You may have seen the revised map of North America circulating on the Internet. A horseshoe-shaped block of northern territory extends from Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania through New England, then stretches across the upper Midwest and down the West Coast. The new nation is labeled "The United States of Canada." The remainder of what once was known as the U.S.A. has become the country of "Jesusland."

The map, a copy of which now hangs over my desk, provided me my first moment of laughter after election day. I had to say, "Thank you, Jesus!"

Kidding aside, sometimes I feel sorry for Jesus. It’s not that I’m particularly religious; I frequently find the dictums of organized religion to be unpersuasive, needlessly meddlesome and divisive. Like John Lennon, I suspect that the world would be a more tolerant place if personal spirituality replaced organized churches. But raised a Christian, I spent a considerable amount of time in my youth studying the life of Jesus. And a lot of his values have stayed with me. He helped me develop a social consciousness, and he is a major reason I became—and proudly remain—an out-of-the-closet liberal.

So it is an amazement to me how many people who claim to be his most dedicated followers completely misrepresent his messages.

Whether a deity or an eloquent spokesman for moral and social issues, Jesus was definitely not a rightwing zealot, as many of today’s evangelicals would have us believe. In fact, I would be thrilled to see Christ make a second coming to our planet and sue the pants off all those who slander him to advance their personal agendas of exclusion and hate.

In his days on earth, Christ was, in fact, a radical liberal serving up an often unpopular vision of brotherhood and sharing in a greedy society. He urged us to love our neighbors as ourselves. As John reported in his Gospel, Jesus preached, "Beloved, let us love one another: For love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God."

Jesus didn’t make an exception for homosexuals or anyone else. He particularly stressed the importance of loving those who are different from ourselves. He emphasized it in the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a victim of a hate crime is rescued by someone from a different socio-economic class, a person who typically would be regarded as his enemy.

Jesus also believed in sharing society’s bounty. All those fish symbols we see mounted to the BMWs and Hummers of fundamentalist Christians today should remind us of the story of the loaves and fishes. Christ didn’t want anyone to go hungry; he found a way to stretch the food so everyone could share it; he believed that no one should allow others to suffer. In a visit to a Temple, he upended the tables of usurers, and he would not have been the least bit happy to watch a small group of wealthy individuals grab ever-larger tax breaks while large numbers of citizens fell into poverty and even more were unable to afford adequate healthcare for their families. Where is the Christian spirit in voting to oppose social equity and to deny civil rights to loving couples just because they seem a little different? What ever happened to loving your neighbor as yourself?

"One man, one woman," is the fundamentalist battle cry. They must mean one man or woman at a time. Otherwise, the more than 50 percent of married people who divorce would be just plain out of luck when it came time to hooking up with a second man or woman. If the zealots want marriage to be restricted to one man and one woman, then they should be the first to rally for an amendment to the federal Constitution outlawing divorce.

The most disheartening aspect of the recent election (and there were many) was the eagerness of conservative churches to impose their intolerant beliefs on everyone else. If this country loses its separation of church and state, it has lost not only its cultural pluralism but also its democracy.

There may be one way to force the zealots to back off. Let’s mount a major campaign to tax the churches. If they want to meddle in politics and demand repayment for delivering votes, then they must forego their tax exemptions. Then they may freely go about the business of trying to influence the nation’s legislative and judicial processes, just like any other lobby group.

As with many of you, my reaction to the sorry state of this month’s election has run the gamut from depression to outrage (and back and forth several times). While the professional pundits seem to have no shortage of words to evaluate what has happened, often comparing it to an exciting sporting contest, we know that this election was no game. The consequences we likely face are way too serious to laugh off over a couple of beers.

Nonetheless, in order to garner the resolve to go to political battle yet another day, it’s important to try to "spin" the results in such a way as to give us a modicum of hope. Sigh. So, regarding the passage of all 11 anti-gay-marriage amendments, here’s a small glimpse of a rainbow.

If you look at the three major battleground states of Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon, the amendments won narrowly (57-43 percent in Oregon, and by 3-2 margins in the others).

Counting all of the states that adopted an amendment (including the "red" states), the exit polls found that 60 percent of voters supported some form of legal protection for same-sex couples: 25 percent for civil marriage and 35 percent for civil unions. Only 37 percent said they opposed all protection. Those statistics would have been regarded as good news even 10 years ago. So, there is hope for the long run albeit a very long run.

By the way, these were the same exit polls in which about 20 percent of the voters called so-called moral issues their top priority. One survey indicated that 20 percent of the moral-values voters actually voted against the anti-gay-marriage amendment in their state. According to the Human Rights Campaign, swing voters did not go to George Bush on gay marriage. "Fully one half of the voters who said they support civil unions voted for George Bush," the HRC reported. "The center of gravity in the election was in the voters who support civil unions. If polls show that even half the George Bush voters support civil unions, then caring about ‘moral issues’ does not mean opposition to gay equality."

Yes, I know, such statistics are small comfort in such a sad election year. And I still spend a lot of time wishing that our community had tried harder to persuade the public of our need for and right to domestic-partnership legislation before bringing up the contentious M-word. But we can’t go back, and we can’t give up. We have to find a way to demonstrate our humanity to those Americans, many of them in rural areas or smaller towns, who simply don’t know us well enough to empathize with us. We need to undertake something of a missionary crusade on our behalf, just as our opponents have done against us. It is time for us to show that we have strong moral values on our side, grounded in our faith of building a fair and fully inclusive society.

So, if you’re holiday shopping in an antiques store you discover along a country road in West Virginia, let the proprietor know that you’re buying that expensive item for your long-term gay partner. If you’re visiting Aunt Nell in Idaho, tell her sweetly about your partner and how much you’re committed to each other. Small exemplary actions can produce significant results.