"It you get easily offended by being caleld a fag then don't tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. "

Cool, keeping shit to yourself nice, do me a favor and please keep that religious garbage to yourself.

"I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other AIDS and die."

Funny lesbians have the lowest AIDS rate and straight men are only kept at a lower rate than gay men because WOMEN don't like having random sex with multiple strangers. That's right it aint because straight men are somehow morally superior, it's because women put a stop certain sexual practices. If women had the crazy sexual drive that most men do (gay and straight) you better believe AIDS would be a big problem among the straight community.

I tried to explain to a homo hater that

The First Amendment protects freedom of religion and speech. Are we really goingnto judge a man as unfit to serve on a school board because of his poor grammar and god-ordained hatred of gay sinners? Do you hate the bill of rights?

"I tried to explain to a homo hater that"

Sorry ment to type I tried to explain to a homo hater once that fruit flies can be turned "gay". Of course he wouldnt accept it despite the scientific research.

(Sidenote: the same genes they turn on and off in fruit flies are not present in humans)

Oh, yay. Another homosexuality thread, this one thinly disguised as a religious thread.

The only thing I'm seeing is two people vying to see who can get the most publicity.

Clint McCance first plays a reliable hand in his attention-seeking bid: go after gays with ugly, over-the-top rhetoric. For instance, suggesting they should all kill themselves.

Good opening move, if somewhat trite.

Now Michael Stone counters with an overused but still reliable hand of his own: the victim card.

McCance's insensitive and inhumane remarks are representative of the abuse and harassment mainstream Christianity heaps on members of the LGBT community on a regular basis. McCance, like so many Christians, used his ugly and ignorant religious superstitions as a justification for his deplorable and despicable hate speech.

Really? That's mainstream Christianity? Suggesting that those they see as sinners should all kill themselves? Gloating over AIDS is mainstream Christianity? I thought it was reserved for bona fide nuts like Fred Phelps.

Michael Stone, you aren't helping. Go away. And stay away.

First amendment, baby. He can say whatever he wants, and we don't have to care. Actually, I would like to encourage people like this to speak out. In the end, they do their cause more harm than good.

Absolutely the only thing of relevance here: His knowledge of the English language is, shall we say, rather below what one might expect of a school board member.

Loud Mouth Braggart who sticks his foot in his mouth. And lets the whole world know of his beliefs is what we can expect of an over the top CHRISTIAN. Hmm what would be the response from a proper Muslim. Ahh yes I almost forgot - death, beatings, honor killings.

I'll take an annoying Christian any day over. He's easy to deal with - roll your eyes, defriend him if he is on your list, and go one with your life.

A over the top Muslim that you can not ignore unless you have a strong stomach for blood.

I should add, it is piss-poor reasoning to take one bigoted dumbass's statement to prove Hitchen's contention that religious really does "poison everything." It would be incredibly illogical to assume anything about Christians from one Christian's comment, much less infer anything about all religion in general.

Bravo Patrick, like I said, on most days I could actually like you. This moron is about as "mainstream Christian" as lucifer. A moron yes, mainstream Christian, hardly.

But, this comes straight out of religion, as did the bigotry I experienced when I was a kid: "You killed Jesus," "You're gonna burn in hell" (based on zero evidence that there actually is such a place), etc.

When liberals say that christians are "just as bad" as Muslims, this is the guy they're talking about. Still not true, because he's not going to find much support within the christian population for actually "killing queers", but he certainly doesn't give christianity a good rep...or his school system.

"But, this comes straight out of religion, as did the bigotry I experienced when I was a kid: "You killed Jesus," "

If it makes you feel any better; these days they'd probably follow you down the street yelling "Gingers have no souls!" Kids don't need religion to be assholes and neither do grownups. Religion is one of the multitude of things that assholes can use to defend their behavior, but it doesn't poson them.

...judge a man as unfit to serve on a school board because of his poor grammar....

As opposed to using his hairstyle as a criterion?

If you're going to serve on a school board, you should at least exhibit some evidence of having an education.

...as did the bigotry I experienced when I was a kid: "You killed Jesus,"....

"We Jews believe it was Santa Claus that killed Jesus Christ." - Kinky Friedman ("They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore")

Yes, some people use religion as excuse for bigotry. No news there. What's suprising to me is that this podunk white trash actually knows how to type. (That someone like this would be an elected official somewhere like rural Arkansas isn't so much a suprise.)

And, do note that the least literate/educated people seem to be the most openly bigoted...

Hey, Amy! Update!

The bigmouthed bigot (Clint McCance, not the anti-Christian Michael Stone...who, judging by his picture, would be more aptly named Michael Stoner) has resigned.

Hmmm, it really suprises me how Americans seem to believe that Muslims are all violent evil people bent on murdering all gays. I have very close ties to the military community and one thing that they ALL have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan saying is that Muslims are actually very sexually repressed. So much so in fact that the men frequently engage in homosexual activities with other usually younger men. As long as the older male has a wife and children most people look the other way. The stories repeated about how Muslims kill gays is only true when two men want to have a loving monogamous relationship without involving pretend wives and children. Men in these countries aren't even allowed to speak to a woman who isn't their wife and they don't even get to choose their wife or speak or even look at her before marriage. I'd be about ready to kill an infidel too if I had to grow up in that environment!
THose wars weren't started because of how they supposedly rape, murder and hate each other and us, but because WE WANTED TO GET THEIR OIL!
Americans are so deluded and racist that they will believe anything so they don't have to ask questions of the people in charge of our government.
Terrorist are like a box of chocolates, they come in every color, even white.

"The stories repeated about how Muslims kill gays is only true when two men want to have a loving monogamous relationship..."

So that's ok? The fact that they're secretly engaging in homosexuality, while hypocritically murdering openly gay boys and men somehow shows their tolerance and lack of violence?

Meh. I'm an atheist, and though I like Hitchens, I think he is simultaneously the most militant and least thoughtful of the "New Atheists." He is mainly correct about Islam, though, based on my experiences in the Middle East.

I work in a very conservative industry, and know many Christians, ranging from devout evangelicals to "Christmas Christians." I do not know ANYONE who talks like this McCance idiot. The Christmas Christians don't seem to really care much about homosexuality one way or the other, and the devout folks seem to have a mixture of humor and pity about gay people. In no case do any of these people want homosexuals to suffer, contract AIDS, etc. While they may oppose homosexuality (or perhaps more accurately, the gay lifestyle), I certainly don't think the overwhelming majority of Christians wish injury on gay people.

Rather, the Christians would prefer homosexuals to give themselves to Jesus and be "saved." As an atheist, I find this amusing. But at least this is a sharp contrast to devout Muslims, who would prefer to behead or stone to death a gay man, in accordance with their Sky Fairy and holy scribblings.

"But, this comes straight out of religion, as did the bigotry I experienced when I was a kid"

If you had grown up in the officially atheist USSR, you would have been lucky not to have been packed off to Siberia with your whole family on account of being Jewish (Jews were suspected of being loyal to something other than the Socialist State). And the USSR, like every other Communist country, was ferociously anti-gay. More so, in fact, than the Orthodox church-dominated state that preceded it.

Religion just gives the likes of McCance & those brats who bullied you a crutch for their bigotry.

Lovelysoul, I am sorry if you think that I am implying that it is ok to kill, it is never ok for anyone to do that for any reason. The problem with putting all Muslims into the same "terrorist evil box" is that eventually someone will put YOU into the same box as every evil "Christian" nutjob (like the above mentioned Mr McCance, assuming that is your religion)that wants to kill people to advance their own horrific agenda. It's simply not logical to assume that you know someone completely based solely on their religious denomination (or lack thereof). If every Muslim in the whole big world population of over 6 billion people was really a murderous psychopath for their religion, nobody would be alive right now. WE cannot allow people to divide us according to Christian vs Muslim vs Jew when the reality of life is that it is good vs evil. Hence my attempt at humor: Terrorists are like a box of chocolates....
I remember a quote from a critical thinking class in college, "Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? It depends who's side you're on."

DD, I don't think all Muslims are murderers, but the difference is that they remain largely silent when gays, or women, or anyone who violates sharia law is murdered...or even if it's suggested they be murdered (like the South Park creators). Whereas, we here, in a land of due process and free speech blog about this idiot Christian for days, and in fact, forced him to resign due to our outrage.

Where is that outrage for murder in the Muslim world? Why do they stand by and let young girls be killed for honor by their fathers?

That would never happen here. No crazy Christian would ever get away with stoning his daughter to death for being "unpure," and we wouldn't allow gay boys to be hanged just for being gay.

So, I don't care if anyone tries to lump me (as a barely practicing Christian and free American) in with that kind of murderous ideology. It's clearly not the same.

I don't think the problem is religion, I think it's ideology. Any ideology can be turned into a reason to express hatred and contempt towards those who don't share it. This would obviously include atheism. The problem is that ideology is unavoidable: even the rejection of all ideology is an ideological position.

At any rate, all groups have their assh*le element. It's invalid to judge an ideology on this basis unless you can establish a direct connection between the ideology's teachings and the assh*le behavior. With regards to Christianity, its central teachings include love your neighbor as yourself, and you can't love God if you hate any human being (because all human beings are allegedly created in God's image). It's difficult to see how someone who insults and denigrates others is living up to these ideals.

DD and Lovelysoul both made good points.

To take up where DD left off, I would like to ask Amy: If Islamic terrorism against the U.S. (which seems to be the most common kind of organized, funded Islamic terrorism) has more to do with Islam than U.S. foreign policy, then why does Al-Qaeda seem to have such trouble getting recruits who don't appear to be Middle Eastern? (For those who don't know the following already - and you should! - only about 1 in 5 Muslims IS of Middle Eastern background. Probably fewer.) Offhand, I can count on one hand those well-known Muslim terrorists who are black. Maybe my memory's faulty, but if not, you see my point. (I certainly don't remember any anti-American Muslim terrorists in the news with distinctly East Asian faces - or white Russians or white Europeans, for that matter.)

Well?

Just remembered the blonde woman whatshername - and John Walker Lindh. But my point is that while Lindh has been safely in jail for eight years, there don't seem to have been many replacements for him since then!

Have you been living in a cave for the past few decades, lenona?

Even if you add up all of the dead from 9/11 and all the American soldiers killed in Afghanistan & Iraq, it's just a drop in the bucket. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic terrorism have been Muslims who weren't Muslim enough for the terrorist's liking, and infidels who had the misfortune of living next to Muslims.

Islamic terrorists are committing genocide in Darfur. They've killed 400,000 black Muslims for being black, and for being the wrong kind of Muslims. This genocide has the full support & backing of the Sudanese government, army, & air force, and the diplomatic backing of other Muslim governments.

Islamic terrorists launched a civil war in Algeria in 1991 when their attempt to take over the country was foiled. They've killed 200,000 Algerian Muslims for not being Islamic enough.

Islamic terrorists have slaughtered thousands of Buddhists & Christians in long-running insurgencies in southern Thailand & the southern Philippines. All of these innocent people are in their graves because their Muslim neighbors weren't satisfied with being Thai citizens or Philippine citizens with equal rights - they demanded their own separate Islamic states under Sharia law.

Remember the 2002 Miss World beauty pageant, the one that was supposed to be held in Nigeria? Nigerian Muslims were so offended by it that they went on an orgy of rioting & murder, burning whole villages down to the ground.

Two years ago, the finest hotels in Mumbai were assaulted by Islamic terrorists who killed 165 people, almost all of them ordinary Indians.

Islamic terrorists haven't managed to pull off any suicide bombings in the US since 9/11, but they've been very busy in Pakistan. There are no American soldiers occupying an inch of Pakistani territory. Virtually all of the thousands of victims of these bombings have been ordinary Pakistanis. Here's a typical example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10190389

Taliban terrorists shot & blew up 93 Ahmadi Muslims in their mosque, for being heretics.

Another example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10483453

This time it was 42 Sufis who were slaughtered in their shrine for being the wrong kind of Muslims.

Care to explain how this endless carnival of death is the result of American foreign policy, rather than Islam itself?

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to suggest that Islam was just another flavor, as good as any other. I was trying to make the general point that an ideology can be used in ways disconsonant with its own precepts, and we have to judge it on the basis of its teachings rather than whether its followers are living up to these teachings.

I agree with you about Islam. On my blog I've written that the problem stems from Islam's claim that God transcends morality (as opposed to being its ground, as in Christianity and Judaism). Thus, morality can be set aside if one does so in order to follow a command of God -- to wage violent jihad against the unbelievers, for example.
http://agentintellect.blogspot.com/2008/10/islam-christianity-and-euthyphro.html

My apologies for the miscommunication.