was totally obscure; had no impact whatsoever in his day, a career path I relate to.
     But he was better than gays, in his mind. That's what this is about. Ever since black people joined white society in America, the Bible-thumping haters have looked for another class to feel superior to, and gays, as they have for thousands of years, serve nicely. Though I can't help wondering how a Christian and a pagan—and, for that matter, the Nazis—could find themselves all on the same page about the same people.

   —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 6, 2004

"The passage of time has not dulled the ache"

   
     Armed Services Radio played "White Christmas," the signal for the last Americans to leave Saigon.
     Or maybe not. Like so much about the Vietnam War, which ended 40 years ago Thursday, there is controversy. Some claim they never heard the song, ergo it never played.
     But others insist they heard it, though not the Bing Crosby version, but Tennessee Ernie Ford's.
     In the end it doesn't matter.
     It was the morning of April 29, 1975. The North Vietnamese Army encircled the city. Explosions sounded in the distance. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, friends and family had been leaving for weeks. One plane from Operation Babylift, the evacuation of 2,000 war orphans, crashed, killing 151 aboard. "We have plenty more," a South Vietnamese lieutenant quipped bitterly.
     The streets were chaos. Once the communists arrived, anyone with connection to the Americans could expect to be killed. Crowds massed around the gates of the American embassy. Some brought their luggage, heartbreaking, hope to make flights they were promised. A mother hurled her baby over the high fence, guarded by 52 U.S Marines.
     The Vietnam War probably has to be explained for some readers. After World War II, Communists fought to control the country, but were kept at bay by their former colonial overlords, the French, who bugged out in the mid-1950s. America stupidly replaced them, beginning with advisors during the Kennedy administration. We thought, mistakenly, that a communist victory would spread to neighboring nations.
     The war exploded under Lyndon Johnson, who could neither quit nor win. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the United States was torn by protests, led by young people who were being drafted to serve and die in a cause where even its supporters, Martin Luther King said in a 1967 sermon, were "half-hearted, confused, and doubt-ridden."
     Faith in government was shaken when the lies that the Johnson administration told trying to cover up military failures came to light. Johnson became so unpopular that he didn't bother running for re-election in 1968, making him one of the rare presidents in American history not to seek a second term.
     He was followed by Richard Nixon, whose Republican Party, in echoes of today with Iran, tried to undermine LBJ's frantic efforts toward peace. Nixon would spread the war into Cambodia and Laos, secretly. He had been hounded from office in the Watergate scandal, resigning in August, 1974, and while Watergate and our defeat in Vietnam aren't generally connected in the public mind, they should be. Watergate crippled the presidency so it could no longer prosecute the deeply-unpopular war, and an emboldened Congress refused to do so.
     The morning of April 29, advancing Vietcong sent rockets into the Saigon airport, killing two Marines, Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge, the last of the 56,559 American servicemen to die in Vietnam. They were 21 and 19 years old. Their bodies were left behind. A defecting South Vietnamese pilot dropped his bombs on the last operating runway. After that only helicopters could come and go, ferrying to American warships in the harbor, in what is still the largest helicopter evacuation in history — 1,300 Americans and 5,600 Vietnamese in 19 hours.
     At 3 a.m., April 30, local time, as the crowds around the U.S. Embassy began to climb the fences, the last 11 American Marines pulled back to the rooftop of the six-story building, locking the doors, floor by floor, as they went up.
     "Then everything came to a standstill and we just sat," Master Sergeant John Valdez later wrote. "All the Marines were up there. No birds in sight."
     The choppers had been coming every 10 minutes. Now the Marines crouched, listening to gunshots, to the mob in the embassy courtyard. "I never thought for one minute that the choppers would leave us behind," Valdez wrote in Leatherneck magazine in 1975.
     A whirr was heard overhead. The Marines fired a smoke grenade to mark their position. One last CH-46 Sea Knight hovered, and landed on the embassy roof. The 10 Marines clambered aboard, followed by Valdez, holding the folded embassy flag, the last U.S. soldier to depart what historian Paul Johnson calls "the most shameful defeat in the whole of American history."
     Gerald Ford, not known for eloquence, echoed T.S. Eliot.
     "April 1975 was indeed the cruelest month," he wrote, in 2000. "The passage of time has not dulled the ache of those days."

No one cries like a bully

   
     Should the cows rise up against their human overlords, and turn carnivorous in their rebellion, sating their hunger for vengeance on human flesh, I hope that, even if cornered by a bovine killing squads, as they close in around me, their long-lashed eyes brown and angry, their cud-flecked muzzles dripping foam, I still wouldn't, in the moment before their hooves come crashing down upon my head, blurt out something like, "How can you kill and eat an innocent living being!"
     Sigh.
     Because—I hate when I have to explain—people eat cows all the time. So if the cows turned the table and ate us, well, we wouldn't be happy about it, but we sure couldn't say it it wasn't fair, or condemn the act of eating other living entities. 
     Well, okay, we not only could say that, we would, because people are oblivious, and hypocrites. They're against all government handouts but their own. They discover the beauty of tolerance—for themselves—only after they're asked to accept someone they'd rather be kicking to death out behind the bar.
     Yesterday I wrote a fairly straightforward reaction to Bobby Jindal's execrable op-ed piece on why the religious notions of small businessmen should trump the basic civil rights of certain American citizens. I was more interested in why the battle should center on the statistically meaningless act of buying wedding cakes.
    Because really, wedding cakes? Wedding cakes! I had a big, hotel wedding. We ordered a big ass, multi-tiered cake. It was about the 20th most expensive thing related to the wedding. I'd hate to try to figure out the percentage of the American economy taken up by wedding cakes, but it would have a whole lot of zeros after the decimal point, somewhere between money spent on motorcycle sidecars and the market for fine bowler hats.
     The reaction was to be expected. But even with my lowered expectation, I noticed an extra strong dose of grievance. Religion, like meat-eaters, is so used to running our lives unquestioned, that even a tiny correction makes it feel that it is being pushed around. They  don't like it.
    "Bobby Jindal is correct that the gay militants are bullies," writes Albert Felker. He doesn't quite say why—I assume they're pushing people around by wanting to get married and have cake (the whole issue is a canard, like prayer in school. You are free to pray whenever you like, quietly, to yourself. But that isn't the big fucking me-me-me display that religion demands.. So hence the battle. Ditto for bakers. Being pressed to bake wedding cakes for gays is not actually a real life issue; this might be the first time that has actually been pointed out. A handful of occurrences, maybe. But really just a notional wedge dreamed up by the geniuses who brought us abstinence education).
     My favorite email from Monday, perhaps my favorite email of all time, came from Mike Zintak. It's sort of a greatest hits collection of the current thinking of the Far American Right, to stretch the term "thinking," and really needs no commentary. It is self-explanatory.
     Though, I can't resist pointing out his line about how gays "push their agenda down everyone's throat." That's what conjured up the cow revolt. Because really, look at religion. As with carnivores, faith had a lock on society. For centuries, millennia, the church had the whip hand. Wrong faith, they'd pack you in your synagogue and set it on fire. Women, well, God intended them to be scrubwomen and moms. Talk about pushing their agenda. 
     You can't expect them to see it. But that doesn't mean we can't look at it, blinking in wonder. A Mount Everest of hypocrisy.
     And then gays, after only a few decades of trying, get the chance to marry like normal human being do. And rather than give up that rather small shift--can't do that, can't give an inch—we get this insane stink over wedding cakes. (Mine came from House of Fine Chocolates, by the way, praised be its memory, a Broadway institution. They didn't give us any crap for being Jewish, which I didn't think to appreciate at the time).
     But enough commentary. You need to read this email. Because it is a Whitman Sampler of revanchist nuttery. Notice how he drags in Muslims at the end—the classic, wiggle your-fingers-over-your-sputtering-lips intellectual parry by the Tea Party, part of the ooo-we're-victims pathology, the daft notion that the Muslims "get" to do all these vile things, cutting people's heads off and such, without having as many liberal columnists point out that it's wrong, as if that's necessary. I call it "Terrorism Envy."
     He mentions "marching orders" twice—first capitalized, then not. He doesn't say where my orders are supposed to be from. Moscow—that's the traditional source. Or San Francisco. Anyway, for your reading enjoyment:

I find it interesting with those on the Left when they try to make a point against the Conservative line of view. You seem to follow the Marching Orders to the line with your article today. Comparing Gettysburg with the Gay movement. I would guess that you don't practice a "Religion", based on your dialog? Personally, I have no problem with a Gay or Lesbian life style...that is if their own choosing. I do how every have an issue when they (the gay movement), push their agenda down everyone's throat. There are a lot of Conservative Gays..that would agree with this...but you never mention those gay people...why? The fact that a gay couple can have a child defies logic. Yes they do adopt, but what does that do for the psychic of those children later into their life? Sure you agree that is not Normal? Many gay men and women would agree with that. Secondly, the whole aspect of "Gay Marriage", Marriage was set aside for a Man and a Women, for reproduction purposes....with Christian and Religious beliefs as stated in the Bible. And that includes the Muslim Faith. Funny though, how you don't detract the Muslim Faith about Gays....oh I forgot, within the Muslim Religion...they execute the gay people. Why have you not talked about that aspect? Must not be in your marching orders...huh?