“Not All Like That”

Burroway describes the NALT project:

Dan Savage introduces the new project, recalling he often encounters Christians who tell him, “we’re not all like that,” that not all Christians condemn LGBT people. Savage’s response had been: Don’t tell me, tell the anti-gay Christian leaders who claim to speak for all Christians. Now there’s a platform for those Christians to do just that. Not All Like That was launched [yesterday], providing a platform for “NALT Christians” to post their videos and demonstration that Christians support LGBT people.

Gabriel Arana elaborates on the project’s goals:

The project is a call to arms for Christians who want to take back their faith from the religious right, which has sucked up much of the air in public debates on faith and policy.

When conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum become synecdoches for Christians writ large, it doesn’t leave much room for people like John and Catherine Shore—those who mirror public opinion far more closely than the anti-gay Christians on Fox News.

Indeed, while polling shows support for gay rights varies by denomination, the majority of Catholics and mainline Protestants—the country’s two largest Christian sects—favor same-sex marriage. But the anti-gay crowd seems to have won the public-relations war: In a well-known 2007 study of to 16- to 29-year-olds, 91 percent of non-Christians and 80 percent of active churchgoers described Christianity as “anti-homosexual.” Savage and Shore attribute the disconnect on the religious right’s well-funded media machine; when gay rights are in the news, media bookers turn reflexively to virulently anti-gay personalities like the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins or Pat Robertson. “Tony Perkins is very loud and the NALT Christians are very quiet,” Savage says.

(Video: Evangelical blogger Fred Clark’s NALT video, a transcript of which is here)