Please pardon the baseball bat. I thought you were a Christian.

A quick story: a man and his infirmed father were at a local mall here in Nashville some years ago. The man was helping his father to their car so they walked arm in arm. Some local guys spotted them and assumed they were gay snuggling, so they shot them. I doubt the father and son even considered that someone would think they were gay, and never considered what might happen to them if they made it appear that they were gay.

I was reminded of that story because of this story that happened last Sunday: two Ecuadorian bothers were in New York and had been to a bar. They too were walking closely together and, as is the custom in Ecuador, they may have been walking arm in arm. Three men jumped out of a car and attacked them. One of the brothers escaped but the other had a bottle broken over his head and was beaten with a baseball bat. He died.

Now this:

The idea that Mike Huckabee seems to be expressing is that gay rights aren’t that big a deal because we homosexuals haven’t had to deal with the kind of violence that African Americans have. What Huckabee fails to recognize is that much of the reason we aren’t the victims of violence more often is that we hide that we are gay, something the families in the stories above didn't know either. But saying that we don’t deserve the same kind of civil rights movements as African Americans because we could stay in the closet to escape from violence is like saying that Anne Frank in didn’t need a civil rights movement because she could stay in the attic.

The guys in the two stories above didn’t know they had to live in fear because they’d never had to. Like Huckabee, they didn’t have an assumption that violence would follow if they stood too close to each other and appeared gay. I doubt Huckabee has thought about the threat of violence to people who could frequently seem gay because they are gay. Why should he? His life hasn’t depended on hiding.

But like those separate facilities and those issue of second class citizenry that Huckabee denounces for what they did to African Americans, the separate facilities and issues of second class citizenry that Huckabee espouses for people like me create the same permission to use violence that was used to justify hosing people and cracking open their heads in the 60s.

Huckabee brings up the “attack” on that old women, where someone brazenly slapped her Styrofoam cross out of her hand and equates that with the bias and violence used against gays ... and people suspected of being gay. He equates the very out Christian Church, the one that to which every President has proudly proclaimed his membership to, with homosexuality, to which no President and few elected leaders have been willing to admit membership to.

One has to wonder if anyone has ever been killed by strangers on the streets of America because someone mistook them for being Christian.