An Open Letter to the Woman Behind the Man
I have a friend, Stuart, who has a penchant for emailing religious fundamentalists whenever they upset him. Which is often. And, as it turns out, they sometimes write him back. You should have seen the exchange he had last year with the person who answers James Dobson’s email.
Anyway, with Redmond’s very own Rev. Ken Hutcherson now agitating for a boycott of Microsoft, Boeing, and other companies over their support of Washington’s gay civil rights bill, Stuart is back pounding away at his keyboard. Problem is, it’s not easy to find Hutcherson’s direct email address. Instead, one has to go through his personal assistant, Anne Comer….
…who describes herself this way:
I love to sing in Choir and the Praise Teams, study God’s word and listen to the birds outside early in the mornings… God has blessed me with a wonderful, godly upbringing, (thanks Mom and Dad) a godly husband, godly children and a church that I can grow my faith in Jesus Christ. “Thank YOU Jesus, for saving my soul!”
Here is Anne’s email address. And here is an email from Stuart about his decision to email Anne to politely complain about her boss’s opposition to gay rights. Stuart asked me to share the email with Slog readers, and he encourages you guys to follow his lead, if you’re so inclined:
I woke up this morn to this news on the radio… that one Rev. Ken Hutcherson at a church in Redmond, WA (which is real close to Microsoft, for those out-of-staters I’m sending this to) is threatening another of those tiresome boycotts that sometimes seem to get folks in the business world to cower and retreat. All because it looks like for the first time in 30 years of trying, Washington is about to get a gay civil-rights bill passed…I know that I don’t necessarily have the power to stop his ignorant and evil threats and thoughts, and, when you go to his website, you can’t seem to send HIM a personal email voicing your opinion. What you can do is email his personal assistant, who, by proxy, is complicit in his views. I have sent a polite email to her, and it made me feel just a tad better.
My email went something like this:
“Since one cannot email Rev. Hutcherson directly on this site, I chose to email you, and ask, politely, what if one of your godly children turned out to be gay…would you want them to be discriminated against, and have no protection under the law?
Just asking…food for thought.”
Basically, I’m not looking for folks to be rude; I’m looking for these folks to stop and think for a minute what they’re doing and asking others to do.
I’ve never done a mass email like this before, but, after the Ford boycott and other endless threats by these people, I felt like I had to do something, albeit small.
Thanks,
Stuart
I’ll let you know if Stuart gets an email back from Anne, or her boss, and in the meantime, here’s that email address again.
Oh, and if you do write an email to Anne, and want to post a copy of it in the Slog comments for all to see, well, the link to the comments is right here ——>
I wrote Hutcherson an impolite letter several weeks back and mailed it to Antioch Bible Church's office address, and I received a response from him, albeit an unsatisfactory response. Nevertheless, I was able to fill three pages with my thoughts about him, and he read them. That was as much as I had hoped to accomplish.