Legalized same-sex marriage. The G.O.P. in shambles. A biracial Democrat — in Republican parlance, a foreign devil — in the White House.

White, entitled, angry Christians are apparently the new self-appointed minority. And they’re not taking it well.

We’ve been there. It’s tough being an underclass. You’ve had to bear the burden for a whole three months. Still, you need to parcel out your vitriol. Otherwise, you run the risk of hitting the wall.

Don’t get us wrong — your White Panic is rabidly visceral, but it just seems so unfocused. We can tell you from experience that you have to pick your battles. Frankly, we can’t keep all the splinter groups — Birthers, Teabaggers, God Warriors, Minute Men, and Purity Ringers — straight. It all just looks like a torch-wielding crowd of villagers ready to storm Castle Frankenstein to us.

So how do you vent all that impotent rage simmering inside you when it comes to your litany of canards?

Jerry Springer can only booking so many guests, KKK membership dues are through the roof, and writing angry letters to the government under a bare bulb takes too damn long.

You’re gonna have to resort to signs — lots of signs to let your feelings be known to world. We know, the hippies do it too, but just go with it. It’s the very latest in passive/aggressive catharses!

While no one can ever hope to play proper homage to the vast spectrum of staggering brilliance that fuels American Fundamentalism in all its forms, we’ve nonetheless attempted to present a tribute to the delightful cross-section of Americana and its creative endeavors that make this nation great.

The God Hates Fags Brigade.

God may hate the fags, but he clearly loves damaged hair, fanny packs, double wides, and mom jeans. Led by the charmingly restrained Fred Phelps — aptly enough, a dead ringer for Poltergeist 2‘s fanatical death cult leader — the Westboro Baptist Church takes a cue from the medieval Anglican Church and every contemporary televangelist by reasoning that natural disasters, terrorist attacks, plagues, and other such catastrophes are God’s punishments upon gay-tolerating nations. This must be what they mean by ‘mysterious ways,’ because God strikes us as something of an oblique micro-manger with confrontation issues.

Whatev.

The point is that the God Wads have a direct line to the All Mighty, and their life’s purpose is crashing every remotely gay-friendly event with their creepy OsKoshB’GoshHatesYou tykes in tow.

The historical justification for it all: the Fall of Rome brought about by ass sex. Autocracy, barbarian incursions, economic collapse, and intellectual backwardness had nothing do with it, nor did the rise of an obscure cult called Christianity — whose members decided persecution was A-OK as long as they were the ones doing it — that blurred the line between church and state, aiding in the culture-on-the-skids descent into the many wonders of the Dark Ages.

Being the anti-gay branch of the Conservative Movement that goes too far even for that motley crew, we thought you impossible to lampoon, but then True Blood used a ‘God Hates Fangs’ roadside sign in its credit sequence, instantly turning you into a toothless parody twice removed.

The Please Don’t Kill The Wittle White Babies Hand-Wringers

Around election time, you may have noticed lawns full of little white crosses and massive billboards populated by well-fed cherubs and flaxen-haired Ivory Snow Mommies.

It’s all about symbolism for our beloved and industrious Pro-Life Nuts. Babies — especially the white ones — are huggable, giggly, perfect props, and since none are ever born unplanned or unwanted into deplorable situations where they’ll be abused and neglected by unfit parents, we can understand their piously useless outrage. Plus, we’re always grateful that they’re the first to object to any form of contraception being taught in struggling third world nations. It’s not as if God would want to spare children the horrors of war, disease, famine, and pestilence. Those are the only readable parts of the Bible!

Best of all is their utter monomania when it comes to anyone else expressing concern for other powerless creatures. When the Michael Vick case exposed a system of organized canine abuse-related crime, they chided, ‘Well, babies are being aborted!’.

When we found the movement’s Abstinence Shill Sarah Palin‘s sharp-shooting of drugged and exhausted moose and wolves from a helicopter to be less than heroic, they whined, ‘I guess you Liberals don’t care about dead babies!’. We question the morality of slaughter houses and factory farms, only to have them bellow, ‘Don’t you people understand that babies are being aborted at this very moment?!‘.

We hear you. It’s just that the connection to 1973 can be so staticky.

The These Colors Don’t Run! Superpatriot

Oh, cousin-fucker, I think you’re the most dear to my heart. In high school, you were that guy who shouted, ‘Hey fag! What are ya playin’ — crochet?’ at me while I was on the tennis court. Sure you meant croquet, but your heart was in the right place, and even though you got caught sodomizing a sheep in the eleventh grade, you were still more accepted than me because I was a sick queer who wore black turtlenecks.

Now you’re all grown up, recklessly tail-gaiting me in your pick-up so you can get home to watch back-to-back episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger and Nash Bridges on Pax.

It’s your hamfistedly self-assured, red-bloodedly arrogant patriotism that truly defines you, though. Who else but you would take upon yourself to guard our borders from the Mexicans who are out to teach us Spanglish and marry our daughters? You put maximum effort into festooning your truck into Uncle Sam’s cracker wagon, which is a lovely gesture considering it’s taken the place of the healthy relationship with a woman you’re totally incapable of fostering. You even brought out Grand Pappy’s noose during the Jena Six hearings, just to add a dose of nostalgic class to your repertoire.

We salute you Hawkman, even though the illegal immigrants you despise for leeching off the system die from heatstroke and pesticide exposure they encounter while working on farms, that, like, your own, receive countless billions in tax-based subsidies.

The Antediluvian Monkey-Baiters

Evolution, schmevolution. The idea of species surviving or dying based on their ability to adapt to the vagaries of a frighteningly random world — ridiculous, dodo-brain! For this crowd, One Million Years B.C. by way of The Flintstones makes the most sense. Obviously, John Richardson‘s Adam worked at the local wheel dealership, Raquel Welch-as-Eve had a pteronodon hair dresser to style her glam mod ‘do and a mammoth dishwasher that was the envy of the neighborhood, and Ayla from The Clan of The Cave Bear matriculated at the local community college just off the Eden turnpike.

Sure, the physiognomic similarities between us and the great apes are readily apparent, and there’s only a minute chromosomal variance between us, but that’s hardly compelling evidence in the way a magical book and aircraft carrier-sized arcs are. And we appreciate you constantly re-waging the Scopes Monkey Trial for the past eighty fucking years. Really, a When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth-inspired curriculum full of pet dinos and a body-waxed race of proto-young Republicans demands equal-time inclusion.

Your just reward? Millions of years from now when the world is an ocean, humanity as we know it has fallen by the wayside, and the Mer-People reign supreme, your fossilized remains with their weird bipedal appendages will be unearthed and immediately declared an abomination of the doctrine of the sea goddess Cra’Taa (formerly the Little Mermaid), subsequently written off as a hoax perpetrated by the goddess’ less intelligentsia.

The Way of The Gun Gang

‘Guns are power! We need guns!’ chanted the dumbass gorillas from The Planet of The Apes, so that makes them at least as lexical as any other N.R.A. rally. The founding fathers knew the guys with the guns make the rules, and we feel your pain. If the government isn’t trying to take away your Bible, your money, or your God-given right to discriminate based on race or sexual orientation, then it’s after your boomsticks. At least you’re not bitter and clingy about it.

Even though Lisa Simpson shot a hole in your movement years back when she declared the Second Amendment a meaningless remnant of the Revolutionary War, and your chief rabble-rouser Chuck Heston was a pro-gun control Democratic before he achieved the two things that are essential for membership in the upper echelon of the trigger-happy G.O.P. — money and power — you remain undaunted. By your logic, we should we billeting soldiers who knock on our doors in the dark of night, and we’re nothing if not comforted by the idea of drunken yahoos pumped up on too many viewings of Red Dawn buying up every assault weapon in sight. Only the ensuing hunting accidents grant us a sigh of relief.

We get that you want to project an image of chiseled Aryan warriors armed-to-the-teeth and protecting our shores under a mantle of God and Country; what we really see are gun racks in pick-up trucks, chicks in bikinis brandishing machine guns, and tacky deer slaughter chotchkies galore.

The Secessionist Obsessionists

The adult version of the kid who angrily stomps home after gathering up all his marbles, and the constituency every Republican candidate for office tries in vain to legitimize the Confederate Flag for. Would Texas and Alaska (really, the Texas of the north) be just like Mandingo or The Dukes of Hazzard if they did break away from the Union? Sorry, partner.

Instead picture a backwater hell with a barter economy based around a crumbling plantation market, extant slavery, child brides, widespread poverty, rampant illiteracy, a vigilante kangaroo court justice system, abhorrent grammar, and an inbred population that could supply twenty The Hills Have Eyes sequels. Anyone with enough sense and unwebbed feet would just run for the border, sonny boy.

And the facial dexterity of current Texas Governor and presumed Confederate President Rick Perry is to be commended. Few could demonize the Federal government out of one side of their mouth, while simultaneously asking it for Swine Flu vaccines and national guard troops to help stem Mexican gang violence out of the other without accidentally unhinging their jaws in the process.

*

So battle on, oppressed Far Right, and take heart. Your foreign policy rubric 24 is still on the air, Sharpie’s stock is through the roof, and Fox News is happy to enable your paranoia by orchestrating and then covering more of your “grassroots” anti-tax freak-outs. And if we may, here’s a little helpful advice that you offered us Lefty agitators time and time again over the course of eight long years: executive power is absolute in times of crisis, questioning authority is decadent, and if you can’t fall in line with the majority, you can always move to France.

Anything else would just be unpatriotic.

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