Fruits and deeds

Dear BTL,
While Senator Brownback did deserve to be Creep of the Week last week, I disagree that it should be for his "You'll know 'em by their fruits" comment. I found the original Rolling Stone article (easy with Google) in which he made the comment and Brownback says some mighty scary things, but I think even Rolling Stone didn't understand the quoted sentence.
"You will know them by their fruit" is a sound biblical principle. The next verse says, "Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit." You will know a person by what he does. A good person does good deeds; a bad person does bad deeds. It is unfortunate that many gays no longer understand good biblical references. Would we be in such an uproar if the word "deeds" had been used instead of "fruits"?
What Brownback claimed was that gay marriage was bad for Sweden (and bad elsewhere) because it had made society worse there. He was not calling Swedish gays "fruits."
What Brownback actually meant is bad enough. He used discredited research about gay marriage in Sweden as proof that gay marriage is bad for society and wants to use that same proof to ban gay marriage in America. That is scary. That is worth giving him the Creep of the Week. Alas, much of the gay press has been so caught up on the "fruits" issue that the more important issue has gone unnoticed.
Paul Kinney,
Westland