"Will the makers of Star Wars video games create Darth VaPaula, a (mock) transgender version
of Darth Vader/RuPaul for kids to choose as their action character?"

That's just part of the funniest protest letter I've ever read, as drafted a month ago by the Florida Family Association. Their mission statement: to "educate people on what they can do to defend, protect, and promote traditional, biblical values." So I doubt they're actually advocating for the inclusion of Darth VaPaula as a character option in Star Wars: The Old Republic even though their letter often reads that way.

Two grown men rubbing their giant, glowing phalluses together. Yep, totally straight.

They're also late to the party. The Family Research Council, a far bigger Christian advocacy group, jumped on developer BioWare's plan to patch gay/lesbian/bi/transgendered options into The Old Republic way back in January, and they've been sending hate mail to publisher Electronic Arts ever since. As FRC President Tony Perkins put it, "In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists!"

Let's momentarily ignore that Perkins cast his homosexual activists in the heroic Rebel Alliance role and straight-up nail this issue: Games need more gender-bending sexual experimentation, not less. In fact, that's been the medium's historical role as well.

First of all, let's acknowledge that, while you'll find plenty of perfectly honest Christians fragging away on their platform of choice, neither the FFA nor the FRC are gamers or represent gamers. Mainly, they're in the boycott-for-publicity business. Tough to do if you don't actually participate in the game itself or buy the company's products. Instead, they want to whip up outrage and fear around the idea of homosexuals, by their very presence, inflicting a gay social agenda on other innocent people.

I wonder if anyone's told them that a lot of men buying these games voluntarily create and play as female characters. Is that what they mean by transgendered?

When you play a video game, you assume a role. Sometimes it's defined, like Gears of War's Marcus Fenix or Metal Gear Solid's Solid Snake. Other times, the developer hands you a blank slate and lets you fill in the blanks. We create a character, and often we impose our personality, our feelings, on that avatar to fully immerse in the epic struggle de jour. If those feelings tend towards someone of your own gender, the game that doesn't include those options rings false. A better game lets you imprint yourself completely to complete the fantasy.

That's not it. That's not it. Lower. Ow!

Sometimes that fantasy means stepping away from yourself instead. "FemShep," the female version of Mass Effect's Commander Shepard, has such a strong following that Mass Effect 3 features a reversible cover to feature both male and female heroes. You can quite literally swing both ways and, as FemShep, pursue relationships with male or female characters. A lot of players do. And nobody thinks anything about it.

When gamers first beat Metroid and found out -- surprise! -- they'd played as a woman the whole time, society didn't cave in. Overt sexuality aside, nobody's ever complained about inhabiting Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, Joanna Dark, or Bayonetta, to name a few. I'm willing to bet few men ever felt funny about being a woman for a while -- female gamers, certainly, take on male roles as a matter of rote -- and I highly doubt a video game has altered too many sexual orientations. But yeah, I'll say fantasy still plays a part here. We spend our game time being someone we want to be, and gender-switching titles would fail if they didn't appeal on that level.

Of course, it's a far cry from slipping on a new skin to getting some same-sex skin. Maybe you don't want to play as a gay character. That's fine. Maybe someone who's gay doesn't want to play as a straight character. That's fine, too. But I don't have any trouble thinking up titles that enforce a strictly heterosexual agenda. Find me the game that imposes a homosexual point of view.

Franchises like The Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Fable always give you the choice. It's an option to accept or decline. That's also part of the fantasy...you control what happens. And with whom.

You had me at "I'll pay you lots of money to kill people."

And hey, if you want to experiment, good luck finding a safer environment. I'm talking about single-player gameplay, of course, far away from the online matches where "gay" and "fag" are always derogatory. Funny...those are compliments when my gay friends use them.

So when a bunch of lobbyists, using tactics I've frequently seen hate groups employ, attempt to disinvite whole populationsfrom civil society (albeit a virtual one) because they're afraid of contact contamination -- or, at the very least, institute a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy -- I've got to shake my head. They just don't know what they're dealing with. You've got 12-year-olds rolling as sexy 30ish female assassins and blatantly racist homophobes already running riot online. Sometimes, that's the same person. But then, those interest groups' righteous outrage has less to do with gaming than it does with grabbing some press on a hot-button issue in the middle of an election year.

That said, they're right about one thing. The "gay agenda" has got to go, because "agenda" suggests something remains to be proven or defended. We need to reach a place -- one often depicted in BioWare games -- where sexual identity and preferences lack any sense of scandal. Certainly, we as gamers never felt ashamed when creating or playing an identity outside of our normal selves. That's a courtesy we should extend to real people.

If that fails, here's an idea: Go play something else. Alone.