Comment: The war is over,
or haven't you heard?

For many years, center-left people like me knew who the bad guys were – the religious right. We learned to recognize their code words, their iterations and mash-ups of "family," "values," "faith" and "life." (They, in turn, knew ours – "diversity," "tolerance," "embrace" and the all-important "people of" usage.) I suppose, in the back of my mind, I knew the pendulum would swing away from them someday, but as long as they could get respect from the people who spent my tax money, the watchword was vigilance.

What I didn't expect was the emotion I felt watching the strange, bumbling comedy at the War Memorial Thursday night (March 25), where a little-known Grosse Pointe Farms group called Point of Relevance sponsored a presentation by one Linda Harvey, a Columbus, Ohio woman whose group, Mission: America, seeks – quoting from their website here – "to equip Christians with current, accurate information about cultural issues such as feminism, homosexuality, education and New Age influences." Harvey came expecting to speak to the like-minded Point of Relevance. But they were outnumbered by a crowd of my people, scrambled via social networks and email, holding signs and itching for a confrontation.

As a journalist, I've seen many such divided crowds, taunting one another. But I've never looked at the other side and felt this: Pity.

For one thing, there was the title of Harvey's talk: "Homosexuality: Is the Debate Really Over?" Well, yes. It's over, Linda. Maybe not in your circle, but everywhere else? Over. Gay people, gay culture, have been embraced by the mainstream, even if you don't know it. Ellen DeGeneres is a judge on "American Idol" (and she's the nice one). Your kids are watching "Glee," a show so gay that if you melted down the first-season DVDs and put one drop in a municipal water supply, everyone would redecorate their houses Midcentury Modern. The latest inspirational movie about a civil-rights hero was about Harvey Milk. The villains included Anita Bryant, the Linda Harvey of the '70s. Her anti-gay activism cost her a job endorsing Florida orange juice. In 1979.

Here's how over it is: The other event going on at the War Memorial was a student oratory contest sponsored by a service club. These nervous, scrubbed-up students, escorted by their still-married parents, passed the pickets waving their rainbow flags. "One mother stopped and asked, 'Why are you here?'" said the man sitting next to me, keeper of the "Grosse Pointe is OK with Gay" sign. "She was horrified." You bet she was; you can't really be a Grosse Pointe mom without a sassy gay friend to tell you when it's time to rethink that haircut.

OK, I'm dealing with stereotypes here. But that's the kind of night it was. Point of Relevance was obviously stunned at the turnout, so much so that the order of the evening was upended. Alison Lorkowski, president of the group, stood to tell everyone how much she loved them and appreciated their presence, hoping God would work through them the way he works through everyone, and then booted it to Pastor Sonny, aka Marcellis Smith, for 20 minutes or so of praise music, his mic piped through the inadequate Fries Ballroom's PA system at a volume that constituted aural torture.

"Is this some sort of Christian filibuster?" the man on the other side of me murmured, shortly before getting up to leave, begging an 8 p.m. conference call. By the time Harvey came on, nearly an hour after her scheduled start time, the tang of flop sweat was in the air.

"I had this PowerPoint I was going to give, but I think I'd just like to tell you my story," she said, before setting off on a rambling tale of her conversion from Ms. magazine-reading, career-chasing, child-neglecting secular progressive who had to rethink everything after a bitter divorce. The crowd, which had come to hear Harvey's thoughts on homosexuality, was getting restless. They didn't want to hear how much Harvey hated Fred Phelps; they came for the red meat. Where was the red meat?

Harvey refused to engage for a long time, throwing out only hints of her beliefs – how it's possible to "leave the lifestyle," how heterosexual marriage is God's plan because it "forces you to get outside yourself. You get out of your own selfishness. If you desire someone who is the same, you never get there."

Lorkowski rose again and sent the program back to Pastor Sonny, who launched a long apology about how badly contemporary Christendom has mishandled its relations to gay people, while the crowd grew more and more fidgety. The crowd began to demand Harvey come back and give the PowerPoint. It was getting close to 9 p.m. before she finally relented and ran through her slides about gay marriage (bad), gay-friendly public policy (bad) and therapies and ministries designed to convert gays and lesbians to heterosexuality (good). There were boos. There were no fisticuffs. Then everybody went home.

That's when the pity kicked in. What happened to these people, who used to make elected officials tremble with the force of their political activism? Here's what happened: Mary Cheney happened. The Log Cabin Republicans happened. Larry Craig happened. A lot of conservative Americans looked around and noticed that some of their best friends, their beloved family members, their children's most talented teachers, were gay. The crazier ones left gay-bashing behind and moved on to agitating about the president's birth certificate. The compassionate ones wonder how many more Mrs. Larry Craigs there would have to be before we could finally accept that whatever homosexuality is, it's not a choice, and maybe it's time to lay down the culture-war arms and watch "Glee" together.

All that's left are these few, these apologizing few, this band of brothers, outnumbered by their opponents in square old Republican Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

"You should call your story 'Point of Irrelevance,'" said Jordan Medeiros, one of the gay men who organized the counter-protest. I couldn't agree more.  

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