God does not hate fags. In fact, God isn’t in the business of hating anyone. Look it up. It’s right there in the Bible: “God is love.” It doesn’t say “God loves.” It says he is love. Love is baked right in. It’s his defining trait.

I hate stupidity and ignorance. I hate intentional obliviousness. And I’m pretty sure that God hates those things, too.

I hate that my books don’t sell more so I can support my family. And stuff like this — like the big signs being held in that picture — make me hate the people holding them. What would these people, who are picketing San Diego Comic-Con, think of me — a Christian who loves pop culture and has loved attending Comic-Con six times? Should I expect them to throw up a picket line outside my house next? (Or maybe they’ll move on from inflammatory media statements to the next logical step: guns and pipe bombs.)

I don’t want to be identified as having anything in common with people like this. Even though these people are in the very miniscule minority, they represent a way of thinking that the majority of Christians are guilty of from time to time, having been once guilty of it myself: an insular, self-serving, us-vs.-the-world mentality. This very mindset, in lesser degrees, is exactly what leads to safe, sterile stuff like “Amish fiction” — the current genre du jour in the Christian Fiction world.

Am I wasting my time publishing my books in the Christian marketplace? I know there are lots of intelligent readers there, but there are also plenty of small-minded readers who are afraid of anything that doesn’t fit within their nice little walls of safety and lukewarm beliefs. This thought that my books are in the wrong market has been the predominant thought in my head lately (and this post is probably ending in a very different place than where it started because of it). Offworld, in my opinion, deserved more attention than it got; several major Hollywood studios expressed strong interest in the concept, but they never purchased the movie rights because the book wasn’t a bestseller. It should have been in the science fiction section of your local Barnes & Noble or Borders, just like Nightmare should be on the New Releases shelf. Instead, my stuff is stuck in the back corner whereChristian Fiction books collect dust and wait to be sent back to the publisher.

I love my publisher; they’ve been nothing but great to me. And I love my readers very, very dearly. I just need more of them. And I can’t help wondering if I’ve maxed out on the number of “Christian spec fic” readers out there who are willing to go to the Christian Fiction section (or to Christian bookstores) to find the kind of thing that I do. Read this article; it sums up everything I’m pondering.

So anyway… I’m done with my soapbox for today. To restate: God does not hate fags. But I don’t think he’s crazy about people who live like this life is a fight between us and the rest of the world. And he and I both aren’t wild about readers who think authors should never dare to step a toe outside of what they consider safe and normal.

It’s the same disease, just different symptoms.