Yet Another Closet

Boy, that's a toughy. You come out to family, friends and maybe coworkers. Then you testify to the University of Southern Maine's Center for the Prevention of Hate and Violence, revealing the vicious anti-gay discrimination in the how-life-should-be state.

Now the leading liberal columnist in the state says, "Come on out!" In a piece Gay rights law needs a few heroes, the Portland Press-Herald's Bill Nemitz calls for the anonymous gays to stick their necks out again and farther. His logic is good; the emotion is hard and jagged.

The pseudo-minister Mike Heath (he calls his Christian Civic League Website and lobbying efforts his ministry) has publicly and inanely cited the discrimination study as a sham. He has said the 48 who testified are fictitious and that their firings, getting tossed from housing and other blatant hate acts never happened.

Nemitz writes:

They should come forward. They should drop their anonymity like a piece of excess baggage, stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the microphones and explain, once and for all, what it's like to live in a state where your sexual orientation can indeed get you fired or evicted or . . . worse.

And in doing so, these 48 brave souls just might knock the evangelical wind out of (Heath).

Well, knock the wind out of him and there'll be nothing left. Hmmm.

Yet, that is a lot to ask from those who have already been heroic. While some would deny the record and try to further humiliate the victims, we have to ask how much more must the 48 pay. Nemitz has his answer. Come out of yet another closet.

They would be even greater heroes were they to do it. We who are so much more fortunate in not having suffered as they already have will understand if they do not.