McCain: The Gays Who Tortured Me

The 12,000-word account that McCain published has also caught the attention of some bloggers, who are questioning the Republican's account of a guard drawing the sign of the cross in the sand. McCain repeated the anecdote during his appearance this past weekend on the forum hosted by evangelical Pastor Rick Warren, saying it led to a moment of "just two Christians worshipping together." Andrew Sullivan, a supporter of Senator Barack Obama, posted several entries questioning when McCain first related the story and concluding it was no earlier than 1999.

Sullivan pointed out that in the 1973 article McCain talked about a Vietnamese guard - "the only real human being that I ever met over there" - who let him lie down to rest for several hours, but made no mention of the cross in the sand.

Sullivan also noted that the McCain account is similar to one that Luke Veronis, in his 1997 book " The Sign of the Cross," said that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in "The Gulag Archipelago," recounted about his own experience. Sullivan said that he can find no such passage in the Solzhenitsyn book, but that evangelical leader and convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson popularized the same account of the Russian expatriate's experience under Soviet imprisonment in a 1983 book.

Source: www.gaycitynews.com