Just Because Mel White of "The Amazing Race" is Paranoid Doesn’t Mean People Don’t Want to Kill Him

AE: Is there a sense among conservative religious circles that they’re already lost the younger generation? Do they understand that it’s going to change whether they like it or not?
MW: James Dobson literally said that in his [recent speech announcing his resignation from the board of Focus on the Family], that the nation is awash in evil and that we’re going to go on fighting the good fight, but that this country is pretty well down the tubes. I celebrate his speech and feel like down the tubes is exactly where we need to be.

AE: The dominoes are falling.
MW: And whether they realize it or not, what they’ve done is they’ve given up. The new mega-church pastors, who are the new fundamentalists, with a patina of acceptability kind of with a shine and a normalcy because they wear open Hawaiian shirts, and they are expanding the causes to the real ones, to AIDS and to hunger and to those things, but they still haven’t changed about homosexuality.

Fundamentalism is on the wane, but the new fundamentalists, the new evangelicals haven’t really caught on either. Their big seminaries while they’re more progressive in everything else still won’t allow homosexuals to come and study, and so I think we’re making these great steps, but religion still has a really strong influence here and religion still hasn’t turned. The dominoes aren’t falling there.

AE: I thought Rick Warren did quite a little dance, portraying himself as so tolerant and respectable and denied all of the things that were even on video of him saying.
MW: Monday I was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and they asked what was the difference between Falwell and Rick Warren? And I said, “Well, Jerry Falwell is like a rattlesnake. You always knew where he stood. But the rest of them lost their rattles, but they’re still snakes.”

AE: We have a lot of younger readers. What would you say to them as an older gay man?
MW: New freedoms can be lost every generation. Justice can be undone very quickly, and the new generation needs to support the organizations that are representing us, like HRC, NGLF and GLAAD and Lambda Legal, the Defense Fund and Soulforce. They need to start thinking about giving some money.

Also the senior thing, you know there’s nothing worse than being a senior and going into a bar just because you need to socialize, and being shunned because everybody thinks that you’re trying to hook up with them. I go to Sundance with my son every year, and they have this huge gay party, and my son was going to meet me there and I went over alone. And I’m a fairly interesting person and I would love to talk to people, but I couldn’t get anybody to talk to me. And that’s a funny feeling, you know? Don’t worry – we’re not just hitting on you. We need conversation, too. And then Michael came and then – bang! I had all the friends I could stand.