By now you’ve read the delicious tale of Dr. George Rekers, a leading advocate for ex-gay junk science, being photographed coming back from Europe with a young blond “assistant” he hired from Rentboy.com. He hired the boy, he insists, merely to carry his luggage. At least that was the first draft of the tale.

The story changed within 24 hours, as his cohorts on the religious right dropped him off their sites. Now Dr. Rekers claims he was “ministering” to a confused young lad, for by definition all athletic young men who shyly sell themselves on Rentboy.com with promises of a “smooth, sweet, tight ass” and a “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” must be confused. And to such sweet and perfect and guileless confusion (see photo at left), our 61-year-old Christian crusader was uniquely qualified to minister.

For one thing, Rekers was actually a Baptist minister, though that is not how he made his mark in the world. As a professor of Neuropsychiatry & Behavioral Science, Dr. Rekers spent his life trying to reclassify homosexuality as a psychosis.

In this effort, he co-founded with James Dobson the vile Family Research Council, a Christian lobbying group focused, in actuality, on criminalizing all aspects of homosexuality. Rekers is also an officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a faith-based center for the curing of homosexuality that the American Psychiatric Association has condemned as a sham.

NARTH, when it is not damaging the usually young Christian kids sent to it by their parents, is busy inveighing against the longstanding consensus of mental health professions that homosexuality is normal, positive, and not a mental disorder. Leading the charge, Dr. Rekers (at right, December to Rentboy’s May) most recently turned up in Florida, in 2008, to testify as a so-called expert witness against gay adoption.

And yet there he is in the photos arriving at Miami International Airport, fresh from London, Rome and Madrid, all the fleshpots, as the preachers used to say, of Europe, with his rentboy in tow. Rentboy, by the way, is not carrying even so much as a flight bag, let alone luggage. The Miami New Times reported that Dr. Rekers was humping his own baggage cart all the way through customs. (read the full article)

“These are the Armies of The Night. They are 60,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City.”

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have an insane person in your life, then you know the red flags that indicate you’re in the presence of a troubled mind. I’m not talking charming eccentricity or uneasy mercurialness. I mean batshittery.

Conspiracy-related paranoia is key for the unstable. There’s always some form of shadow government or encroaching social malaise that only they and the like-minded can see coming. A wildly inflated sense of self-importance is also integral; something about them makes them so special that powerful forces are uniting to destroy or discredit them. Secret societies — the Illuminati, Satanists, Communists, and aliens (the illegal kind and the invading variety) — are typical oppressor fixations.

Lately I’ve been positing that extreme racist and ethnist reactions may be a form of mental illness themselves. The causal and “enlightened” forms of prejudice — the kind you have to awkwardly dance around as you argue you can spot an undocumented worker by the type of footwear they sport — are character flaws, but the sort of convulsive, visceral kind that revolves around the idea that our arch nemeses Hawaii and Kenya would collude to put a Manchurian Candidate in the White House is a whole different bag. (read the full article)

Out of runway.

It’s a personal saying — not quite a mantra, not quite an idiom — that I regularly resort to when I’m wont to describe a certain feeling of dread finality that comes over me — that sinking realization that your back’s up against the wall, of feeling the house lights dim, of sensing the final curtain about to drop down.

Charlie Crist is officially out of runway.

The once-popular Florida Governor was riding high just a scant year ago, his Republican good ol’ boy cred in a conservative state deemed enough of a momentum to let him cross the finish line of his Senatorial bid in a comfortable jog. In 2008, he was in the top running to be John McCain’s VP prior to McCain opting to play the Penguin to Sarah Palin’s Catwoman in a campaign equivalent of a schlocky supervillain tag-team. Prior to that, he was Florida’s Attorney General under Jeb Bush.

A lot can happen in a year.

Crist’s campaign coffers are now so in the red that they might as well have a DNR. Teabagger rival Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles with a conspicuously ethnic “o” at the end of both of his names — proof positive that the Tea Party can’t even manage coherent consistency in reviling the very type of person it was organized to detest — has been bracingly outdistancing him in polls. (read the full article)

“Opponents of this message, they’re seeking to marginalize this movement. They want to paint us as ideologically extreme and the counterpoint to liberal intolerance and outrageous conspiracy theorists aimed at our own government and unethical shameless tactics like considering a candidate’s children fair game. But unlike the elitists who denounce this movement — they just don’t want to hear the message — I’ve traveled across this great country and I’ve talked to the patriotic men and women who make up the Tea Party movement. And they are good and kind and selfless and they are deeply concerned about our country. And today I ask only this: Let’s make this movement a tribute to their good example…”

– from Sarah Palin’s Keynote Speech at the Inaugural Tea Party Convention

…and Alice just left the fucking table.

As our trusty pal Joe Jervis points out: “New Hampshire state Rep. Nancy Elliott doesn’t do anal.”

Godamnit!

Ms. Elliot wants to repeal same-sex marriage because — quote: “…We’re talking about taking the penis of a man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement. And you have to think … would I allow that to be done to me?”

Well dear readers, what do you think? Could she? Should she? Would you fuck her? COULD you fuck her? Help us out here. And help out the citizens of New Hampshire while you’re at it — so much hangs in the balance (or sling).

Palinesque adj. 1 having the characteristics of a babbling, shallow cipher.

2 a quality that encourages inexplicable fandom from segments of the populace exhibiting an intense need to have their prejudices and fears legitimized in a public forum by a teased-haired rural caricature.

3 a bizarre form of self-aggrandizement coupled with a terminal lack of self-awareness that can result in difficulty in focusing, an inability to complete tasks, bad pronunciation, and the inclination to depart from certain locales because there are too many Asians.

4 relating to the tendency to use gender, motherhood, and especially children as human shields in order to deflect any and all criticisms about your character and aptitude.

5 a reflexive mindset wherein mass communications trigger a deep-seated paranoia and the corresponding reactionary impulse to lash out via Facebook or Twitter in the manner that a teenage girl would.

6 the perverse habit of insisting to speak on camera despite the fact that visual and aural mediums do not become you. (read the full article)