Rick Perlstein doesn’t think Mitt Romney’s Mormonism will ultimately matter to Evangelical voters, and I tend to agree. You should read the whole thing, but here’s how his piece starts:

I’ve never been impressed with the argument that Mitt Romney makes for a weak Republican nominee because conservatives don’t like him. That’s not how that party works. Like they say, “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” Don’t believe me? Think back four years. When the race was still up in the air, the venom aimed at McCain was ten times worse than anything being suffered by Mitt. I collected the stuff back then: Rush Limbaugh said McCain threatened “the American way of life as we’ve always known it”; Ann Coulter said he was actually “a Democrat” (oof!); an article in the conservative magazine Human Events called him “the new Axis of Evil”; and Michael Reagan, talk radio host and the 40th president’s son, said “he has contempt for conservatives, who he thinks can be duped into thinking he’s one of them.”

Then McCain wrapped up the nomination, and Mike Reagan suddenly said, “You can bet my father would be itching to get out on the campaign trail working to elect him.” One thing Republicans understand: In American elections you have to choose from among only two people – not between the perfect and the good.

He adds a bit later:

I think they’ll get over it. In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.

Consider that little more than a generation ago, Catholics had it even worse than Mormons do now. “Theological qualms”? Try this one on for size: Once upon a time many, if not most, Protestant fundamentalists identified the Roman Catholic Church as nothing less than the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth – the dreaded “Whore of Babylon” described in Revelation 17 and 18. More prosaically, they identified Catholics as an alien force. Billy Graham reassured his followers in 1960 that it was legitimate to vote against Catholic John F. Kennedy out of religious prejudice, because the Roman Catholic Church “is not only a religious but also a secular institution, with its own ministers and ambassadors.”

Fast forward to now: extremist Catholic voters and activists are in lockstep with extremist Evangelical voters and activists, because conservative religious people in this country, at least of the “Judeo-Christian” variety, have united about that which they hate.

It’s actually a little bit astonishing to look at how much American theology has changed in the past century. Rick’s piece looks back on that time not so long ago when Evangelicals really, honestly, didn’t care about abortion. For some of us who weren’t around in the 1970′s, it’s hard to imagine, but they used to consider that a Catholic issue and they kinda sorta totally hated Catholics. Now the enemies are gays, women, Muslims, etc. We’ll keep hearing the prognostication about whether Evangelicals will vote for a Mormon up to the day that Romney ties up the nomination. At that point, wingnuts, like they do, will fall in line.

[h/t Digby]

Radical fundamentalist activists are meeting at a ranch outside Houston today and tomorrow hoping to line up behind a Republican presidential candidate that isn’t that dreaded Mormon guy. Currently their loyalties are divided between the peanut, the walnut, the Brazil nut, and the nut-job (Santorum). Such indecisiveness is giving Romney a decisive advantage in South Carolina.

The clandestine meeting has been endorsed by Focus on the Family co-founder James Dobson, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land and will likely be attended by American Values’ Gary Bauer, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, the American Family Association’s Donald Wildmon, and Skyline Church’s Rev. Jim Garlow.

If the extremists can’t decide on one nut to rally behind, they will discuss how to extort promises and blackmail Mitt Romney at the expense of America. According to the New York Times:

The evangelical leaders say they will also prepare for the strong possibility that Mr. Romney wins the nomination. In Texas, they expect to discuss what promises — in the party platform, in the choice of a vice-presidential candidate and in judicial appointments — they should seek from Mr. Romney in return for their enthusiastic support.

It seems this collection of crazies is overreaching and inadvertently aiming to make Romney unelectable. Their message to Romney: “If you are not really one of us, pretend that you are and succumb to our demands or we will whine and stay home on Election Day.”

Of course, expect Romney to bow at their feet. It seems that the shape-shifting, oleaginous Romney will say or do practically anything to win the support of these dangerous zealots.

Kathy Baldock, Evangelical Christian and fierce ally and advocate for LGBT equality:

I am growing weary of the Christian community saying our faith is being attacked and we are being persecuted. Is there any non-gay, non-trans person in this country that is not free to walk in any church on any Sunday and publicly praise God? No straight person is barred from marrying the person they love or even a person they do not love. No one has ever stopped me from reading my Bible or praying as I walk along a public trail. I am not persecuted.

As unpopular as it is to say, many of those I religiously identify with, have become the persecutors. God specifically tells His people in Isaiah 58 that He is not interested in their external piety and conformity to rules of service, worship and discipline. He tells His people that if they really want to serve Him and have Him listen, they need to “loose the chains of injustice … and set the oppressed free and break every yoke.” He further tells His people to “spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed.”

Injustice means treating people unequally; oppression is exercising authority or power in an unjust manner. Is the glbt community oppressed and treated unjustly? Of course they are.

This country is ruled by a Constitution that guarantees all of us equal treatment. All of us. Being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender is not a choice or a behavior or something that needs to be or can be changed. Gay and trans people are a class of people. When people of faith lead the charge to withhold rights from a class of people, then they have indeed have become the oppressors.

I have nothing more to add, but you should read the entire post from which that quote comes.

Two things.  First of all, bigots in North Carolina are trying to push through a constitutional amendment banning marriage or any other legal arrangements for gay couples.  If you’ll remember from your geography classes, North Carolina is in the South.  Guess what?  A majority are opposed to said amendment:

According to a Public Policy Polling survey released on Wednesday, 55 percent of respondents would vote against the proposed amendment, 30 percent would vote for it, and 15 percent said they were not sure.

Oh crap. That’s gotta give some North Carolina wingnuts tremors.

Another recent poll shows how much ground the hate group set has lost among their own offspring:

The poll, released in late August by the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute, found that nearly half (44 percent) of young evangelicals between the ages of 18 to 29 favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry.

By contrast, the white evangelical community as a whole (even counting those relatively liberal young adults) is solidly opposed to same-sex marriage, by slightly more than 80 percent.

More broadly, the poll found “at least a 20-point generation gap between millennials (age 18-29) and seniors (65 and over) on every public policy measure in the survey concerning rights for gay and lesbian people.”

The poll also found that a slight majority of all Catholics (52 percent) favor same-sex marriage, despite the energetic teaching of their church to the contrary.

Ouch. More pain for the wingnuts! A majority of Catholics support equality, which I’m sure chaps the behinds of the Catholic front group known as the National Organization for Marriage. But even more than that, this poll basically shows that among Evangelicals, the fight is lost as soon as the older generations hand the torch to the younger ones. Those younger Evangelicals are only going to get more liberal, and those who are not yet 18 will be more liberal than the current 18-29 set.

Wingnuts need to give it up and do something with the remainder of their lives, I think.

We won.

This is your weekly reminder, Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown, Tony Perkins, Peter Sprigg, Laurie Higgins, Peter LaBarbera, Matt Barber, Linda Harvey, and whatever other sad sack bigots I missed:  UPDATE YOUR RESUMES.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Jim Daly, president of Focus, in the Christian magazine World:

We’re winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage? We’re losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don’t know if that’s going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We’ve probably lost that. I don’t want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.

You and the demographers are right, Jim. Those numbers ain’t goin’ back, baby. Civil Rights issues never, ever, follow that sort of trajectory.  EVER.  Especially on the issue of equality for gays and lesbians — it doesn’t matter what your family looks like, what you believe, what color you are, how much you make, or anything else:  you have gays and lesbians in your family, in your circle of friends, in your church.  And the second people get to know us, they start voting for us, because they learn that what they’ve been taught is not only a lie, but a damned lie.

[The stuff about reproductive rights is wishful thinking, but eh, not getting into that right now.]

The interview in World is subscription-only, which makes me laugh, so I’m kind of relying on Pareene at Salon for these quotes from the interview, but he pulls out another interesting one about the Obama family:

I may not agree with any of his policies. I do appreciate that he’s married to his first wife and raising his two children. We need more men like that. I once said that America would be better off if we had more families that reflected the Obamas, and a lot of conservatives went nuts with that, but it’s true! Some of the conservative candidates that we put up—between a couple of them recently, I think they had seven or eight marriages. That seems a bit hypocritical.

The overarching message here? Clean up your own damn house, fundies, or as the bumper sticker on my old car used to say, “Focus On Your Own Damn Family.” It’s a known fact anyway that liberals do better with things like marriage than fundamentalists anyway, so it’s not like they have anything to teach us. We’re doin’ just fine.

Still, it’s nice to see a prominent Evangelical leader begin to embrace reality.

It’s a good question, and it’s something that everybody can see, except, of course, White Evangelical Christians. It’s sort of amazing to liberal believers, atheists, agnostics, etc., that these people, who so fervently scream about how they’re the Real Christians, the ones who really have been Saved By The Blood Of Jesus, often have little to nothing in common with the deity they claim to worship. A new study has come out which addresses this very topic:

The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life () reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.

Jesus unambiguously preached mercy and forgiveness. These are supposed to be cardinal virtues of the Christian faith. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of the death penalty, draconian sentencing, punitive punishment over rehabilitation, and the governmental use of torture. Jesus exhorted humans to be loving, peaceful, and non-violent. And yet Evangelicals are the group of Americans most supportive of easy-access weaponry, little-to-no regulation of handgun and semi-automatic gun ownership, not to mention the violent military invasion of various countries around the world. Jesus was very clear that the pursuit of wealth was inimical to the Kingdom of God, that the rich are to be condemned, and that to be a follower of Him means to give one’s money to the poor. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of corporate greed and capitalistic excess, and they are the most opposed to institutional help for the nation’s poor — especially poor children. They hate anything that smacks of “socialism,” even though that is essentially what their Savior preached. They despise food stamp programs, subsidies for schools, hospitals, job training — anything that might dare to help out those in need. Even though helping out those in need was exactly what Jesus urged humans to do. In short, Evangelicals are that segment of America which is the most pro-militaristic, pro-gun, and pro-corporate, while simultaneously claiming to be most ardent lovers of the Prince of Peace.

Oh, but here is the thing, and it is a lightbulb moment:

Evangelicals don’t exactly hate Jesus — as we’ve provocatively asserted in the title of this piece. They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. Through his magical grace, and by shedding his precious blood, Jesus saves Evangelicals from everlasting torture in hell, and guarantees them a premium, luxury villa in heaven. For this, and this only, they love him.

In other words, conservative Evangelicals react to Jesus the same way they react to everything else: “What is in it for ME?”

Now think about it.  This sort of selfish mentality also informs their reactions to things like marriage equality, because people who are only concerned with themselves tend to play victim when somebody else threatens to outdo them in quality of life, love, happiness, etc.  They have so long convinced themselves that they are The Elect, and that their system of morality is the best one, so it really messes them up to consider that the rest of the population has no use for their patriarchal system, for their rigid shame-inducing lifestyle, or anything else about them, really.  It’s the same mentality that has retirees on Medicare joining the anti-union pitchfork-fest in Wisconsin.  That’s why it’s really not surprising that conservative, fundamentalist Christians are the most likely demographic when it comes to supporting selfish, awful policies that do nothing but hurt people.

Indeed, in my Evangelical upbringing, there was an inordinate focus on the idea of grace, but not in a humane sort of way.  It was a sort of grace that was offered to Evangelical Christians for no reason other than that God had chosen us.  There were always banal ramblings from the pulpit about how this inherently meant we weren’t better than anyone else, because we weren’t elect by our own merit.  But at the end of the day, just the same, we were the elect.  We got ours.  This was a Calvinist tradition, but it’s much the same in the more Baptist, Arminian framework.  The only difference is that the Baptists knew well enough that they’d better accept Jesus Christ into their hearts, thus making them elect.  The others who didn’t?  We got ours.

It’s useful to remember these sorts of things, when considering the fight for equal rights.  We’re dealing with people who have been trained to be selfish, to view this life as merely a stepping stone to a magical paradise fantasy land, the entry into which they have not earned, but that they have nonetheless received.

In other words, screw the rest of y’all, you’ll be sorry when we’re all in Heaven!

Sarah Posner reports on the findings of Southern Illinois University sociologist Darren Sherkat, who has compiled the General Social Survey results over the last couple of decades on public support for marriage equality. I’ll let her set it up for you:

Sherkat tells me:

There are no other scientific surveys which have asked questions about same sex marriage over a long period of time. The only other remaining scientific general population surveys are the National Election Surveys, and I don’t think they ever asked a question about that (or if they did it was only in the 2008 version). I can’t stress this enough.

In other words, the GSS is the only survey that shows these trends over time, using face-to-face surveys of respondents (as opposed to telephone polls).

And here’s what support for marriage equality looks like, from 1988 to the present day:

Stunning.

Sarah also addresses the notion that young Conservative Christians are becoming more tolerant. Apparently that is not the case, but it IS true that the younger generations in general are much more tolerant of LGBT equality. That can only mean one thing, and it’s something we already knew: the wingnut churches are driving their young away in droves. Anecdotally, I graduated from a small-ish private Christian school and grew up in a fairly conservative area, and I can think of very few people from that time who still attend church on a regular basis. Surely, there are some who do, but the overwhelming feeling I get is that many stay tangentially involved in church, perhaps when they’re with their extended families, but otherwise, it’s not that big of a deal in their lives. Moreover, I know others who are still very much Christian, but who shun the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist labels like the plague. I’ve even heard the term “recovering Fundamentalist” thrown around in my age group.

I only point this out because wingnuts are likely to try to scapegoat gays and feminism and the lib’rul culture or whatever else for the fact that their young just don’t buy what they’re selling the way they used to. The fact of the matter is that they did it to themselves, when they made the decision to dig their heels in and refuse to assimilate into modern culture. It’s increasingly difficult to keep young people in churches that teach young earth creationism when the internet is full of actual science. It’s increasingly difficult to keep them hating gay people, and thus worshipping at the altar of Fundamentalism, when their college roommate is gay and they realize that their parents and pastors have been lying to them all these years.

Anyway, we’re winning, is the point. The sharp rise in support shown on the graph is evidence of the tipping point Wayne and I have talked about a lot over the past year. There just comes a certain point where there is too much correct information out there, too much education, for people to keep their fingers in their ears any longer. It will only get better.

If you remember, Jim Swilley, a Georgia megachurch pastor, recently shocked his congregation and showed true integrity when he came out of the closet to his congregation, and by extension, the world.  In this video, he sits down with CNN’s Don Lemon and talks more about what his experience has been like:

[h/t Perez Hilton]

The key moment comes a little after 3:00 when Kathy Griffin says “Look, let’s cut the crap!”  She’s easily the most powerful voice in this segment.  People can agree or disagree over how effective celebrities are when they speak out, but when they’re as informed and on point as Kathy Griffin is in this segment, I’m cheering.

[h/t HuffPost]

When Lance Bass talks about how he used to make fun of gay kids in order to hide his secret, I understand what he’s talking about.  That’s something that hasn’t been discussed much in the past week — the likelihood that at least some of those doing the bullying are doing so because the gay kid who is either out of the closet or perceived as gay by others threatens their own secrets.

When I was younger, I didn’t do precisely the same thing, having been bullied myself, but I sure did adopt the Evangelical Christian judgment of gays hook, line and sinker.  It was never because it made any logical sense — because anti-gay beliefs are not, at heart, about logic, nor are they arrived at by deep thought — but because I psychologically felt that if I was standing in judgment of gay people, then surely my secret attractions to guys couldn’t be real in any way.

So that’s another interesting angle.  Often the bullies are victims of the same bigoted climate the bullied kids are.  They’re just reacting to it in a different way.

I need to direct you to this piece written by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin. As a non-Christian, I grow weary sometimes of speaking about clueless fundamentalists, but Timothy has really encapsulated the true message that conservative Evangelicals (and conservative Catholics) have for the LGBT community, and why, despite their inability to see it, their message is ultimately one of inhuman degradation:

And the extra-special plan that God has for gay people? Is it a lifetime of celibacy?

Perhaps it is never, ever, experiencing romance, flirting, a first date, or a kiss on the beach under the moonlight. Maybe a life of devotion to others, knowing that your last breath will not be with a partner. Being a wonderful uncle or sister or neighbor, but knowing this: God’ Plan is for you to never be the most important person in anyone’ life.

And they wonder why we don’t leap at the opportunity.

I’ve never seen it encapsulated quite like that, so bravo Timothy. Oh wait, he’s not done:

“But it’ grace”, they say. “God is as quick to forgive you for your life of love, commitment and devotion to your partner as He is to forgive me of my extramarital affairs. He’ll forgive you for building a life together, for caring until death do you part, He’ll pardon you for experiencing same-sex attraction just as quickly as he forgives a murderer.”

Is it any surprise that some gay people conclude that God is a bully? Or that even more have responded to such nonsense by questioning the existence of gods at all and have come to conclude that it’ all just irrational myth and superstitions?

Read it all, as they say on the internet. Because it just keeps getting better. One more graf?

And for as long as you continue to be part of the movement to deny civil equalities, you will never, ever “reach gay people for Christ”. If your Christ compels you to take away my health insurance, then your Christ is my enemy. If His message of love is to take my children away from me, then I’ll do without that kind of love, thanks.

Oh boy.

Yeah, you’ll be clicking that clicky right now.