The other day I posted this CNN video of former Growing Pains actor Kirk Cameron, who’s now a grown-up, well-spoken, fundamentalist Christian evangelist, and it’s stirred up a bit of a heated discussion. I said when I posted the link to that piece on Twitter that Cameron is dangerous, Roger Ebert retweeted it (thanks as always, Roger) and that spurred some interesting comments from the Christian side, folks who aren’t necessarily regular readers around here. And it’s been an interesting discussion, but the whole issue of the fundamentalist perspective on homosexuality, and the impact the religious right has on the future rights of both the LGBT community and women’s rights, deserves more serious discussion.

First, to clarify, when I said that Cameron is “kind of dangerous” on Twitter, I absolutely meant that. He’s not dangerous in the sense that I think he’d personally go out and beat up someone who’s gay that he saw walking down the street, but he is the kind of dangerous that has the potential to incite others to act on their own passionate feelings. He’s not the kind of guy who’d tell people to go out and commit hate crimes, but I bet he could rouse his fanbase to get to the polls on election day. And he’s “dangerous” to those of us who hold to a more liberal perspective, for a number of reasons, some of which I already articulated in the comments of the previous post, and some of which I’ll go into a little more here.
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