My only sister and her husband mark their 40th anniversary on Saturday, March 10. My wife and I are close to 34 years of marriage. My parents made it to more than 55 years and my in-laws to 51 years together before death stepped in. The stability of lives together like that cannot be underestimated. But you wont — and dont — find me beating the drum for laws denying or banning same-sex marriages. There has never been a stitch of logic to the notion that my marriage is any way diminished or threatened by lesbians or gay men taking up committed relationships. You will find me saluting monogamy and always, always being a society providing the means and support to make it possible for two people who love each other to develop a stable, enduring life together regardless of gender. We are privileged to know a number of same-sex couples who have been committed and living together for a long time. Its just absurd to think they would be happy or normal if they broke up and found mates of the other gender. I feel fortunate that early on in my own growth and maturity I discerned that a segment of humankind and natures creatures just are not heterosexual. One of the greatest tragedies of our time is how anti-gay hardliners are so willing to make this the issue that drives them to open schism within denominations and establish something new purified and orthodox. If it is the great sin that they make it out to be, Jesus would have been all over it. But he wasnt.It was heartening this week to see the findings of a Field Poll showing public support of gays is increasing in California. The first comprehensive report in nearly a decade looking at public attitudes on the topic found opposition to same-sex marriage dropped from 56 percent to 51 percent since 1997. Approval had grown from 38 percent to 43 percent. Throughout the poll, approximately a third of all respondents oppose legal protection of same-sex relationships and 40 percent favor amending the federal constitution to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, writes Wyatt Buchanan in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Field Polls director, Mark DiCamillo, says the key finding is this: As time passes, there is a greater acceptance of gay and lesbian rights and greater support of anti-discrimination policies.Of course, that historically is the pattern. Hate, ignorance and prejudice on social issues go daily to the graves as their holders pass on. Succeeding generations often imperceptibly slowly embrace enlightened understanding and self-evident truth. Its often noted that the New South became open to racial integration and equality more as a result of the dying of entrenched segregationists than that attitudes were reversed. It is clearly happening nationwide with attitudes about homosexuality. Today’s youth are already showing that sea change.Another powerful force is just knowing people who are gay. I was the company clerk and sergeant in a U.S. Army training unit in 1970-71 in Louisiana. On the night before the clerk in Alpha Company next door was discharged, he got stinking drunk and told me he was gay and dreaded going home to New York and marrying his fiance. This was 20 years before the insipid dont-ask-dont-tell policy was imposed. That gay GI had performed his job with distinction. He was a credit to the Army and America. I have often wondered what happened to him.The Field Poll found the clearest-cut issues dealing with whether gays and lesbians should be able to serve openly in the military. Californians give 67 percent to that notion, but just 22 percent oppose it and 11 percent had no opinion. The idiocy of the policy, put into place early in the Clinton Administration to placate the military, has manifested itself by more than 11,000 service personnel being discharged for their gay and lesbian identities becoming known. The loss of hundreds of sorely needed translators trained in Middle Eastern languages during the war in Iraq is just one of the great casualties of the mindless policy long overdue to be put on the dung heap of failed ideas.The poll was done with 1,000 California adults, Spanish and English, Feb. 12-26, and included 680 registered voters. Sixty-four percent of Californians polled know someone who is gay or lesbian. That is up 15 percent from a 1977 poll finding. Demographics showed those groups with the most positive feelings toward them are those who personally know gays and lesbians, plus those who are liberals, Democrats, those affiliated with non-Christian religions, San Francisco Bay area residents, non-partisans and people with a college degree or a post-graduate degree.Subgroups in which larger proportions have unfavorable or cool attitudes toward gays and lesbians, Field Poll noted, include conservatives, those with no more than a high school education, born-again Christians and people who do not personally know any gays or lesbians. Republicans, males, blacks and seniors age 65 or older are about evenly divided in their assessments.No stopping change when its time has come. Love and relationship make for a powerful force not trivialized by mere X and Y chromosomes.

I have visited only five presidential libraries — those of Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon. In addition, Ive wandered in homes and museums related to Washington, Jackson, Lincoln and Grant. Time always governs what we can grasp in those visits. So we leave it to historians and scholars to sift through it all, to micro-analyze the lives and legacies of presidents, even make discoveries. Few humans’ lives are so probed.Obviously these repositories are strategic in how their exhibits and warehoused records convey and showcase presidents tenures what is played up and what is to be kept hidden or downplayed. How sanitized are the papers and documents that ultimately make it to the libraries? Or are unsealed? Should each library get the dirty laundry along with the presidents fan mail and gifts of swords from Saudi Arabia and carved ivory from a dictator in Africa?Of course, each presidential library that goes up becomes a sprawling, overbuilt, edifice to rival a pharaohs pyramid or a French kings extravagant estate. It must always exceed previous libraries in architecture, innovation and cost.Its important to follow the fuss United Methodists and others are making in Dallas about the proposed President George Walker Bush Presidential Library on the campus of Southern Methodist University. Getting such a library is huge, but it will be sharply diminished if scholastic compromises and limits are put on academic research and access to the archives of a highly controversial presidency not known for transparency. Bishops and SMU faculty have warned about allowing the library and an accompanying think tank. (Bush changed from Episcopalian to United Methodist in 1986, adopting wife Lauras lifelong faith. So his religious identity provides another reason to plop his library at SMU.) There is a batch of issues surrounding the controversy, not the least is the November 2001 executive order that Bush signed allowing presidential papers to be kept unavailable to researchers indefinitely as long as that is the wish of the president or any heirs. That was a real slap at the intent, integrity and discipline of historical research. Archivists and library groups objected, and a congressional committee passed a bill in 2002 to repeal the action, but it never got to the floor of the House of Representatives. How much of Bush’s papers will never be open to scrutiny? The library coming to SMU disturbs some because it directly links Bush and his troubled presidency to the private, church-affiliated univeristy. Fifteen retired or current United Methodist bishops, along with five clergymen and lay members of the church have signed a "Save SMU Petition" (www.protectSMU.org), which says, We the undersigned express our objection to the prospect of the George W. Bush library, museum, and think tank being established at Southern Methodist University. As United Methodists, we believe that the linking of his presidency with a university bearing the Methodist name is utterly inappropriate. We urge the Board of Trustees of Southern Methodist University and the South Central Jurisdiction of The United Methodist Church to reject this project.Questions are raised, too, about the librarys $500 million proposed cost, or twice as much as was spent on Bushs 2004 re-election campaign. Some of that will be used to establish an endowment, whose intent will surely be to secure the best portrayal of Bush and his record for posterity and scholars.Some 175 of 609 faculty at SMU had sought a full faculty vote on a non-binding resolution regarding the librarys coming. But on Feb. 7, the effort was defeated by the faculty senate. Critics say the think tank could conflict with the academic independence of the university. The Jimmy Carter library in Atlanta has spurred some of that same kind of debate among the faculty of Emory University where it is housed, especially in light of the former presidents publication of a controversial book about Palestine and Israel. Methodist bishops also want eight trustees of Southern Methodist to remove themselves from a group that is making decisions about the library. Seven of those trustees have been past major fund-raisers for Bush campaigns. The bishops say any decisions that those trustees might make on behalf of the library could be in direct conflict with the fiduciary duty as trustees of the university. They say the think tank there will just "further Bush’s partisan political goals and views."Even the marrying of library and think-tank are troubling to people like presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. He has said it could start to become the engine of the library and overwhelm it. The think tanks and public-policy centers become a way to spin the legacy of the former president, he said.

A false story is going around the Internet that the new Washington dollar does not contain In God We Trust. Wrong! Those uninformed folks are calling for a boycott of the new coin, obviously without looking at the coin first.Because I cover religion full time for this newspaper, many people are quick to come to me and ask about what they have heard: Is that true? A newsroom colleague asked me Monday about the coin after a friend told her about the "godless" new coin. Not to mention that the same people were complaining that the new dollar does not mention the year of coinage or which mint made it. Wrong? Look around the rim of the coin. Its all there. In an innovative way, the mint has engraved E Pluribus Unum, then In God We Trust, then the year 2007 and finally the place of minting, such as D for Denver.Now here is the text of the e-mail, in three paragraphs, that a friend forwarded to me that he had received. It is unedited and written like so many get-em e-mails these days:Today I picked up at Regions several of the new $1.00coins with the picture of George Washington on it. To my shock anddismay the words, "In God We Trust", are not on this coin! A quicksearch of the other coin denominations in my collection confirmed thatevery one contained these faithful words. The new George Washington$1.00 coin is the first money ever issued by the USA in modern historywithout the words "In God We Trust". By omitting these words, ourpolitically correct, secularist leaders made a conscientious decisionthat either; 1) God does not exist, or 2) that God exists, but can nolonger be trusted. "I am personally offended and fed up with thedenigration of God and Christianity in my country. I am certain GeorgeWashington would never have agreed to his picture on the coin if it anyway diminished faith in God. What can we do to show our displeasure?"First of all, let’s boycott the coin. Do not ask for it at banks. If itis given to you in change ask for dollar bills instead and tell theperson why. Write your Senators stating your displeasure. Finally, ifyou agree, pass this e-mail on to others. Collectively, we must send astrong message to those secularists who are trying to remove God fromour culture. If we do this, some 300 million $1.00 coins will back upand rot in the supply chain! To God be the glory! That the end of the e-mail. Now, how many folks received this phony information, read it and passed it on? I asked for the coin the second day after coins were issued a couple weeks ago. It took me a while to make out the tiny information around the edge of the coin, but it is all there. Sure, if the coin gets used a lot, those letters may wear down and disappear, but so it is with all coins. This misinformation and over-reaction are symptomatic of our times. Theres a preoccupation that God is being squeezed out of things. Im no apologist for government, but it isnt so stupid to intentionally remove In God We Trust and risk the wrath of the people. Question stuff, folks. Check things out when things seem spurious. A POSTCRIPT TO THIS: On March 7, the Associated Press reported: "An unknown number of new George Washington dollar coins were mistakenly struck without their edge inscriptions, including ‘In God We Trust,’ and are fetching around $50 apiece online …. They made it past inspectors and went into circulation Feb. 15." So maybe those coins are what have some in a dither.

On Sunday, an Arizona State University student ardently asked two scarred veterans of social justice activism about how the fires were first lit in their bellies and has kept them going up against the system for decades. Transformation came early for them, they responded a combination of participating at the grassroots level on life and death issues and the mentoring that comes with observing others with courage, grit and a voice to fight.I took in the Sixth Annual Local to Global Justice Teach-In (www.localtoglobal.org) on the ASU campus where dozens of organizations showcased their work, taught workshops, gave out literature and networked on some of the most pressing issues of our time. Many were related to immigration, human trafficking, globalization, human rights, the death penalty, the environment, media, indigenous people, racism, and vigilance of government and law enforcement. What I heard from talks and tabling gave me so much to think about that I lay awake for more than an hour on the last night still absorbing and processing it all.At one point, my mind went back to a November week in 1968 when I caught a bus in Toluca, Mexico, west of Mexico City, and went deep into the countryside and lived several days with a poor, poor campesino in his tiny adobe house. The family, with me added, squeezed around a table in a nook, the only light coming from a fire and ate beans and tortilla. One afternoon, I accompanied the woman up a steep hill. She carried a bucket and a cup and knelt down at the base of a huge century plant (maguey) and reached into a hole in its heart and dipped out the sweet liquid or agua mile (honey water). She hauled it back down to her house where it was put into another container to ferment and produce pulque, the cheap liquor of the campo. Further distilled it can become mescal, a nasty intoxicant. The farm had a few pigs and chicken and a field where corn was raised. The only other people from the U.S. I saw during that stay were Mormon missionaries. I was a Peace Corps trainee, seeking a deeper understanding of an indigenous people with few resources. It would be just one more exercise for me to try to know another culture and see how people cope within the context of their world. Often, its that family I think about when I hear all the rhetoric to crack down on illegal immigration. So much of the American outcry is aimed at people like that when it should be directed to the American business and corporate world that employs illegals and exploits them, then lamely claims they didnt know backgrounds of workers when the feds move in. John Fife, a retired Tucson pastor who founded the Sanctuary Movement 25 years ago and helped congregations across America provide shelter and protection to political refuges from Central America, passionately told listeners how all the gains made by standing up to the U.S. government on that issue were obliterated by the stunning sweep of Homeland Security legislation that gave government full license for intrusion and surveillance. Speakers lamented that the American faith community is less committed these days in the fight for human justice for peoples.In the countless voices of Local to Global Justice, I sensed resolve. Though indices suggest the American Century came and went, this ex-Peace Corps volunteer believes the new generation can still save the day, speak truth to power and be the force that can save humanity.

Its not often that the pastor produces the monthly church newsletter, but the Rev. Paul Whitlock, pastor of Desert Heritage Church in Mesa, writes and edits one that is creative, full of information, ideas, fun and character. From strong commentary, solid congregational news and fresh writing, Whitlock manages also to provoke discussion and share valuable materials gleaned from web sites. Twenty-five years ago, I was doing my churchs monthly newsletter on the side a terrible chore in the days of stencils and a mimeograph machine.The March issue of The Heritage Herald, which goes to the approximate 90 members of the church related to the United Church of Christ with some Disciples of Christ roots, contained Pastor Pauls Top Ten (Plus Two), or 12 ideas to guide us this year. He offered them in descending order, 12 to 1, so we will also. They are stop-and-take-notice assertions about healthy and hurting congregations: 12) Alive churches are constantly changing; dead churches never do. 11) Alive churches have lots of noisy kids; dead churches are stone quiet. 10) Alive churches expenses sometimes exceed their income; dead churches take in more than they ever dream of spending. 9) Alive churches are intense and earnest about coming to worship; dead churches say worship doesnt matter. Alive churches move out in faith; dead churches operate totally by human sight. 7) Alive churches support outreach heavily; dead churches keep it all at home. 6) Alive churches focus on people; dead churches worry mainly about the buildings. 5) Alive churches are filled with great tithers; dead churches are filled with skimpy tithers. 4) Alive churches dream great dreams of God; dead churches relive the good old days. 3) Alive churches feel the fresh winds of love blowing; dead churches breathe the stale air of bickering. 2) Alive churches dont have cant in their vocabulary; dead churches have no other word. 1) Alive churches EVANGELIZE; dead churches FOSSILIZE. Whether the church you know is dead or alive or somewhere in between, Whitlock puts forth some succinct and thoughtful indicators.This months newsletter also borrows from United Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ websites that humorously explain, You Might Be a Disciple if.. or You Might Be a UCCer if . Heres some dandy items: (You Might Be a UCCer if) when you have one more preset left on the car radio, it does not take more than four nanoseconds to choose between NPR and Rush Limbaugh and Your worship bulletin consistently read: Untied Church of Christ. Meanwhile, on the You Might Be a Disciple if list, it noted: You show up for Bible study without one and You dont want the sermon to last more than 20 minutes so you can beat the Methodists to the restaurants and you think churchwide planning is an oxymoron.

I winced when I read the press release from prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York City. Youd think so lofty an operation like that would not make such a mistake. The fax from Carnegie Hall News on Feb. 26 and titled, Carnegie Hall, New York arrives in Chandler, started its first sentence like this: Dr. Craig Jessop, director of the Moron Tabernacle Choir .The publicist in New York, who listed her name and phone number, isnt the first writer to mistakenly produce that typo for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Others, too, have put Mormon in a sentence and left out a letter. I pointed out the news release to a newspaper colleague who belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He shrugged his shoulders and said, At least it doesnt say LSD — another typo sometimes found when writers mean LDS, the very commonly used acronym for Latter-day Saints. That said, we should salute members of the Chandler High School Chorale, led by Dean Anderson, and the Highland High Concert Choir from Gilbert, directed by Rita Scholz. No state has ever had two high schools represented in the annual Carnegie Hall National High School Choral Festival. Carnegie only selects four high schools from across America for its annual national festival. So with two out of four of them coming from Arizona, the East Valley will make up half of that 200-voice choir that will perform in New York on March 19. On Monday, Jessop, who will direct the choral festival, joined the Gilbert and Chandler choruses at Chandler Center for the Arts where he held a 2 -hour rehearsal to prepare them for the festival. Participating choirs have been rehearsing for a year. They will be doing Stravinskys Symphony of Psalms and Poulencs Gloria. On the Perelman Stage of the Stern Auditorium, they will be joined by New Yorks Orchestra of St. Lukes and renowned soprano Nicole Cabell. The first part of the evening will feature the four choruses each performing separately, and then they will combine for the rest of the event.Anderson notes that its his Chandler choirs second time to be invited to the Carnegie festival, making it the only choir in the U.S. ever to perform twice for it. The Carnegie web site (http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/press/press_release/104674.html) notes the Chandler High Schools Chorale distinguished tradition : In June 2005, the choir participated in Americas first arts exchange to the Jilin Province, China. The Chorale was the top-scoring concert choir at the National High School Choir Festival in Chicagos Orchestra Hall. Other performances include finalist finishes in four national festival competitions at the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (Los Angeles), Symphony Hall (Salt Lake City), and Lincoln Center (New York City).As for the Highland High School Choir, it says, Led by Rita Scholz, the Concert Choir consists of auditioned seniors, juniors, and sophomores, and has performed at the Arizona ACDA conference, the Arizona Music Educators Association conference, and the 1998 MENC National Convention. The Highland High School choral music program consists of 170 students in five performing ensembles, presenting four concerts on campus per year as well as other performances around the community.The other two high school choirs taking part are from Rexburg, Idaho, and Bentonville, Ark. To send choirs and bands to festivals and national competitions are enormously expensive and require financial sacrifices for students and families, plus fund-raising prowess. It will surely be a grand night for singing come March 19 in the Big Apple. These two East Valley schools have excelled in music education. Their singing students always will be able to say, I performed at Carnegie Hall.