Get up, stand up.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Need for the left to strongly support gay and lesbian rights - Editorial

Paul Soglin is the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin. He's no longer the radical he was in his student days, when he got his head bloodied by police while protesting the Vietnam War. But he still stands up for what he believes in.

And one of those things is gay and lesbian rights.

When a city firefighter distributed vile leaflets condemning homosexuality as evil, Soglin publicly criticized him for doing so.

This brought on the wrath of the reactionaries.

Here in secular Madison, seven conservative Christian pastors sent Soglin a rather un-Christian letter. These modern-day Torquemadas believe they've got the word of God modemed directly to their computers (what's the e-mail address? God.comm@sheep?), so they feel divinely obligated to go to war against all those who don't log on.

The letter from the pastors was no polite disagreement on a public-policy issue. It was a death threat.

They gave Soglin, who's Jewish, the following choice: Convert to Christianity, repent your views on gay rights, or else "God, somehow, supernaturally, will remove you from office."

These clerics have the conceit of all theocrats: that their line to the Lord serves as the executioner's noose.

So it was during the Crusades. So it was in the Spanish Inquisition. So it was in the Ayatollah's Iran. And so it will be in America, if the far right gets its way.

We must confront the far right at the point of attack.

I've mentioned this before, and I know the cancellations keep trickling in, but I'm going to say it again: The left must stand up for gay and lesbian rights.

It's the moral thing to do, first and foremost. Our gay brothers and our lesbian sisters have as strong a claim on liberty as do the rest of us.

And they suffer when their liberty is suppressed.

They suffer as parents denied custody of their children; they suffer as spouses denied health benefits; they suffer as loved ones denied entry into emergency rooms to be with their partners; they suffer as the victims of vicious hate crimes.

But standing up for gay and lesbian rights is also the politically essential thing to do. Along with abortion providers, gays and lesbians are the chief infidels in the right's holy war. If we don't stand up for our friends who are under assault today, who's going to stand up for the rest of us tomorrow?

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