It is not a pretence, Don. I am 100% serious. You're playing out the comfy, familiar "liberal" role that makes you feel most holy and righteous (as an anti-anti-gay crusader), and you've been cleverly led into it by the politicans and the mass media...solely for THEIR gain, not for yours.

You are entirely in error in imagining that only people who think the way you do and talk the way you do and get outraged the way you do care about what happens to someone like Matthew Shepard.

The people who beat up and tortured Matthew were similarly led into it, and they felt similarly holy and righteous doing what they did...in service to the complete opposite line of insane, exaggerated rhetoric. They may have heard some horrible, inflammatory story about what some gay man supposedly did to a child or something along that line.

And that's what I object to: the hysterical, ridiculous, self-righteous, self-serving, self-justifying "victim" rhetoric on both sides of the issue and the ridiculous amount of media overkill that has been invested in raising 2 sets of holy warriors to do pointless battle with one another over something really trivial (gay sex) that's been happening anyway in human society for thousands of years!

It's a sad, sad case of the media and politicians driving the agenda, the tail wagging the dog, and people falling for it hook, line, and sinker...and hating each other over their exaggerated and false assumptions about what the other ones are thinking and believing.

Look at yourself, Don. You're positively panting to find some way to prove that I am a secret homophobe, when the subject of homosexuality in itself simply bores me and strikes me as a tempest in a teapot, something that just doesn't matter. You're searching diligently like an investigator for the Spanish Inquisition, hoping to find that one damning bit of pyschological evidence, that one stray word, that will prove that I am homophobic just because you want me to be in order to serve your need to prove I'm wrong. It's farcical. I'm about as worried over gay men as I am over gay hamsters, meaning not at all...and I actually find gay women rather appealing, provided they're not too ugly.

Stop looking for witches, Don. And stop trying to burn them.