John Danforth blasts Bush, Bill [Frist] and Bashing [gay]

"If the kingdom of God is spacious, how dare church leaders take it upon themselves to rope off these large rooms and establish crannies for some while booting out the others?"

Faith and Values: How the "Moral Values" Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together.

He's taken on the Republican Religious Right before, as in "Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers," but now there's a whole book of his theological, social, and political musings. (You all know he's an ordained Episcopalian minister, right?)

In a book excerpt available online from Newsweek, he says of moderates:

It is time for a clear statement of what we believe, a statement we repeat relentlessly and a statement that expresses the strength of our convictions:

• We believe in a large God, a transcendent God, a God who cannot be shrunken by political activists and stuffed into their own agendas.
• We believe that no one should presume to embody God’s truth, including ourselves. We acknowledge that our political programs, however prayerfully inspired, are no more than our best efforts to be faithful to God, and that we should pursue them with humility.
• We believe that God’s truth is expansive enough to embrace conflicting opinions, even on hot-button issues, even of people with whom we vehemently disagree.
  

More from this lovely excerpt can be found here, from Newsweek.

I' ll point you to an excerpt about the Schiavo debacle at The Raw Story

Also according to The RAW Story, the book says of the "Marriage Amendment":

"I think that the only purpose served by the campaign for the amendment is the humiliation of gay Americans, advocated by the Christian right and eagerly supported by its suitors in the Republican Party. "In reality, it is gay bashing."

Danforth then goes even further, saying supporters' assertions that the amendment would protect marriage is ludicrous.

"America's divorce rate is now over 50 percent, and marriage is under attack from a number of quarters: finances, promiscuity, alcohol and drugs, the pressures of work, cultural acceptance of divorce, et cetera," he pens. "But it is incomprehensible that one of these threats is when someone else, whom we have never seen, in a place where we may have never been, has done something we don't like."

Alas, it's coming out now in hard cover. When it's out in soft cover, or available in my local library, I'll actually read the whole thing.