Dan Savage’s call to arms (and shout-out to me)

Last updated on: May 31, 2013 at 7:39 am by John Shore

Dan Savage’s call to arms (and shout-out to me) 2013-05-31T07:39:45-08:00 John Shore

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During his appearance yesterday on HuffPost Live to discuss his runaway bestseller American Savage, Dan Savage talked a bit about me (at 2:10):

Oh, Dan. Don’t you know that our love can never be? Oh, sure, you’ve got those Popeyesque biceps. And yes, at times I find myself lingering with a weird wistfulness over the photos of yourself that you keep sending me no matter how often I change my email address. I could maybe do without the ones of you recumbent on your couch writing (I cannot believe how hot your laptop mustn’t get), but the ones of you renovating the interior of your house did inspire me to finally install that ceiling fan in my wife’s bathroom.

Boy, I sure don’t look as good as you do wearing nothing but a tool belt. And I wish I wasn’t now so nearly tragically aware of why it’s a prime idea to always store the hammer somewhere toward the back of the tool belt. But whatever. I’m sure my voice’ll soon drop back to normal.

Har! Hammer jokes!

No, but seriously (in case anyone could possibly mistake any of the above as anything but a joke): of course I greatly appreciate Dan’s words about me. (And, apropos to what Dan says in this clip, my own piece about Tony Perkins is This animal. This cretin. This travesty. This demon.)

Dan and I go back a little bit. In September of 2011, he excerpted on his blog my Christians and the Blood of Jamery Rodemeyer. And it was his excerpting and commenting about my An Open Letter to Famous Progressive Christian Jim Wallis that did so much to … well, help change things. Dan also once asked me to write a guest post for him (16, Christian, and Surrounded by Bigots). When he was so widely accused of bullying some teenagers, I wrote Dan Savage and the Truth. And we chatted a bit before his famous debate with Brian Brown.

The idea that Dan Savage hates Christians—which slathering louts who make their living persecuting gay people in the name of Christ start mindlessly parroting the minute anyone shines so much as a flashlight on them—is the vilest kind of nonsense. Dan has no problem whatsoever with Christians or Christianity per se. What he does have a problem with are Christians who insistently make of the Bible a club they then use to beat LGBTQ people with—and Christians who don’t then roundly denounce that life-destroying hypocrisy.

What Dan is is relentlessly fair, unflaggingly good-natured, and above all a tireless defender of the unjustly persecuted. Would that all Christians were the same.

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