Dear Editor,

I read with interest your article on the GLBT Religious Experience (GLT issue 819, Sept. 4, 2003), and the worthwhile calling many feel to work for reform within the traiditional (sic) frameworks. I would love, however, to see another article titled “The GLBT Spiritual Experience,” since I truly believe that religion and spirituality are two very different things, and many people — gay and straight — have abandoned their spiritual quest because religions have treated them shoddily.

In the weekly “Spirituality for Gay Guys” lectures that I give in Hillcrest, I try to help gay men make their own direct, personal spiritual connection, using information and teachings that may be common to many faiths but are by no means the trademark property of any religion. While many of us have been able to overcome the stultifying social dogma that there is only one sexual orientation that is acceptable, it has been more challenging for many to overcome the religious dogma that the only way to a spiritual connection is through a conditional and judgmental church. We all deserve our “inside connection” to Spirit, just as we all deserve to have intimacy with whomever God is steering us toward.

Scott Patrick Wagner

San Diego

Dear Editor,

Would you vote for SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s son if he was a legal citizen of California now running for Governor?

How about a son of SS (Schutzstaffel) Deputy Chief Reinhard Heydrich, who was in charge of the extermination of all Jews, Gays, Gypsies, Communists and mental incompetents in occupied Eastern Europe until his death in 1942?

How about some son of the SS head of the Austrian Office for Jewish Emigration in 1938 and 1939, Afdolf Eichmann, who went on to head the Gestapo’s overall Jewish section after Heydrich’s assassination, to manage the Final Solution?

How about some son of SA leader Ernst Roehm, assassinated head of the Nazi street thugs or Sturmabteilung, whose Brown Shirts attacked Jews, Gays, Gypsies and other “enemies of The State” in Nazi Europe?

THEN how about the son of Austrian SA officer Gustav Scwarzenegger? This convinced Nazi’s unit joined similar ones in expanding Nazi power. His Austrian Anschluss (the pending 1938 merger into Nazi Germany) motto of “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer” also called for the extermination of Jews, Gays and Gypsies. Arnold left the former Nazi and later Soviet Occupied coal, governmental and engineering city of Graz. Few Jews or Gypsies were still alive in their province of Styria. As his son works in an American industry where his father’s views would hurt his career, Arnold has prudently excused himself from these public attitudes. Of course, Arnold declared himself to be Anti-Nazi and donated to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But consider the ghosts of their land’s dead “Enemies of the State”: is recent involvement enough to really merit our trust?

Jay Murley

San Diego