This rant is pretty righteous.  I’m going to excerpt some of it, but you really need to read it in its full glory:

Another teenager killed himself because of bullying and anti-gay harassment. This one was in Minnesota, and his name was Justin Aaberg. The local news report is here. School officials, wary of conservative protests, did nothing.

This comes on the heels of the suicide of another teenager in Indiana, one who never actually said whether he was gay but who was mercilessly harassed nonetheless. His name was Billy Lucas. The local news report is here. Again, school officials did nothing.

[...]

Focus on the Family, a right-wing lobbying group that fronts as a religious organization, pays lip service to the bullying issue, but wants no mention of homosexuality in schools because it might encourage kids to be gay — this in spite of the fact that the vast majority of bullying is directed at teens who either appear to be gay or are actually out, not those who are fat or wear glasses.

[...]

Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, and similar groups don’t actually give a damn about these kids or their families. They couldn’t care less how many of them are beaten within an inch of their lives or actually take their own lives. What matters to them is power, influence, and promoting an extreme religious agenda to help them hang on to said power and influence. They are deathly afraid that some of the kids might not grow up to be as bigoted as they are.

What did I say earlier today?  The same exact thing.

All of that is just build-up though, to this:

Lost in the hysteria of Quran-burning and mosque-building is the clear and present danger to our youth, and society in general, by these American “religious” organizations, their teachings, their agenda and their political influence with equally insane right-wing politicians, who callously turn away when the clear evidence of the atmosphere they help create manifests itself. In the name of Almighty God, they are evil. How about some good old Tea-Party-type energy directed against these people?

What’s the difference between the Taliban and the Focus on the Family? About 7000 miles.

AMEN.  And bravo.

Politically obsessed liberals are probably aware that Markos Moulitsas has a new book out, American Taliban, about the similarities between Islamic extremists and American Christian religious extremists.  The title is obviously hyperbolic for the purposes of making a point.  I haven’t read it, but I plan to pick it up.  If you’re on the fence, though, General JC Christian of Jesus’ General has posted his Amazon review, and he’d like you to help vote it up as the “Most Helpful Negative Review.”  Here’s a bit:

How dare the author compare the American right to the Taliban. Sure, we both hate sex, reproductive choice, secularism, government regulation, homosexualism, and masturbation. We both want to establish godly governments that enforce scriptural law. And, we both justify our wars on the basis of religion. But the similarities end there.

We fight our wars in the name of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. They fight their battles for Allah, a god who doesn’t even know how to transubstantiate or turn water into a party.

We want to impose God’s kingdom on Earth by passing biblically based sharia laws. The Koran serves as the basis of the Taliban’s law, and unlike the Bible, it offers no object lessons in which she-bears eat children or whole cities are smitten with hemorrhoids.

The Taliban punish OB/GYNs using crude, uncivilized methods like stoning. We shoot doctors from a distance with a modern high-powered rifle.

While we may demand that our women dress modestly, and enforce it by calling them sluts or blaming them when they are victims of rape, our burka is a more fashionable and procreation-friendly burka.

.

Heh.  The she-bear verses have always been among my favorites.

Unfortunately, we’ve been consumed with Mehlman fever (antibiotics should do the trick) the past twenty four hours, so I missed this. Jeff Sharlet has a new book, and a new piece in Harper’s, which unfortunately isn’t available yet, but an NPR interview with Sharlet drops a bit of a bombshell about the private ambitions of the sick, twisted, maniacal Ugandan MP David Bahati, the sponsor of that nation’s infamous “kill the gays bill”:

“Bahati said: ‘If you come here, you’ll see homosexuals from Europe and America are luring our children into homosexuality by distributing cell phones and iPods and things like this,’ ” Sharlet recounts. “And he said, ‘And I can explain to you what I really want to do.’ ”

Sharlet accompanied Bahati to a restaurant and later to his home, where Bahati told Sharlet that he wanted “to kill every last gay person.”

“It was a very chilling moment, because I’m sitting there with this man who’s talking about his plans for genocide, and has demonstrated over the period of my relationship with him that he’s not some back bencher — he’s a real rising star in the movement,” Sharlet says. “This was something that I hadn’t understood before I went to Uganda, that this was a guy with real potential and real sway and increasingly a following in Uganda.”

And he has connections to American leaders. Sharlet explains that Bahati is one of the Uganda leaders of an American evangelical movement called the Fellowship, or the Family — the secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians who wield considerable political influence, both in Washington and abroad.

His legislation has also been outright defended, or explained away, by Cliff Kincaid, Peter LaBarbera, Don Schmierer of Exodus, Lou Engle, Molotov Mitchell of WingNutDaily and several others.

If that’s what Bahati says to an American journalist with a history of reporting facts, I’d hate to imagine what he says behind closed doors to American Religious Right wingnuts.

Bahati is an aspiring genocidal maniac, and continuing American support from fundamentalist Christian leaders just proves what so many have always said: They are our American Taliban, and the only reason they haven’t started bombing things is because they live in a developed country where the Enlightenment and secularization have had a civilizing effect on the most grotesque applications of Deep Religious Faith.  Bahati just has more “freedom” where he lives than our American mullahs do.

[h/t Jim Burroway]

Re: Maggie Gallagher, whose blubbering over the way things were going in the Prop 8 trial I blogged about earlier today:

Of course, America’s Taliban doesn’t believe in the Constitution, or laws, or judges. They only believe in their own beliefs. And if they believe it, it’s right. If you believe it, it’s wrong. And if you want to live in this country alongside them, you’d better worship their god in the exact manner they do, or they’ll destroy you.

That’s why we have a Constitution. To stop people like Maggie Gallagher.

They reject with every fiber of their beings the fact that they, the Religous Right, AKA America’s Taliban, are the ones on the wrong side of history, and that they are the ones fighting against uniquely American values, but as usual, the facts are not on their side. When it comes to the actual US Constitution, the actual Bill of Rights, and the actual American system, the Religious Right pretty much has a 100% record of being completely, utterly, insanely wrong.

In a later post today, Maggie basically conceded the Prop 8 trial. She’s clinging to hope that the Supreme Court is as stupid as the voters she targets in her campaigns of hate, and I’ll grant her that Clarence Thomas is, but I don’t think she should count her chickens.

(h/t Joe.My.God)

Remember how Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association went on the radio the other day and told the story of Phinehas, who found favor with God (quote unquote) by murdering two people he found engaging in some sort of sexual intercourse that was not Phinehas-approved, and then encouraged his listeners so that each one of them could “be a Phinehas” in our modern world?

Well, surprise, it’s the Bryan Fischer game, where he says something awful, honest people report exactly what he said and their implications, and then he claims we’re “smearing him.” No, no, no, he says, I didn’t mean to kill people! I just meant be like Phinehas, who found favor with God by impaling people, but don’t really impale them, just be like Phinehas, who again, impaled people, blargh blargh blargh.

Kyle has covered Fischer’s latest jack-assery in full, so I have nothing to add.