IT ARRIVED

Did you know there are 3,500 parts in a pinball machine?  And nearly half a mile of wiring?  And 115 little bulbs?  “A penguin on roller skates – amazing!”  Believe It Or Not!

I’ve lost two pounds.

“TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE!”

Growing up, I knew that to be the retort of choice but had only the vaguest notion what it meant.

(There were so many things I parroted without understanding them, all unsuited for a family website.  In later years a light bulb would occasionally – finally – go off.  As in . . . oh!  And then, upon further reflection . . . oh, my!)

But the general notion of “it takes one to know one” was that the person most likely to be calling out someone for being gay (which was not the word in use back then) was the person trying most mightily to hide something himself.

I had one such incident myself, when – to impress the high school classmate with whom I was smitten – I yelled at two men with umbrellas following us out of an off-Broadway show our English teacher had required us to see.  My classmate, being comfortable in his own skin, was oblivious.  Not me.

The difference is, I was sixteen.  It was 1963. 

That one of “America’s most prominent anti-gay crusaders,” George Rekers, a founder of the Family Research Council, should be acting this way at 61 – in 2010, for crying out loud – is just a bit much. 

(Likewise, that Florida’s Republican attorney general and gubernatorial candidate would recently have had the state pay him $87,000 to serve as an expert witness in an effort to retain Florida’s status as the only state to ban gay adoption.)

Rekers, as you’ve doubtless read or seen elsewhere by now, hired a male prostitute to accompany him on a ten-day trip to Europe.  Here’s one account.  I chose it for its lack of active hyperlinks.  This is a family site, and unlike Professor Rekers, you may be uncomfortable visiting the explicit site he picked to make the hire.

Rekers explains that the 10-day vacation was all part of his Christian ministry – he rented the 20-year-old not out of fantasy or desire, but as a way to help the young man go straight (and for help carrying his bags).

Like John the Baptist and Jesus, I have a loving Christian ministry to homosexuals and prostitutes in which I share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them . . .

Well, good for him.  But that anyone would look to this sad man for guidance, let alone expert testimony, strikes me as . . . unwise.