by Ed Dugan

Created on: November 01, 2008   Last Updated: January 19, 2009

Ignorance, like a disease, can be transmitted from the carrier to many innocent victims. Almost like handing down an heirloom, some parents transmit ignorance to their children, especially about other races and people who hold ideas or have lifestyles different from their own. The children then transfer the same ignorance to their offspring and it goes on, generation after generation. The generic term for these kinds of families is losers.

When it comes to the gay community, in addition to right-wing Republicans, neo-Nazis, skinheads and the rest of the outlaw biker crowd, by far the most vocal in spewing their hatred of gays are born-again Christians and Evangelicals. Together, they represent a large part of what is wrong with American thinking. As wildly disparate as these groups are they almost always focus on biblical teaching to support their views and, as always, they engage in selective morality. They pick and choose what part of "God's Word" they want to obey and what parts to ignore.

Being gay isn't always as it seems, so let me tell you a little story to demonstrate. I was the co-founder of a career consulting firm, a highly specialized firm dealing only with top level executives and others who were having difficulty or were sometimes unaquainted with the process of marketing themsleves. For instance, a number of our clients were business executives fleeing various totalitarian governments. One client was the vice-president of a Latin-American country going through a change of regime. We were very effective, our success rate being over 99%. One of these clients was a retired senior executive of a Fortune 500 company. He was a large man, well over six feet, and had a handshake that could crush a walnut. I learned quickly to tense up my hand when we greeted each other.

He lived on one coast of Florida and we were on the other. After spending a month, testing him and analyzing his situation, I was puzzled by his vagueness and lack of specific goals. He always came toward the end of the week and one day offered to take my wife and I to dinner. We went to his private club and it soon became apparent we were in a gay nightclub and restaurant. It made absolutely no difference to us and we enjoyed the evening, but I had gotten his message. That evening he told us that when he came over he always went from our office to Key West to spend the rest of the weekend with a special friend.

Here we have a top executive in a multi-national firm, married with a grown son,

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