1. “Soulmates” – Maren Parusel
You gotta start with a hook. I caught Maren’s act at a chili festival in my neighborhood back in December while I was waiting in line at a food truck. By the time I got my corn pancake-batter-dipped sausage on a stick (yum), I was a fan of her synthed-out rhythms and spunky voice. I bought her CD and this song, the anthem of eternal, reincarnated lovers, fit the bill to open this year’s playlist. “We’ve been togeddah, forevah… togeddah, forevah… we are soulmates…”

2. “It’s Time” – Glee Cast
I usually recommend going with the original artist who recorded the song (sorry, Imagine Dragons!), but exceptions must be made, especially when both you and your partner are huge Gleeks. For us, it was a bonus that this song is sung by a male character to his boyfriend. I told Michael that if I had cup-clapping skills like this, I’d organize my own flash mob to make him smile!

3. “Not the Only One” – Bonnie Raitt
Don’t forget the classics! This song is one of my all-time favorites. My love affair with the female singer-songwriter began in the 90s Lilith Fair heyday – Sarah Mclachlan, Natalie Merchant, Tracy Chapman. But she of the white streak in a mane of orange hair preceded all of these and was still making killer blues-roots records. Just like Ms. Raitt, I remember “feeling that I’d always be the lonely one… but then I saw your face, on the edge of my horizon, whispering that I was not the only one.” Bonus: this song is perfect for dancing.

4. “Brighter Than the Sun” – SMASH Cast
All good mixtapes deserve a piece of empty-headed pop fluff, and this little ditty was perfect for ours. Michael and I watched the whole first season of SMASH together with some close friends last year before he moved to St. Louis to begin grad school, so this makes for some nice memories. Plus, my dance moves look just like spoiled white girl Karen’s in an NYC karaoke bar.

5. “Into the Mystic” – Swell Season
Mixtapes are a perfect for sharing “new” finds with your partner. I’m sure I’d heard this Van Morrison song before, but it really caught my attention when it played in the soundtrack to the film “The Five-Year Engagement,” which happens to be about a couple working through the challenges of moving from California to the midwest because one of them is pursuing a Ph.D. – something Michael and I know a little bit about. So this pick is as much related to that movie as it is the song itself – though I absolutely love when Glen Hansard is wailing, “When that foghorn whistle blows, I want to hear it, I don’t have to fear it and I want to rock your gypsy soul…”

6. “Be My Honeypie” – The Weepies
Sometimes a sweet, simple song says it best. My brother introduced me to The Weepies several years ago, and they’ve become one of my favorite folk groups. With this song, they manage to translate a melodramatic hyperbole into the sweet nothings of lovers who can’t bear to be apart. “If you don’t love me, I will die – be my honeypie.” (Bonus: can’t help but smile at the LGBT-friendly video!)

7. “A Bushel and a Peck” – Doris Day
Songs that are shared experiences always make for great mixtape selections. My Mamaw used to sing this to me as a boy. To this day, I hum it absentmindedly on a regular basis. I used to sing it to my border collie, Winslow, who I had to say goodbye to when he became sick back in October. So it’s always been a very personal song for me. But Michael thought it was something silly I had made up. “A bushel and a peck, a barrel and a heap…” I was delighted to watch him eat crow when we saw “Julie & Julia” together and heard the track playing in the soundtrack. Since then, it’s become a song that we sing to each other at random intervals. I love that a song my Mamaw sang to me still means so much, and I hope to sing it to my children and grandchildren one day.

8. “A Place Only You Can Go” – Needtobreathe
Here’s where I let the mood of the mixtape transition to something a little more serious. Like all lovers do, Michael and I have faced (and continue to face) our share of challenges: family and friends who don’t approve of our relationship, trying to integrate our lives while being in different emotional and spiritual places, navigating the long-distance thing. At the end of the day, there’s no one else I would want to go through these things with, and this song (and the next) both speak to the very real challenges of life. It also acknowledges the very real power of choosing to go through them together. “This is the cry of a man: I can’t give you fortune or noble life, but I’ll love you all I can.”

9. “We’re Gonna Pull Through” – Over the Rhine
My favorite band, OTR always makes it onto the mixtape. This song is actually from one of their Christmas albums. It’s a reflection of the hard times of the previous year, with an eye to the hope, however bleak it might be, of the future. When Karin Berquist sings, “Maybe, kinda, sorta – if I really had to say – something good is on it’s way,” I can definitely understand the very tentative belief she musters in the face of what can seem like overwhelming obstacles. But it’s my conviction that belief that “we’re gonna pull through” – however slight – is sometimes the only thing that enables us to do just that.

10. “Emotionally Yours” – Jimmy Lafave
This ballad from Texas rock-n-roller Jimmy Lafave was actually a tricky pick for me. I  co-owned this CD, called “Texoma,” with a girlfriend back in college. We bought it on one of many road trips – to Boone, North Carolina, I believe – and it’s been an essential part of my music collection every since. I don’t go on a road trip without listening to it at least once. It certainly reminds me of my strange, complicated history – not all of which is negative. I have a lot of very good feelings and memories about that time in my life and the people I shared it with. But I wanted to give this song new meaning and new life with where I am today. In it, there’s a line that says, “It’s like my whole life never happened every time I see you.” I get that. Not that the past is wiped away, but that if all the twists and turns I took to get here brought me the wonderful man I have in my life today, then it was a journey I’d take a million times over. Though I’m glad I don’t have to.

11. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” – Greg Laswell
Sometimes, you just have a song that is beautiful, and suits the mood you want to cultivate. I have no other reason for including this moody interpretation of the Cyndi Lauper classic other than I think its very, very pretty.

12. “Oh How the Years Go By” – Amy Grant
I don’t know about you, but I get a kick out of making my partner cringe by amplifying my innate nerdery, love of schmaltz, and long history with good old Contemporary Christian Music. Enter Amy Grant. Despite the fact that, musically, this song is everything that made 90s pop ballads so transcendent cheesy, I actually really love the lyrics: “In our times of trouble, we only had ourselves – nobody else… No one there to save us, we had to save ourselves…” When you choose a partner, you’re choosing the one whose back you will always have, and who you trust to always have yours. I like that I can communicate that to my boyfriend through my CCM pop goddess.

13. “Hummingbird Heartbeat” – Katy Perry
I’m sorry, but it’s not a Valentine’s mixtape without a pop song that’s full of thinly-veiled sexual innuendo. In this case, very thinly-veiled.

14. “Right Back Where We Started” – Maxine Nightingale
Another movie soundtrack-inspired choice. Every November after Thanksgiving, I force invite Michael (and anyone else in the general vicinity) to watch my favorite Christmas movie, “The Family Stone.” There’s a scene in a bar on Christmas Eve where Sarah Jessica Parker’s uptight intruder finally let’s her freak flag fly by playing this disco ditty on the jukebox. It’s an awful song – so awful that it makes for a beautiful moment as you realize just how desperately her character needs someone like Luke Wilson’s laid-back, pot-smoking slacker to help her “just, you know… relax.” Now we can enjoy this song all year long.

15. “Hang With Me” – Robyn
Nothing wrong with introducing your partner to your favorite new music through your mixtape. I rediscovered the Swedish dance/pop star Robyn when her single “Dancing On My Own” was featured on the show “Girls.” I loved it so much that I got the whole album. “Hang With Me” is one of my favorite tracks – a warning to her suitor not to “fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me, ’cause it’s gonna be all heartbreak, blissfully painful insanity.” I told Michael, you’ve been warned.

16. “Wanted Man” – Needtobreathe
Needtobreathe is the only band to make it on this year’s playlist twice. I just really dug their “Reckoning” album this past year, and this Bonnie and Clyde-inspired road song is great to sing along to and says, essentially: I’m a fugitive on the run, but get in the car and trust my love for you.

17. “When the Right One Comes Along” – Nashville Cast
As seen in some of the previous picks, I like to include music that represents a shared experience. Michael and I are both addicted to the new country music-centered drama Nashville, and this song is among the best they’ve recorded for the show. “You think you know what you’re looking for, ’til what you’re looking for finds you.” Ain’t it the truth.

18. “It’s Time” – Gavin Mikhail
Yes, it’s the same song as #2, but a significantly stripped-down version. Michael is an excellent pianist, and I wanted him to learn to play this one so we could sing it together. It makes for a great little anthem: “I’m never changing who I am.” And when you find a Valentine who loves you for who you are, you’ll never have to.

I hope this how-to has inspired you to keep the mixtape tradition alive. Don’t wait for the next Valentine’s Day – you can make a mixtape for any occassion! St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, and there’s a world of Irish pub songs waiting to be put together in just the right order. Cheers!

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I love Christmas music, more than is generally acceptable among even the most merry people I know.

Each year, wisps of smoke are still floating out of the fleshy eye sockets of a just-extinguished jack-o-lantern when on the first of November I army-crawl into the back of my closet to find the stack of cracked jewel cases holding my favorite holiday CDs. It’s an eclectic mix: James Taylor, Kristen Chenowith, Annie Lennox, a compilation of ska and punk bands from high school, a host of regional folk singers, the cast of Glee, Bing and Burl and Judy and Perry singing all the classics.

I play these albums on an interminable loop from the day after Halloween through the first of a the new year. I’m the living embodiment of a December department store soundtrack. But I figure two months out of twelve is a fair enough allocation for these songs that make it easier for me to believe in things like angels and guiding stars and hope. Songs that help me to hope.

There is one album in my ever-growing stack of Christmas CDs that brings the season to life in a way that no other does. It has that power not only because it’s a gosh-darn delightful album, but also because of the special set of circumstances that make it such a vivid memory from my youth.

When I was a boy growing up in Asheville, every Christmas Eve my parents would load the brown Crown Victoria with presents and casseroles and three kids to head south across the state line that separates the Carolinas. The destination was Lake Keowee, a maze of inlets built by the power company to keep the lights on. My Dad’s parents owned their little piece of paradise on this lake, a home that Grandpa mostly built himself. To a boy, it was a magical house – and that’s not merely the sentimentality of a grown man waxing nostalgic.

The house featured a vacuum cleaning system built right into its walls – circular holes the size of a racquetball designed to attach to a special vacuum cleaner that had no base or motor or bag or filter. Just a vacuum stem attached to a long coil of snaky tubing. When you plugged the tube into one of these holes in the wall, the whole system would whir to life, sucking up dust and dirt left behind by the feet of six busy grandchildren, pulling it somewhere deep into the house, somewhere in the basement. I’ve never thought about where all that dust and dirt went until this very moment. My child mind never considered this mystery as I drug the coils from the closet and cleaned, cleaned, cleaned the floor. Any house that compels an eight-year-old boy voluntarily vacuum its floors must be magic. Right?

The central vacuum system wasn’t the only piece of technology in my Grandparents’ home that held my fascination.

Enter through the front door and you are in a comfortable and spacious living room – stone hearth, La-Z-Boy recliner, and one of those behemoths of a television set that came in its own wooden cabinet and sat on the floor. Big screen in the days before plasma.

Keep walking down the length of the living room. In front of you is a hallway leading to the bedrooms. But before you reach it, the hearth on your left gives way to the curve of the wall, which in turn leads to a nook – a small sitting room with glass doors overlooking the lake. There is nothing much here save two blue swivel chairs. It is a place to relax, to read… or to listen. Built into the wall is a stereo system that is as tall as you are (as long as you happen to be an eight-year-old boy).

I was fascinated with this piece of technology, since we had nothing like it at home, where my musical options were limited to 8-tracks of Disney soundtracks or John Denver (both of which played a significant role in forming my lifelong tastes in music). Grandma’s stereo was cutting edge for its day. It was a five-level tiered system, with a record player on top, a dual cassette player, an AM/FM tuner, and a super-fancy, super-new device called a CD player.

At eight years old, this CD player was just so freaking cool. One simply had to push a flat button (that hardly felt like a button at all) and a mechanical tray slid smoothly out from the face of the stereo like it was straight off the set of Star Trek. It had a spring-loaded circular base, and that was where you gently aligned the glimmering CD, which was pulled back inside the machine to whir and spin and eventually play music.

Grandma only had a handful of these CDs. I don’t remember what most of them were – Readers Digest or TIME compilations, I think – but one CD I remember very well. The jacket cover featured the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen leaning on an aspen tree trunk in what appeared to be the White Woods. Her soft, colorless face, which gazed knowingly beyond the camera’s lens, was framed by pillows of curly auburn hair, and her lips matched the plush, rich red coat that was keeping her warm in this winter wonderland. She wasn’t quite smiling, but a slight curl of her mouth showed she was full of memory, full of… thought. Home for Christmas, the album was called.

My sister with Grandma & Grandpa

Every Christmas Eve, one of my first acts upon arrival at Lake Keowee was to gently remove this CD from the case, carefully place it in the sci-fi CD deck, and press “play.” The stereo came to life and soon the room filled with sounds of strings and harp, setting the holiday mood. Finally, Amy Grant’s gentle alto would fill the house with the promise that “from now on, our troubles will be miles away.” And for this eight-year-old boy in a Rudolph sweater sitting cross-legged on the carpet, with his family moving around the magic house and casting lines off the bank of the lake and basting a turkey in the kitchen, all was right in the world.

I feel like I did this twenty times or more. I feel like I have infinite memories of endless Christmas Eves on the lake, letting Amy’s sparse rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” fill the house and my head. The reality is that there were but a few. Just a handful of times that Grandpa smiled from his recliner, watching his grandchildren through lenses that must have been a quarter of an inch thick. A very finite number of years that brought cousins together, cousins who spent a few minutes shyly becoming reacquainted with each other before resuming the prior year’s adventures down on the dock or under the peach trees in the yard. A short-lived tradition of Grandma’s crock pot mac ‘n cheese and creamy chicken ‘n dumplings. (A lot of foods in the South are irrevocably conjoined by the letter “n.”)

Grandpa left us first, in 1994, his body slowly succumbing to the tumor that doctors had discovered in his brain. Though I don’t recall the words, I remember watching my Dad speak softly at the funeral. Grandma spent much of the next decade in assisted living, her body shutting down a little more each day.

Medical care for both Grandma and Grandpa was expensive. By the time she passed in 2005, the lake house had been sold and the bulk of possessions from their life together had been redistributed. The stereo system ended up in our own living room. Even after my parents ended their marriage and Dad moved out of the house with a few pieces of furniture, it remained in the living room. It’s now a permanent fixture in my Mom’s home, and every year my brother, sister, and I bring home new LPs to spin on the record player, a piece of the stereo that for years saw no action. Now every Christmas, it plays the fuzzy sounds of Carole King and John Denver records. I suppose the once-futuristic CD player isn’t much used anymore.

After a brief childhood cemented in reliable traditions, the world did what it always does. It changed. The family continues to gather. My grandparents’ eldest daughter, our Aunt, assumed the annual role of holiday host. The cousins, one by one, graduated high school and scattered across several Southern states, going to college and getting married and starting families of their own. I left the South altogether, wending my way across the Sierra Nevadas and finally settling in the southwestern-most county in the Continental forty-eight: San Diego.

I often think about the magic in my grandparents’ home when November rolls around – that vacuum cleaner, Grandma’s stereo, the food on the table and the people gathered around it. The little flashes of memory that compose our family’s tradition in my mind.

These memories from my few years on Keowee are deep as the lake itself. And though the magic is different now (I’ve yet to encounter another vacuum quite as exotic as my Grandma’s), the foundation of our family seated around the warm stone hearth with Amy Grant serenading us from the stereo around the corner is a memory just mystical enough to conjure the same kind of expectation that hung in the air on Christmas Eve in South Carolina all those many years ago. In sunny San Diego, where – in December – flip-flops are unquestionably appropriate footwear for wrapping a string of colorful bulbs around the trunk of a palm tree, a few measures of the now-classic Amy Grant album are all I need to transform my home of beaches and board shorts into a snow-laden aspen grove where I can peer knowingly across time and space, awash in yuletide memories (plush, rich red winter coat optional).

I don’t know what happened to the stack of CDs on Grandma’s shelf when my Dad and Aunts packed up the lake house. Some time ago, in college I think, I bought my own copy of Home for Christmas. It’s now well-worn and skips in a couple of places; the case is scratched, and the photograph of Amy on the jacket is a little faded. When I pull it out of the closet, along with all my other Christmas albums, on the first of November each year, it’s never the first one I play. I try to wait until Christmas Eve to put it in the stereo, out of respect for the memories it triggers of Grandpa and Grandma and Christmas Eves on the lake.

Me in Grandpa’s lap

Truth, though, is that I rarely make it to Thanksgiving before I can no longer resist the woman in the White Woods and her plaintive, melancholy rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The season, for me, never quite arrives until the strings introduce that understated dirge of a carol and I find myself transported to my own White Woods, where I uncover just enough hope and magic to carry me into the next year of change.

Matthew Blake Williams
December 7, 2012

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Dear President Obama:

I am so glad that I will continue to call you “President” for the next four years. I am also glad that your campaign will no longer be emailing me five times a day!

I was, like many of your supporters, nervous about the 2012 election. My anxiety stemmed from the possibility that today, November 7, I might wake to an America that chose inequality, individuality, and self-interest over the virtues of our best selves: equality, care for our brothers and sisters, and an interest in what is best for the diverse citizenry of our great nation.

And we are so diverse! Growing up in western North Carolina, I was so rarely exposed to people who were different from me. I was part of a low-income, working class, white, conservative family in the Bible Belt. Politically, the people I knew rallied around moral issues defined by our faith.

But when I went to college in Tennessee, I began to meet people who were ever-so-slightly different from me. I met people from states on the other side of the country. I became friends with exchange students from Korea, the Philippines, and China. Some of my hallmates weren’t even Christians (shocking, I know!). One of my best friends even confessed to me that she believed in evolution. This was, at the time, much harder for me to process than many might realize.

And then, I found myself moving “out West” – something I had wanted to do since boyhood. I lived in Reno, Nevada for two years before making my way to sunny San Diego in 2006. And along the way, I’ve continued to meet people that I never imagined existed when I was growing up in my three-pronged world of family, church, and Christian school in North Carolina. People of a thousand colors, faiths, ideas, and dreams. People who challenged the boundaries of my small and selfish world. And they were, I was so surprised to learn, not my enemies. Not the warring, godless faction of Americans I had been trained to fear or evangelize or – let’s admit it – humiliate with my superior understanding of how the world works.

In effect, I was humbled. To learn that I knew so little. To learn that my way of viewing the world was far from being the whole story, or even the correct story. To learn that these people around me had experienced life in ways that I would never fully understand – but that I could nonetheless learn from.

And then, in the middle of all this learning, I came out.

It is a strange and shocking experience to suddenly transition from being an “insider” of a large and powerful group of people that considers itself to be the best of the best, the most right and righteous in our nation – white, male, evangelical Christian – to identifying yourself with one of that same group’s most virulently despised adversaries, the worst of the worst, an abomination: gay.

But it is also a wonderful, transformational, life-giving experience.

It is an experience that showed me what genuine love, faith, and community are. While most of those that I had trusted and loved growing up began to call me names, treat me like a lost cause, or quietly vanish from my life, I found a new life among all those diverse, different-than-me people that I had met along the way. I came face-to-face with the America you spoke of in your acceptance speech last night, an America with a “belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.”

Obligations to one another.

I heard of this growing up. The leaders in my world spoke of it, when they talked about Jesus, the one who laid down his life for the least. Jesus, who said the last will be first, who “suffered” the little children to come unto him, who partied with prostitutes, who respected women in a culture that didn’t, who turned a cadre of blue-collar followers into an army of servants. It was a powerful theme in the great story of faith into which I was born.

But we somehow missed it. We missed the mark. We cared, but only for those who looked and believed and thought like we did. We reached out, but only to those who acquiesced to our small, small understanding of right and wrong. We supported, but only those who supported us in return.

When I encountered these other people, this “other America” that lay outside the tiny part of it I grew up in, I began to understand what the sacrificial Way of Jesus looks like when we truly live it. And I was amazed to find that Way is alive and well, often among people who do not even bear the name of Jesus, among those non-Christians that I had always learned were pitiable, lost, the enemy.

My fear going into yesterday’s election was that this “other America” was not the real America – that the enthusiasm that swept the nation in 2008 was an anomaly. That this morning, I would wake to the America that I knew growing up, the America that says, “protect your own, fear the enemy, fight those who are different.” The America that insists the whole of its citizenry abide by only one narrow, “righteous” way of looking at the world.

For me, that’s what was at stake in this election: the loss of freedom.

I am so happy that today, I woke to the other America. The real America. The America where diversity is valued, cherished for what it can teach us. The America where respect for one another is the ultimate virtue. Where the need to be right and the impetus to convert others to “my way of seeing things” does not overpower our best selves, does not overcome the grace we give one another to live as free citizens.

I believe that is the America you believe in as well, Mr. President, and that is why I supported you in this election. Thank you, thank you, thank you for representing all Americans, for respecting all Americans, and for the sacrifices you have made to lead this country.

Along with you, I believe that we are truly continuing the tradition of building a more perfect union.

A citizen and supporter,

Matthew B. Williams

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Winslow’s tail thumped the floor incessantly. If all I did was move, or speak, or simply make eye contact – the tail told how he delighted in this, just in my presence. I have not heard a more reassuring sound than the thump of a dog’s tail on a hardwood floor.

There are a thousand fleeting, incidental moments that are a chasm in my day now that he is gone; tiny things that I will miss until my mind forgets to remember them – sounds, smells, and sights. His eyebrows in their unique arch, hinting at how alert he was, even when his chin lay resting on his forearms. The click of his toenails on the hardwood floor as he attempted to sneak into the kitchen. (He never was very good at subtlety.) The way he smelled my clothes as I dressed in the mornings to see whether they were work clothes or play clothes. For him, the difference meant either eight hours of waiting for me to return home or the immediate gratification of a trip to the park.

Winslow took delight in every waking second of his five years on this earth. The moment he was unleashed, he shot across whatever stretch of green lie in front of him, cutting a circle back to me only when my calls became tinged with desperation, or when something distracted him along the way.

He abided in expectation. Every moment was a chance for something wonderful to happen. He was ever-alert, employing all of his senses to their fullest capacity to find something new to sniff, eat, chase, or roll around in. New adventures were life-giving to him, which is why we so rarely repeated a route on our runs through the neighborhood and Balboa Park.

There were things he didn’t like. Vacuum cleaners, smoke detectors, plastic bags (the menacing crinkle that continued even after they had been set down was unnerving). When these things assaulted his senses, he immediately ran to me and buried his wet nose in between my legs, armpits, any place that offered escape – unless, of course, I was the one pushing the vacuum.

Through everything, Winslow was dedicated, loyal to me, and so eager to please. When he was alive, I did not have the capacity to fully appreciate this. Now, in his absence, in the void when I wake up and realize I don’t have to step over him to climb out of bed… Now I begin to understand just how much he gave me. No one else can offer that kind of unwavering belief in me. No one else can promise he will stay, heel, come, sit, and lie down with me.

No man can apprehend the depth of conviction and fortitude of a good dog. We are too far beneath him, wrecked by our disease of want. We crave too many things, too much, too often, and we forfeit the good opportunities our long lives grant us to simply be delighted.

Even from within the stupor of the extra dose of Tramadol I insisted he take on his last day, Winslow’s fortitude shone out. I will always remember it:

I move in close, and my face is wet, and I put my forehead on his. I feel his leg, one of the two he can still maneuver. He lifts it and rests a paw gently on my shoulder. It is a touch that puts to rest every dark thought at work inside me. Even facing the unknown world that waits, even after the frenzy of hospitals and drugs and the pain that comes and goes, Winslow knows only this moment – man and dog, together in the place where we sleep – and though he no longer has the ability to thump his tail in delight, he delights anyway, and assures me that in this moment, as with every other moment in his life, there is nothing better than being where I am.

Today I was finally prompted to write because of one particular Facebook post from a quasi-family member (oh, the tangled web of the modern family) who I hardly know at all, but with whom I share a Christmas dinner once a year.

Right after posting a picture that shared her support of Chick-Fil-A, she said, in so many words: So tired of people commenting about Chick-Fil-A. It was pretty obvious before Mr. Cathy admitted anything anyway, considering that the restaurants are closed on Sundays. 

While making assumptions about anything posted on the Internet almost always leads to errant conclusions, I’m going to risk it in this case. Using the magic of extrapolation and my knowledge of my extended/quasi-family’s faith systems (along with the fact that this person happens to be a Chick-Fil-A employee), I’m going to assume that the message she is conveying falls somewhat in line with this:

Why are people in an uproar about Chick-Fil-A funding groups that advocate against same-sex marriage and in support of reparative therapy? It’s always been a Christian company – of course they’re going to fund those things! Everyone knows that’s what Christians do.

This may or may not accurately reflect the perspective this girl was positing. Regardless, it is a sound byte that resonates with enough of the chatter out there right now that I feel confident in concluding a fair number of Christians feel this way. There appears to be a sense that “we mainstream Christians, who have always been clear about our feelings on this issue, are suddenly under attack for simply living out what we believe to be true. Chick-Fil-A is a company that shares our values, so we’re going to show our support in the middle of this outcry against it.”

Naturally, I have something to say in response to this way of thinking. And my response is…

You’re right. Mainstream evangelicals have never pussyfooted around the fact that they believe marriage is a religious sacrament, not a civil right, and that God restricts it to a lifelong union of one man and one woman. The seemingly sudden blow-up (which has actually been stewing for many months within the LGBT community before Mr. Cathy’s admission caused it to boil over into the mainstream) has, once again, painted Christians as bigoted, homophobic, hateful people when all you’re trying to do is live out your convictions. It would appear that the “gay agenda” to restrict Christian free speech and do harm (in this case, financial harm) to God-honoring believers is in full swing.

It’s not fair and it’s not right – the boycott has led to a lot of mud-slinging that casts all Christians as evil people.

Not what you were expecting me to say? I’ll admit, it wasn’t what I first wanted to write. It wasn’t even really what I expected to write when I sat down to start this post. As I’ve watched this particular battle in the culture war unfold, I’ve found myself – as I so often do – straddling both sides. As a Christian who believes that the way of Jesus is our best model for how to live a healthy, holy, happy life, I’m saddened by the raging of my LGBT comrades who have chosen to use the opportunity to make nasty statements about all of Christendom.

Likewise, as a gay man who believes that God loves me as I am, I am saddened by the raging of Christians who use terms and speech completely unbecoming of Jesus followers as they angrily react to the Chick-Fil-A boycott.

There has been plenty of sad, sinful behavior on both sides. That’s what a culture war does – it enables each “side” to demonize the other. And it’s wrong.

The plain and simple truth is that we are all perfectly capable of raising awareness about our concerns without becoming assholes in the process. It’s not the easy way, which is why we so rarely choose it, but it’s the best way. I have chosen not to give Chick-Fil-A any more of my own personal business because I know that at the end of the day, the dollar I spend there is being passed along to organizations that support reparative therapy for LGBT people. As someone who was in reparative therapy for several years, I know firsthand that it is an extremely damaging and dangerous approach to how the church has “dealt with” it’s LGBT members, and I won’t knowingly allow my money to fund such programs. I also feel responsible to make sure others are aware that by eating at Chick-Fil-A, they are funding programs that are harmful, especially to youth raised in the church who feel compelled to change an unchangeable sexual orientation.

However, if you choose to support Chick-Fil-A, I will not treat you like a bigoted, hateful homophobe. I will respect your decision and your right. I can’t say that I’m happy about it, and I think it reflects a very common deeper misunderstanding among Christians of what it is to be an LGBT person, but at the end of the day, you earned your dollar and are entitled to spend it as you wish without harassment.

There is one more thing that I feel bears consideration in all this. Looking back at the comment made by my quasi-family member above, there is nothing blatantly hateful or harmful in it. On closer inspection, though, it subtly underscores a pervasive problem among the Church. The assumption is made that the world should have already been aware of Chick-Fil-A’s stance toward gays because it already knew that Chick-Fil-A was a Christian company. Meaning, Christians have a strong reputation for the positions we take against homosexuality.

This is a truth few would dispute. In fact, my family member, who is a Christian, seems to acknowledge this herself: we’re known for opposing homosexuality, so why the surprise?

This is insidious, for 2 reasons:

1. Not all Christians believe same-sex relationships are wrong. A majority might, but there are many of us – no less Christian than our brothers and sisters in mainstream circles – who see another way. Christianity is not “owned” by those who define marriage as one man, one woman.
2. Regardless of how we interpret Scriptures and form our beliefs about gay marriage, there is a calling – both in Scripture and in our hearts – for Christians to be known by our love. When 91% of non-Christians respond with “anti-homosexual” when asked what word best describes Christianity, we have more than a PR problem. There is something wrong with our hearts.

My challenge in this and the countless other battles of the culture war (besides “Hey, let’s stop the culture war!”) is to exercise more love. And if that’s asking too much, maybe we can start with mutual respect. I’ve failed at this in recent days, but I know I can do it. It is the best way.

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