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. (more…)

What’s an out-of-power, out-of-answers, out-of-date party to do?

Coherence hasn’t really been the G.O.P.’s thing for decades, and reality used to be a friend back when the party was composed of level-headed Main Street businessman, rather than snake-handling soothsayers. Now that it’s degenerated into a televangelist take on the Mansion of Madness, there’s a power vacuum left in its “permanent majority” (oy, the Rovian hubris!) wake. The Grand Old Party needs a new face.

You can’t flip this whack shack; you can only superficially paint it up all purdy-like.

Since beauty queens are as anachronistic as all the anti-gay rhetoric the party recycles with eye-rolling monomania, there’s something quaintly apt about a teased-haired, glazed-eyed stiletto doll becoming the Conservative It Girl of-the-moment. In I Shot Andy Warhol, Lily Taylor’s bellicose, up-against-the-wall-motherfucker Valerie Solanas disdainly opined that beauty queens and drag queens were the two ideal victims of male oppression. And the lady knew her shit. (more…)

A storm is, indeed, gathering.

This is the opening line of a spooky and deeply mendacious ad from NOM, the so-called National Organization for (actually against) Marriage.

(You can, if you must, see this infuriating ad here. But wait, we have some spoofs of the ad coming after the jump. No need to get your blood up yet.)

Beneath dark, brooding clouds, their faces eerily lit by sudden flashes of lightning, actors fret over the coming gay-marriage legalizations, which threaten their very existence. You see everyone is about to call them bigots, which, of course, they are.

And that would be “just hurtful,” to use the words of Maggie Gallagher, founder of the hastily concocted NOM and the right’s longtime cheerleader and self-described “marriage expert,” a political and transparently theocratic front-woman for that very special brand of Republican wedge-issue: fag-baiting. (more…)

Commence panicked fagmentation in 3, 2, 1…

The source: trusted news outlet Fox. The issue: the gay. Highly respected journalist Bill O’Reilly is so with-it and up-to-date that the realization that the queers are infiltrating the American Idol stage is big news. For somebody. But not him. Maybe you?

Sure, Fox’s entertainment branch has a massive financial stake in promoting the program ad nauseum, and yes, you may think that a supposed reporter pretending to condescend to cover such an obvious plug makes him a hack, and maybe Bill’s attempt at casual objectivity is as thinly-veiled as his hair. The point is, there’s a real issue here. We guess. Bill’s not really sure either.

If you were a cynical person, you might ponder how exactly do you spur a Gay Panic reaction out of an exploitive non-story while struggling to maintain your feigned disinterest about how trivial the subject you’re reporting on really is. First, you need a performer whose Emo-ish, vaguely panssexual appearance threatens you on a visceral level, especially when photos — which you make sure to brand “embarrassing” — of him lip-locking with another glam rock enthusiast come to the fore. (more…)

A full month before Inauguration Day, no-Drama Obama finally made his own first public blunder, selecting Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his swearing-in ceremony on January 20.

Yes, that’s right, Rick Warren. Public Proposition 8 supporter, and pastor of Saddleback Church, an Orange County Evangelical megachurch, who humbly stated that same-sex marriage is comparable to incest or pedophilia and could lead to hate speech prosecutions of Christians.

Who knew that the first controversy President-Elect Obama would be responsible for would bypass the fringe right-wing mobs that called him a Muslim or a socialist. Instead the outrage comes from the left, people in the heart of the pro-diversity coalition that Obama inexorably represents, rightly offended by Warren’s views.

It’s not hard to imagine what the transition team’s reasoning was, as the decision was likely made without much thought. Warren is a staunch social conservative whose following voted for John McCain, but agrees with Obama on climate change, AIDS, energy and concern for the downtrodden, where Obama’s most ambitious agenda lies. The Obama team hoped to reach out to “both sides” to make the inauguration into an all-American event rather than a partisan one. (more…)

She’s a certain character type played by actresses of a certain age in a certain type of horror movie genre.

She’s a Horror Hag.

After all the big bugs, saucer men and pod people of the Eisenhower Era horror movies had abdicated the throne, the Horror Hag became Queen of the new tide of terrors made up of Psychos, Bad Seeds and Peeping Toms.

This matronly malefactor embodied all the mistrust toward Picket Fence Babylon we’d come to harbor. Like chocolate cookies laced with gilt-edged razors, her nurture instinct had grown sick, delusional, deadly.

While her subgenre may have largely fallen by the wayside, the Horror Hag’s shadow still remains in popular culture. Every year there’s a notable real-life contender who takes a cue from the big screen and proceeds to go publicly bat shit and just dares us to bar the door at Thanksgiving.

This year it’s erstwhile Psycho-Biddy and Oklahoma Legislator Sally Kern (above right: upper left pic) who seems to be clutching like mad for the current title of Hag Supreme. (more…)

Ted.

History has blessed us with but a few notable Men Called Haggard.

The first, British novelist Henry Rider Haggard, wrote sprawling colonialist adventures beginning in the late 19th Century. King Solomon’s Mines charts a quest to uncover the spectacular riches of the titular Biblical King of Israel. Allan Quatermain features a lost white civilization brimming with internal intrigue and power-mongering. In the bombastic She, the indomitable goddess-empress Ayesha is obliterated by her own boundless ambition on the fiery dais of her sacred flame.

Cut to the 21st Century and detect a thematic foreshadowing in Ted Haggard and his New Life megachurch, the mere nomenclature of which on the scale of shameless American vulgarity tops even the Monster Truck Rally, the Multiplex and the Megamall. (more…)

The Cult of Mormon.

America’s longest-running scam? An authoritarian and insular power structure that holds its members in a stranglehold of fear and shame? Establisher of the driest and most score-free college campus ever?

Publisher of a highly-specific guide to overcoming the insidious effects of masturbation that depicts the act as if it were heroin addiction or demonic possession?

All of the above?

Damn right. But there’s more!

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints finds itself under the microscope as of late what with the recent accomplice-to-rape conviction of self-styled prophet/child slaver Warren Jeffs and the vapid would-be presidential bid of Mitt Romney, who with the aid of his saccharine sons has attempted to deflect sentiments that he’s a Mormon cyborg by staging the campaign equivalent of an Old Spice ad. (more…)