Hello,

It's finally Friday and the snow is melting and the mud is coming through. Yes, Sunday marks the official arrival of spring and the birds (not to mention the people) are thrilled. We have a church dinner tonight to talk about our church retreat tomorrow. Being the pastor's spouse, I have to go tonight and smile and nod occasionally (wait, I'm not an accessory, who am I kidding, I'll just butt right in and say what I please).

There was a neat (who still uses that word besides me?) article that I read this past week about the Bible and how Christian conservatives try to use certain phrases within the Bible to persecute GLBT people. By the way, they are misinterpreting the phrases. Anyway, the other teachings and rules in the Old Testament are ignored by those same Christians. It was a cool article. If you are interested in reading it, here's the link: http://cjonline.com/stories/031205/opi_roy.shtml I think it's at least worth a read.

Ridiculous item of the day: Alan Keyes, the loser, oops, I mean losing Senate candidate (he was crushed by Barack Obama for an Illinois seat) is at it again. He had nothing but bad things to say about same sex marriage at a Christian rally in Florida. First he called homosexuality "selfish hedonism" and called Mary Cheney a "selfish hedonist." And by the way, the Cheney family hardly blinked when he said that but John Kerry invokes her name, in a positive manner, and they are just thrown into a tizzy.....disgusting!!!! Then Keyes kicks his own daughter out because she is a lesbian and now he has this to say, "Marriage exists in order to respect, recognize and enforce obligations that arise from the fact of procreation." He then went on to mention that heterosexual couples who don't procreate won't hurt the institution of marriage but gay unions would "annihilate" it. Excuse me, isn't that contradictory? You should get married to procreate but if you don't that's ok. What a joke!!!!!! Ok, that's my little rant for the day.

I leave you with a quote from Shaquille O'Neal, NBA player extraordinnaire, in response to being one of the NBA players listed as obese, according to the body-mass index, "I'm classified as phenomenal."

Wherever you are today, have a phenomenal one.

paul