For the Bible Tells Me So (2007)

           Don't watch this documentary film if you expect anything like a balanced treatment of homosexuality and Christianity. It's aggressively polemical, it incorporates all the worst examples of Christian hate and extremism, it omits any treatment of gay extremists like you might see in San Francisco's Gay Pride Parade, and in several instances it presents "experts" without identifying them as aggressively pro-gay (eg, Peter Gomes of Harvard). But there's a good reason to watch this film, nevertheless, because it presents the personal stories of five families, without exception all of which are deeply Christian, and how they dealt with the news that their kids are gay. Two of the families are famous — Chrissy Gephardt is the daughter of two-time presidential candidate and Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt, and Gene Robinson became the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. Jake comes from the suburbs of Minneapolis, Tonia is an African-American who grew up on a dirt road in North Carolina before going to Yale, and then Anna was from Arkansas. These families run the Christian gamut — United Church of Christ, African-American, Lutheran, Catholic, and fundamentalist, and they respond to their child's coming out in different ways. It's a shame that the film makers resorted to predictable polemic instead of trusting the power of these deeply moving stories.