To advance the family values cause, Medved insisted, evangelicals, fundamentalists and family values crusaders must now show love, not mean-spirited and censorious opposition. Otherwise, he warned, the gay activists will win the cultural war that its being fought for the hearts and souls of the nation.

Business leaders, citizens, and the arts community of Charlotte, North Carolina wish that Charlotte's vocal fundamentalists, evangelicals, Southern Baptists, and, perennial political hate-the-homo-mongers, would listen carefully to Medved's counsel. At first they found themselves aghast as one conservative county commissioner after another stood behind the elimination of funds for artworks, mentions of sex in public schoolrooms and plays that mention same-sex lovemaking in a positive light. Now, however, the business and arts communities of Charlotte have linked arms in a powerful coalition to defeat "religious" zealots at the polls. The group calls itself the Committee of One Thousand for Public Funding of the Arts and Sciences.

Nationsbank chairman Hugh McColl and Queens College President Billy Wireman are among the 1,000 city notables who've joined in saying that the (fundamentalist) 'Gang of Five' must go. The conservative county commissioners of whom they speak, believe that public policy must reflect their takes on "Christian" values. In order for this fair Southern city to retain a reputation of twentieth century enlightenment, pro-diversity cultural views, must, say McCall and Wireman, take the place of narrow-minded exclusionary crusading.

Some gay activists talked strategy too, seeing the need to respond to what film critic Medved says was a purported gay strategy paper he'd uncovered, one reputedly recommending the demon-ization of fundamentalists.

Most gays and lesbians see no need to demonize the fundamentalists, "because they are doing a fine job of that themselves." Since the Disney debacle, gay observers have begun to notice their neighbors' comments are pinpointing anti-gay religious zealotry for the imbalance that it is. In Charlotte, however, and elsewhere throughout the United States, conservative Christians are, like tribunals of mullahs, voting themselves into local political offices where their immediate concerns become the legalization of their sex taboos.

Arts funding, again falling prey to the whimsies of anti-gay "religious" rhetoric, continues to be, in the words of Bruce Evans, head of Charlotte's Mint Museum, "a local manifestation of a national power struggle."

Evans said Charlotte's arts community had become a "football that's being kicked" and that "it hurts to be kicked."

City fathers who do not share the anti-gay zealotry of their fundamentalist neighbors are cringing because of excessive hate-mongering such as was spoken recently by one of "The Gang of 5" Commissioner Hoyle Martin, who said: "Gay folk can't make babies, so they want to get our babies and our grandchildren to convert them to their lifestyle."

After a noisy meeting-debate in early April (See GayToday Archives, "World" features, April 7) Charlotte Observer columnist Doug Robarchek responded to such snipes by asking, "Hey? Is that a great argument or what?" Robarchek said he'd had many conversion-minded Christians at his door, but no homosexuals that he could remember.

The Observer's April 3 editorial set the tone of the citywide argument by stating that the debates about arts funding masks "the true issue." That issue, according to the newspaper's editors is "how will this community (Charlotte) treat homosexuals?"

"We didn't elect this body (of commissioners) to be art critics," said the spokesperson for the Repertory Theater, Keith Martin.

The Mint Museum, because it refused to buckle under to political/religious censorship is slated to lose nearly an estimated half-million dollars.

The commission voted earlier in June to forbid county-hired counselors having discussions of sex, pregnancy, or sexually-transmitted diseases, with teens. It is now mandatory that counselors in over 50 county programs, those dealing with abused teens and runaways, must report to parents if their children ask about sex.

"It does not take much imagination to figure out who's going to get hurt most by this little power-mad theocracy," said George McLeod, a North Carolinian who says he tries to stay above the fray. He adds, however, that he does consider the Mecklenburg county commissioners ridiculous.

Local psychologist, Lenore Jones Deutsch, has predicted "catastrophic consequences," an increase in teen suicides, abortions, AIDS cases and unwanted pregnancies.

The brouhaha began in 1996 when Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, was staged at the Charlotte Repertory Theatre. A quickly passing nude scene was enough, however, to rally fundamentalist religious clans that protested outside a new monument to the city's cultural growth: the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center. In a second play, a singular gay character in the script found Commissioner Hoyle Martin leading his "Christian" fellow-soldiers "as to war."

One commissioner who has critiqued his peers is Lloyd Scher who, without embarrassment, says: "We have some very narrow-minded, ignorant, uneducated county commissioners...It's sickening...We swore on the Bible to uphold the Constitution. We didn't swear to uphold the Bible."

Commissioner Bill James, a religious conservative, wants it known, he says, that homosexuality is perverse and immoral and that he knows how Charlotte's citizens feel, and that they don't want their city turned into "some kind of wanna-be world-class city" by accommodating "the lowest forms of behavior."