While Spitz has a sharp eye for potential antigay headlines, Michael Bray has been more focused on the opportunity the Saudi gay beheadings may afford to get some "discussion" going toward a more theocratic order in America.

"While the Christians among us westerners would decline to emulate our Muslim friends in many ways ... " he notes, "we can appreciate the justice they advocate regarding sodomy. Might these fellows also consider an embryonic jihad? Let us welcome these tools of purification. Open the borders! Bring in some agents of cleansing."

"In the meantime," he concludes, "let us pray for justice: viz., that the heads of adulterers, sodomites, murderers, child murderers (abortionists), witches, traitors, and kidnappers roll."

"I think this is a blatant call for people to murder gays and lesbians, among others," Lorri L. Jean, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told Salon. "It's the logical extension of radical fundamentalism and religious intolerance."

"I think that any alliance they may be building with fundamentalist Muslims is alarming," says Surina Kahn, of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. "And this may be just the beginning."

While Bray has called for prayers of Thanksgiving for the Saudi executions, Kahn's group is publicizing Amnesty International's blistering report on the incident. The report denounces the vague charges, secret trials and executions of the three men.

Bray's cheering of the Saudi executions is striking in light of the usual contempt for all things Islam expressed by the far Christian right. "One has to appreciate the cosmic irony here," said Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Mass. "They can side with a religion they don't approve of against a scapegoat they both loathe and demonize."

Berlet isn't surprised by the Army of God's antigay outbursts. "Within the Christian Right, there is a distinction between the reformists and those who want insurgency," he says. Revolutionary groups like the Army of God, he says, see before them a "three-headed monster -- of liberalism, feminism (which includes abortion), and the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. And the monster doesn't die," he observes, "unless you cut off all three."

Spitz's headlines also echo the vitriol of Rev. Fred Phelps, an antigay protestor and provocateur best known for his Web site, God Hates Fags. Pastor of the tiny Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., Phelps and his cult-like entourage are notorious for picketing the funerals of AIDS victims. But Phelps' group has recently picketed such unlikely targets as Weight Watchers spokeswoman and former princess Sarah Ferguson ("fag enabling whore"), and President George and Laura Bush ("demon possessed fag enablers").

But Phelps is not known for specifically encouraging bombings and assassinations, while that has been the raison d'jtre of the Army of God. So the Army's sudden increase in antigay rhetoric worries hate-group watchers. "We know that in the race-hate movement," Berlet explained, "people who have been fed a steady diet of demonization based on falsehoods have gone out and attacked people -- people who have been targeted by the rhetoric. So we know this happens."

The question is whether the escalation of the Army of God's antigay rhetoric signals a coming campaign of violence of the sort that has targeted abortion providers, or a pernicious but nonviolent distraction for a group whose harassment of abortion providers has suddenly come in for greater federal scrutiny. But hate-group watchers say they're monitoring the group closely looking for an answer.

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