But there’s something horribly, wonderfully inappropriate about Bristol Palin coming out for “traditional marriage.” There’s just something wrong with Palin, whose aborted courtship was practically a reality show, using this as a teaching moment.

Instead, I’ll just bring you this breaking news story from the able journalist Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice:

Worldwide Parody & Satire Industries Collapse

NEW YORK – May 11, 2012 – Roiled by a lengthy Republican primary that featured sickly-wife dumper Newt Gingrich in the role of family values advocate, prissy uterus invader Rick Santorum as a small government champion and multimillionaire vulture capitalist Mitt Romney shedding Armani suits in favor of mom jeans and “work” shirts as he positioned himself as a regular guy (with a car elevator), the global parody and satire industries utterly collapsed Friday.

The market sector had teetered on the verge of collapse this week following an accusation from thrice four-times-married drug addict Rush Limbaugh that President Obama had attacked the institution of marriage by coming out in favor of same-sex unions. But some analysts had thought the sector was positioned for recovery.

Those hopes were dashed early Friday when parody and satire futures were bludgeoned by the publication of an opinion piece by 21-year-old single mom Bristol Palin. The daughter of failed vice-presidential candidate and serial quitter Sarah Palin criticized the president for allowing his daughters to influence marriage equality policy, decried the persecution of conservative Christians and urged the president to direct his children since “dads should lead their family.”

“Parody and satire were already on life support thanks to Rush,” said analyst Seymour Butts of the Under the Bleachers Report. “But when Bristol let loose, even hard-bitten industry veterans who had survived the Nixon and Reagan years threw in the towel.”

Most experts were unable to articulate a scenario under which parody and satire could recover. However, at least one long-term analyst envisioned a resurgence contingent upon a direct asteroid strike on the earth that wipes out all existing life, after which single-cell organisms might once more emerge and evolve to acquire language skills.

Bring on that asteroid. It’s late, and we need it.

My birth state of North Carolina has been convulsed with arguments over Amendment One, AKA North Carolina Senate Bill 514, an amendment to the state constitution which declares that “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.”

The citizens voted on, and passed, the amendment on Tuesday. Chagrin, but no real surprise.

Amendment One is redundant and poorly written, but it is now the law of the state. But as an editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer points out, maybe it should really be called Amendment Two:

If Amendment One passes on Tuesday, it won’t be our first state constitutional provision regulating marriage. In 1875, we altered our charter to declare that “all marriages between a white person and a Negro or between a white person and a person of Negro descent to the third generation inclusive are, hereby, forever prohibited.”

The 1875 amendment, too, was adopted shortly (two years) after an invigorated anti-miscegenation statute had been enacted by the legislature. Even more clearly than is the case today, the proponents could not have worried that an amendment was actually needed. No one fretted that a 19th century North Carolina court would invalidate the earlier separationist statutory rule.

The interracial amendment was apparently designed to serve other aims. It was constitutionalism by epithet, by exclamation point. No government structure or power or authority was actually altered. Instead, North Carolinians used the constitution to double down – to declare, in as potent a format as exists, their unyielding hostility to marriage between blacks and whites.

The amendment stayed in place until 1971, when the a new constitution was adopted. That’s about four years after Loving vs. Virginia made it problematic.

Hopefully, we won’t have to wait a century for amendment one to be repealed. But until then, tarheels, won’t you consider a relocation to upstate New York? As someone who grew up in the piedmont, I find the upstate most congenial. Cooler, but with similar landscape. Same depressed economy, but maybe if enough of you come north we can fix that. Just transfer your hatred of NC State to the Yankees and you’re halfway here.

One of the most robust and effective conspiracy theories on the right, the notion that “secularism” – or, just as often, “Secular Humanism” – is a religion is meant to be taken entirely literally: right wingers genuinely believe it refers to an actually existing religious practice. How do conservatives know? Because, they say, the Supreme Court said so. It was, as religious historian and Lutheran minister Martin E. Marty has written, “an instance where one can date precisely the birth of a religion: June 19, 1961.” That was the day the Court ruled in the case of Torcaso v. Watkins striking down the Maryland Constitution’s requirement of “a declaration of belief in the existence of God” to hold “any office of profit or trust in this state” — specifically, in atheist Roy Torcaso’s case, the office of notary public. In his decision, Justice Hugo Black, writing for a unanimous court, further asserted that states and the federal government could not favor religions “based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs” – and, in a fateful, ill-considered, and entirely offhand footnote explained: “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would be generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.”

From here, things get wacky. As unearthed by the outstanding scholar Carol Mason in her masterpiece “Reading Appalachia from Left to Right,” in 1974 a Jesuit priest and Fordham University law professor named Edward Berbasse argued that “since humanism is now considered by the court to be a religion , it must be prevented from being established by the government.” An activist asked him if that meant they could win their fight to ban the satanic textbooks being forced down their children’s throats in Kanawha County, West Virginia by taking the matter to the Supreme Court. “I think you may have the material if you can get a crackerjack lawyer,” Father Berbasse responded. A Supreme Court case was never actually attempted – not least because, as Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons have pointed out, “While historically there has been an organized humanist movement in the United States since at least the 1800s, the idea of a large-scale quasireligion called secular humanism is a conspiracist myth.” In Kanawha County, the textbook fight was fought out with dynamite instead. Nationwide, however, the conspiracist myth took on a life of its own – even unto the halls of Congress.

I also loved this part:

Liberals, dumbfounded by irrationality in that patented liberal way, pointed out that the number of people calling themselves “secular humanists” was only a handful, so how could they possibly possess such omnipotence. Well, fundamentalists would counter, doesn’t that just prove the success of their conspiracy?

Ain’t America grand?

*groan* America was founded on that kind of thinking. Is the British Government placing a minuscule tax on tea? It’s a conspiracy! The small size of the tax is just proof that they’re trying to lull us into a sense of complacency. Paranoia: America’s first founding principle.

The school officials said that they were just “making Bible available,” and said that is some other group wanted to supply religious texts like the Gideons, then the school would make those available as well. Strivelli put that to the test by supply various Pagan books, and the administration blinked. They elected to review their policy on distributing religious material.

Recently a new policy was drafted: Policy 652. It’s a broad policy on religion in the school. It seems fairly moderate by my standards, allowing such things as a “moment of silence.” Frustratingly, it doesn’t actually include a policy on religious material distributed by outside groups, as that is still under review. It recently came up for a vote, and the debate was acrimonious.

I suspect that you can fill in most of the arguments yourself. If you can’t, Angela Pippinger of The Pagan Mom Blog reports that all the usual tropes were there. First was the guy who wanted everyone to know that the whole problem was the fault of outside agitators one lone student:

The most crazy part of the evening is when a gentleman by the name of Honeycutt called out Ginger Strivelli by name. This is not the first time he did this, he has done it at EVERY meeting and sticks by the story that this is a work of Ginger all by herself and everyone else supports bibles being school. He states this after Baptist ministers, Rabbi’s, UU ministers, Presbyterians, and Catholics stand up in support of the policy!

Isolate and minimize the other party. Classic reactionary tactics.

And of course the old “you’re banning prayer!” reaction:

And speaking of blatant ignorance, more people could not get it through their thick heads that kids were not being instructed that they could not pray. Several children got up to speak about how they were going to pray anyway and the school could just kick them out.

Despite all this, the policy passed unanimously. I suspect that this reflects the fact that the policy really is moderate. Byron Ballard, a local columnist, comments:

We will have to police the system for years to come, calling, demanding, emailing. Every time a child whose parents practice a minority religion is othered or belittled or otherwise bullied because of that–someone will have to contact the system and demand that something be done.

Even if the policy had no loop-holes, the situation would require constant vigilance. Unless Buncombe County has changed in the decade since I lived there, it’s overwhelming Evangelical Christian. A majority like that is always going to have problems remembering to respect the rights of the minority. Even well intentioned members of the majority will find themselves leading prayers and pushing Bibles, simply because that’s what everybody does.

However, one of the most interesting memos details NOM’s plan to aid its cause by recruiting attractive but unintelligent celebrities. From GLAAD:

It sounds like a headline from the Onion, but strategy documents uncovered yesterday, from the nation’s most prominent anti-gay marriage group, the National Organization for Marriage (found by the Human Rights Campaign), reveal a novel approach to convincing Americans to vote against marriage equality: recruit glamorous but unintelligent celebrities. (p.19/20)

“Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries. (This is applying the Witherspoon and IAV model to non-intellectual elites.)”

I just love the phrase “non-cognitive elites.” I wish NOM well in its attempts to enlist pretty dumb celebrities. There certainly are enough of them, but they’re going to have to fight the Scientologists for every one.

That means one thing in American politics: negative campaigning. The attacks are going to start early, and they’re only going to get worse as time goes on. Since there’s a lot of money from big donors floating around, we can expect so see a lot of big budget attack ads.

I take this Santorum ad to be a taste of what’s coming:

Please note the anviliscious jump cut from Ahmedinejad to Obama right after the narrator talks about the “sworn American enemy.” It’s at 0:41 -

Via Joe.My.God.

This clip has garnered a lot of attention. It starts out with Terry declaring that America is a Christian nation and that there is only one God (“… and his name is JEee-sus!”) He follows that by telling everyone that doesn’t like all that, or that doesn’t like America or “the way we do things,” that they should GET OUT!

The church is now squirming about the clip and the attention that it’s gotten. They’ve removed that section from their Ustream archives, and their Worship Minister posted this on Facebook:

Terry would like us to believe that these comments were taken out of context. But while Right Wing Watch does clip their videos short, it’s still hard to draw anything but a negative conclusion from this little tirade.