How can one stand under the banner and glory of God and laugh at another man's death?

How?

I don't care what you think of gay people or gay marriage or suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore and his efforts to derail the "agenda of the homosexual movement." Believe what you want.

I care about the cruelty I saw this week, on the steps of the Alabama Supreme Court. I can't move beyond it.

And I'm not talking about what you could read on signs.

If you want to let your kids walk around carrying signs that threaten judgment on " lewd women" and "homos" and "perverts" and "vomit-eating dogs" and "whores" and "pedophiles" and "rebellious women" and "witches" and "whoremongerers" and those people with the "coexist" bumper stickers and ... "ankle biters," well so be it.

If you want to decorate a billboard that says "sodomy ruins nations" or "homosexuality & adultery destroy families," well, it's a free country.

But there is a point at which the anger becomes irreconcilable with the religion. That point came Monday.

It came after Moore spoke through a blaring microphone to crowds that hung on his words, when a few camera jockeys wandered down steep steps to the tiny and poorly amplified press conference held by the Human Rights Campaign.

That's where other people were telling their stories. Just people who live lives most Alabamians don't understand and most gathered there did not want to hear. They were just people, asking for freedom and an equal application of the law.

They asked to be heard, for a moment. They didn't ask for what they got.

They were interrupted time and again by Moore supporters, bullied and criticized and demeaned. On the steps of the highest court in Alabama.

And then came that moment.

Dr. Paul Hard -- who has been involved in a legal fight to recognize his late husband as his husband -- tried to speak through the interruptions. And was met with cruelty in the name of the Lord.

As Hard described the death of his husband, a man in the crowd began to laugh. To laugh. It was a loud, genuine, taunting and cold as ice.

"You can't have a husband," he said. And it spewed like venom.

And I was struck. Not by his opinion, or his belief, or his audacity, but by the malice and brutality.

How can any man, no matter his position on Roy Moore or any issue, stand before another and mock his pain?

How can one stand under the banner of God and laugh at another man's death?

How -- in the name of God -- can one deride genuine grief?

In the name of God.

I don't know how Roy Moore's ethics case will turn out. In truth I don't from a legal standpoint know how it should turn out.

But the type of religion spewed on those courthouse steps -- a type long on the Shalt Nots and woefully short on the Blessed Bes -- looks nothing like Jesus.

It looks nothing like freedom, or like the church I know. It is narrow and hateful and distorting -- a brand of Christianity that slanders all who seek to find comfort in the words of Jesus.

On those steps there is no comfort for those who mourn. No blessings for the merciful.

In the style of religion expressed Monday -- I cannot even call it Christianity -- there is no time for the peacemaker.

Christians cannot let these people define their religion. All they have is volume. As a substitute for moral authority.