Today’s posting is a bit of a rant, but Sir Lance says it’s a legitimate rant, especially with everything going on in Russia with the upcoming Olympics and the country’s new law forbidding people to be gay. So here’s Sir Lance’s thought for the day: every so often random photos pop up on Facebook, very innocuous and usually romantic shots of two boys kissing. Maybe they’re at home, on a park bench, or leaving the prom. They’re just random boys kissing each other. Every time I see these kinds of photos, they are accompanied by some of the most horrendous, vicious, poisonous vitriol I’ve ever seen on FB, the kind of vitriol that inspires laws like they have in Russia. These comments attack the two boys as though one was Hitler and the other Stalin! Are these boys eviscerating children? Are they committing mass murder? Are they plotting some huge act of terrorism? No. They’re kissing. Why are they kissing? Probably because they love each other. Why do they love each other? Their brains are wired that way, because they were born to love others of the same gender. Wow! What a heinous crime, right? Worthy of hate, right? Obviously some people think so! We have enormous problems facing this country and this world and two boys kissing is what gets people fired up? Those people need a life.

Well, here’s a message to the haters out there, and any of you reading this may feel free to share it with haters you know personally: If all of you males out there hating on gay boys are so sure they simply woke up one day and decided to be attracted to other boys, I challenge you to try it yourselves. Do your homework. Show the world that same sex attraction is simply a choice by eschewing all attraction to females and turning all of your drives toward males. Let us know how that works out for you, huh? Oh, and while you’re at it, let us know how you enjoy being hated on by people like yourselves, how much you like being bullied and called names and mocked and ostracized. Give us FB users a full account of how “deciding to be gay” works. It should be quite instructive.

Since I know none of you will do this (because it can’t be done), then may I humbly suggest you get your hate off the Internet and get yourselves a real life. Obviously, your own relationships must be so bad that you can’t stand seeing two boys happy together. Too bad. Get over it. Get out into your community and do some volunteer work. Actually get to know people other than yourselves and maybe you won’t be so ignorant. And if you can’t do this, maybe the U.S. should start its own version of “Battle Royale” and throw all the haters into a big arena so you can wipe each other out. Sounds brutal, but then, you all should relish the violence since you already enjoy spewing so much of it with your words, and often your physical actions, when you bully and beat up boys who love boys. It seems to me that eliminating evil from the world could only be a good thing. After all, evil always begins with hate.

As for you so-called religious haters out there – bear in mind Jesus’ number one commandment: “love your neighbor as yourself.” Also bear in mind that he only condemned one group of people as a “brood of vipers,” and that was the Pharisees. Why? Because they were hypocrites, just like you. You claim to follow Christ, who did not condemn people and did not address the issue of same-sex love, but who did decry fornication among heterosexual couples, i.e. “hooking up” (I’m sure none of you good Christians have had multiple sex partners in your lives, right?), and yet you do exactly what he never did – you condemn. That makes you hypocrites, a brood of vipers. So don’t start taking lines from the Bible out of context to feed your own personal bigotries – that’s the last refuge of haters. And please note the line from the previous paragraph, because it applies to you, too: evil always begins with hate.

I don’t know who any of these kissing boys are. I don’t even know if any of them are still together. The part of me that loves seeing happy people hopes that they are. But them being happy and, yes, EVEN KISSING, doesn’t hurt me or you or the world. In fact, as a rule, happy people make the world a much better place. And this world has MUCH bigger problems than two boys in love. So does this country, and so does your own community. So turn off your hate meters and get out there to contribute something positive to your community. Make this world better for your having passed through it, rather than doing what you’re doing now – making it worse.