During the May primary, North Carolinians will be asked to vote on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. In recent days, one of the leaders of that movement, Pastor Patrick Wooden of Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, has made some graphic, hateful and ill-informed statements about the gay lifestyle.

On January 17, Wooden appeared on Peter LaBarbera's weekly radio show on WYLL in Chicago, and claimed that gays have to "wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels." A week later, in another appearance on LaBarbera's show, Wooden claimed that gay men are forced to shove cellphones, gerbils, baseball bats and other large objects into their rectums, and even claimed that a gay man died from losing his bowels.

Nowhere did Wooden cite any statistics to support such outlandish claims. Absent said statistics, it can only be assumed that Wooden is trying to scare people into voting for the amendment.

Such intemperate, gross, hateful and ill-informed rhetoric has no place in our discourse, regardless of where one stands on gay rights. As long as the Christian Action League and Vote for Marriage NC remain silent on Wooden's remarks, their claims to "love" gays and lesbians in spite of their lifestyle will be a fountain of empty rhetoric.