The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Those pro-gay Christian billboards that appeared a few years back in Indianapolis are back, and this time they're going to the belly of the beast: Texas.

This one lady's reaction is just too funny, and proves the value of posting these billboards:

Christine Lutz was traveling down Interstate-30, just east of Fort Worth, when she came face to face with a billboard containing a pro-gay message. "I cringed. I was disgusted at the same time," she said.

The billboard angered Lutz so much, that she fired off a stern e-mail. "I said how dare you take the scriptures and twist it to fit your needs," she recalled.

Yes, because conservatives have never taken the scriptures and twisted them to fit their needs! How dare those queers actually read the Bible and interpret it themselves! Don't they know that only upstanding evangelicals are allowed to know what God really thinks?

It's more scary than it is hysterical, since if these Christians knew anything about the history of their religion, they'd know how many battles were fought, and how many people were either killed or excommunicated, for the right to interpret the Bible for themselves. What should be shocking from this article is the fact that there are people who become angry when other people choose to read the Bible themselves. You don't have to burn heretics at the stake anymore - these folks already stopped wanting to know what the Bible really says.

Here's a pastor who has an opinion on this topic (that's what I love about the Protestant faiths - anyone can open up a church and call themselves a member of the clergy if they feel like it):

Pastor Sam Dennis, of Parkway Hills Baptist Church in Plano, says Christians shouldn't hate gays. He disagrees however with the billboards' use of scripture to back a pro-gay message. "I'm hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that it's alright to live in a gay lifestyle. Just like I'm hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that's it's alright to live in an adulterous relationship or as a wife abuser or as a murderer."

Ignoring the idiotic comparison of same-sex lovin' to beating one's partner up and murder (because anyone who can't see the moral difference between people having consensual sex and killing has a pretty shitty moral compass), I'd ask Pastor Sam to look at the stories of adultery and murder in the Bible (hey, whatever happened to that King Eglon or that one Hagar Abraham knew?). Sure, they might have been OK because God approved of their murder and adultery, but that's a bit too much circular logic to base any sort of moral system off of.

But that's not what this is about, morality. It's about power, and the power to interpret a powerful text, which is what these billboards are about, is scary to people who have had a monopoly on that power for decades.