and they'll know we are Christians by our love...

MOSCOW, Russia -- Police and religious protesters forcefully prevented Russian gay and lesbian rights activists from rallying in Moscow, where they had hoped to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and then gather in a square opposite of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s office.

"We are conducting a peaceful action. We want to show that we have the same rights as other citizens," the main organizer Nikolai Alexeyev told a news conference a few hours before the rally was to have begun.

But police had closed the entrance to the garden where the tomb is located, and as the first half-dozen activists arrived carrying flowers, they were set upon by about 100 religious and nationalist extremists dressed in black who kicked and punched them.
"Moscow is not Sodom!" they shouted. Women held up religious icons while men stood by.

As a Green member of Germany's Bundestag, Volker Beck, was giving an interview before TV cameras, about 20 nationalist youths surrounded him and pummeled him, bloodying his nose.

"This is a perverts' parade," said one protester holding an icon of the Madonna, a woman who gave only her first name, Irina. "This is filth, which is forbidden by God. We have to cleanse the world of this filth."

I took this photo in a men’s room in Camden. What you can’t tell from the photo is that the posters hanging over the latrines are there to encourage women to become firefighters. Talk about needing to know your audience.

Even the Bible extols us to love our enemies and, in this way, it will be like heaping burning coals on their head (Romans 12:20). Now, there are many different translations of this verse, but they all point to love.

People don’t need to be told their need for God, that knowledge comes from the Spirit. What they need to be told is that God loves them. This is the one piece of information that comes best from us and, sadly, the one piece of information that we don’t seem to understand ourselves.

Know your audience.