Seven for 2007

At the start of a new year, much seems achievable. Therefore, in honor of 2007, I offer up to the universe--or whatever deity happens to be paying attention--seven hopes for the next year.

First, I hope Sen. Sam Brownback starts a career as a model, because nobody can touch his posturing. The Kansas Republican, eyeing a presidential run as the standard-bearer of social conservatives, has stalled the nomination to federal district court of Michigan judge Janet Neff. Why? Because she attended a commitment ceremony.

She wasn't one of the women getting committed; she didn't perform the ceremony. But she was there, so Brownback fears for her impartiality.

He has magnanimously stated that he would quit stalling if Neff agreed to recuse herself from gay marriage cases. Consequently, I think every judge who has ever attended a straight wedding should bow out, too. It's only fair.

Second, I hope the nation of Nigeria gets a grip on itself, instead of on its gay folk. Nigeria already has a lengthy list of ridiculous anti-gay laws, and now legislation is being considered that would make it illegal to meet with a gay person. The penalty would be up to five years in prison. It's a brilliantly cruel way of literally isolating every known homosexual.

What happens, say, when a mother wants to visit her gay son? She walks over for a drink and a chat, and doesn't make it home for five years?

That people would stop disappearing in another country is my third hope for the new year. Everybody with at least one brain cell knows Iraq is a mess. But not everybody knows what lesbians and gays are enduring at the hands of Iraqi death squads. According to the British gay rights group Outrage!, gays are being murdered in a systematic attempt at “sexual cleansing.“

To me, that phrase involves soap, not guns.

Recently five men who had been providing safe houses to gays and were reporting on executions to the west were themselves abducted and are feared dead. In June, Islamist death squads shot two lesbians dead in their home, and also murdered a child the women had saved from the sex trade.

Beam me up Scotty. There's no love down here.

I'm still in Iraq for hope number four. And Afghanistan, and everywhere else our military has been sent. In 2007 Congress will again see an attempt to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. If the pure lunacy of booting experts in Arabic out of the military hasn't convinced those on Capitol Hill that it's time to repeal, perhaps a new poll will.

Conducted by Zogby International and the Michael D. Palm Center, the poll showed that 73 percent of US military members are fine about serving with gay colleagues. Maybe this will be the year DADT dies. I'll always remember it as the very definition of a compromise--because it made both sides miserable.

My fifth wish is simple. I hope Mary Cheney has a healthy pregnancy. And Concerned Women for America throws her a baby shower.

Number six concerns the picture book “And Tango Makes Three,“ about a male penguin couple who hatch an adopted egg. Based on a true story, the book so far has been challenged in schools or libraries in eight states. Give it up, people, and buy the book for Mary's shower.

My seventh hope is Janis Smits loses his job as head of Latvia's human rights commission. The man just said of gays, “The only thing I can do is call on these people to return from their sins, be healed by God and recover normal sexual orientation.“

With Smits in charge, Latvian gays have loads more to fear than fear itself.

Evangelical Dominoes

What is it with the state of Colorado?

Mere weeks after Ted Haggard landed in a scandal of biblical proportions, another Colorado pastor of the evangelical sort has resigned over gay sex allegations.

I've always considered the notion a joke, but maybe there really is something in the water. Or at least the holy water.

You'll remember that Haggard lost his gig as the leader of the Colorado Springs megachurch he founded, as well as the presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals. In a letter to his congregation, he admitted to “sexual immorality,“ such a benign way of describing three years of drug-fueled fornication with a male hooker.

Now Paul Barnes, founding pastor of Grace Chapel in Englewood, has performed a belly flop from the pulpit.

The story is that his church got an anonymous call from someone who overheard a person talk about exposing preachers on the down low, including Barnes. Over a few days the pastor confessed, resigned, and videotaped a Sunday message to his flock.

Presumably he learned from Haggard that lying into a TV camera while in the car with your wife and kids isn't the shrewdest approach.

In his half-hour video, The Denver Post reported, Barnes said he had had sex with men. “I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a five-year-old boy . . . I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away.“

Now that's a winning strategy. Be honest and specific in your confession, unlike Mr. Sexual Immorality, and you'll make your congregation sympathetic and gays everywhere empathetic.

These straying evangelical pastors are still working out the bugs in getting caught. When the next Colorado reverend's gay revels are revealed, I have to believe he'll be toting a script.

There are important differences between these two closet cases. Barnes wasn't a national figure, unlike Haggard, who powwowed with the White House. Barnes avoided politics, staying out of the furor over Colorado's same-sex marriage ban. Barnes did, though, preach homosexuality is a sin.

Which he believed. In his videotape, he described the one talk his father had with him about sex. Dad discussed what he'd do if a “fag“ approached him. “'Is that how you'd feel about me?'“ Barnes thought. “It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed.“

That was one time when a parent would've been better off saying, “Son, talking about sex makes me nervous. Go pick it up on the streets.“

A Christian conversion at 17 didn't make his homosexual feelings go away, as he'd hoped. Barnes said he can't accept that a person is born gay, so he must look to his childhood. If he thinks he's going to find an explanation for his gay longings in the fact that his mother once beat him at pick-up sticks, his suffering is far from over.

In the wake of these ecclesiastical scandals in the Centennial State, The New York Times asked if evangelicals might revisit the belief that gayness is sinful. Nope, said those interviewed. What could happen is greater compassion.

Haggard's successor as the evangelical association president said, “When you discover people you know and respect are struggling with homosexuality, suddenly you're more compassionate because they are real people who are around you.“

Apparently, all of us who have been out are not real people.

The Denver Post noted that when the Haggard mess broke, Barnes scrapped his sermon and wrote a new one stating that, “Most of us . . . wear masks.“ Now that his is gone, here's hoping he starts to like the look of his own mug.