What’s up with the “USA” chant as the gay kissers left the rally? Do they not think that there are gay people in Santorum and Palin’s “real America?”

The fact that they chanted USA in response to this action was chilling and indicative of the dangerous mindset shared by Santorum supporters. Such an intolerant cheer is what one might expect in a ultra-nationalist totalitarian country. I can’t think of a response that is more unAmerican than what we see in these videos.

Kirk Cameron, the former teen star on the sitcom Growing Pains, has become a growing pain.

On CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight,” the anti-gay actor trashed LGBT Americans saying, “I think that it’s – it’s – it’s unnatural. I think that it’s – it’s detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”

There are those who think the incoherent ramblings of an entertainer should be ignored, but it is crucial to not allow such ignorance to go unchallenged. Christian fundamentalists too often make the most foolish, factually unsupported statements, and get a free pass by hiding behind their religion. Their argument essentially is: You should take what I say very seriously because I’m moral, but I should not be subject to harsh criticism for intolerant statements that I can’t back up because they are my personal beliefs.

Conservatives like Rick Santorum have it backwards when they whine that Christians (like Cameron) are not welcome in the public square. What they really seek is to dominate the public space by browbeating anyone who challenges their often-bizarre views. They seek to abuse democracy by passing anti-democratic laws – sometimes through referenda — to give their beliefs dominion in the public sphere, and turn those whom they suppress into second-class citizens.

No one is taking rights away from fundamentalists – but they certainly can’t say the same, as they continuously work to demonize, dehumanize, stigmatize, and discriminate against LGBT citizens. It is also increasingly obvious that if they had enough support, they would severely curtail women’s freedom and reproductive rights.

Christian fundamentalists are not the martyrs they often pretend to be. However, there is a group of people that actually suffers because the “moral” insults of people like Santorum and Cameron give the unkind and unbalanced license to justify hatred and violence.

A report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in November 2010, analyzing FBI data from 1995 to 2008, found that LGBT people are 2.6 times more likely to be attacked than blacks; 4.4 times more likely than Muslims; 13.8 times more likely than Latinos; and 41.5 times more likely than whites.

On one hand, people like Cameron truly believe they have cultural influence, which is why they are compelled to speak out. When people attack the subjects of their dehumanization, however, such types throw up their hands and plead they had nothing to do with creating a hostile climate where LGBT people are maimed, mugged, and murdered.

But what does Cameron think happens in the real world when LGBT people – particularly vulnerable youth — are turned into social pariahs? In his convoluted mind, does he think school bullies aren’t influenced when he calls their preferred targets “unnatural or immoral?”

I agree with Santorum that it is critical that born again Christians take their beliefs into the public square – that way they can be squarely challenged. When Cameron makes the outlandish claim that homosexuality is unnatural, he should have to explain in great detail why it naturally occurs in so many animal species. If he thinks that apes, penguins, or giraffes need to read the Old Testament to straighten out, then let him say so. What is his evidence other than a couple of misquoted, badly butchered Bible verses?

Cameron should be repeatedly asked in media interviews to offer hard evidence backing his foolish assertion that being gay is “detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”

Which civilizations? Can he give us concrete examples of how the citizens of eight American states and the District of Columbia have been harmed by gay couples marrying? Can he show us how countries with marriage equality, such as Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden have unraveled? Does he prefer morally pure anti-gay societies such as Uganda, Russia, and Iran?

Cameron defended himself by claiming he has gay friends (all homophobes seem to think they do): “I do not, however, believe that the right way to advance our views is to resort to name-calling and personal attacks, as some have done to me. I also believe that freedom of speech and freedom of religion go hand-in-hand in America,” whined Cameron.

Someone needs to explain to Cameron that when he makes offensive, inaccurate, and spiteful pronouncements about an entire group of people he knows nothing about, his attacks are very personal and he is engaging in the very name-calling he derides. He also must learn that when people debunk his outdated views, they are expressing their freedom of speech.

If people like Cameron don’t have evidence for their opinions, they have earned the right to be excoriated in the very public square they claim to want to be in so badly. Christian fundamentalists don’t deserve special rights and their beliefs should be put under the same microscope as everyone else’s. That is precisely is what defines the public square in America.

One of the reasons I’m so certain that the battle for LGBT equality will be a successful one is because of the well-documented generation gap in support for LGBT issues, including marriage equality (even among evangelicals!).

But you can’t win ‘em all. Check out the video below — these two young Oklahoman women are just so gosh darn crazy about Rick Santorum that they wrote him a country pop song!

Still, all is not lost. In just a few years, these kids will graduate from high school and move out of mom and dad’s house. If they attend university, they’ll be exposed to all sorts of different people of varying cultures, religions, races, orientations, identities, and political beliefs that will challenge and expand their worldview. (No wonder their man Rick hates it so much!) If either of them decide to pursue studies in music, there’s no way they’ll be able to avoid this. (My education is in music, so I know from whence I speak.) So the odds are good that they won’t be singing this tune for long.

And if they still are in ten or twenty years? Frankly, the world will have left them — and everyone else who still thinks God wrote the Bill of Rights or that married same-sex couples should be forcibly divorced — so far behind we won’t even be able to hear the strumming of their guitars.

Out of touch with the mainstream of America, much, Frothy?

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum on Thursday attributed the criticism of his socially conservative political beliefs to journalists and others living in New York.

“The idea that values issues are losers is held by a group of people in the media who live in the New York area,” he said in an interview with American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer. “Because they don’t know anybody or very few people who share those values, so they just assume the rest of the country is like them.”

“So they just naturally recoil at someone who dares to talk about these things or actually publicly talks about his faith and what his faith and convictions are. It makes them uncomfortable.”

Er, no, Frothster. If it was just mean New Yorkers [as watertiger translates, JEWS!] who hated Rick Santorum’s ultra weird psychosexually obsessed politics, Rick would be winning a lot more primaries than he currently is, and this is among Republican wingnut primary voters. Meanwhile, a majority of the country supports marriage equality and a super-majority [like what, 99%?] of women use/have used contraception at one point or another.

Rick Santorum, of course, said this to the spokesperson for a nationally known hate group, so he didn’t get any pushback. That’s how the echo chamber works.

I’m going to bet that most of you, if not all of you, have seen the new viral video sensation called “Kony 2012.”  The video was created by a San Diego-based charity called Invisible Children and has received nearly 74 million views, capturing the attention of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, and Rihanna. It calls for the apprehension and prosecution of former Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.

But you probably haven’t heard about this: according to researcher Bruce Wilson and IRS 990 forms, Invisible Children receives major funding from far-right, anti-gay fundamentalist donors and organizations, chief among them the U.S.-based National Christian Foundation (NCF). The NCF has also provided significant funds to fanatical groups deeply tied to the persecution of LGBT people in Uganda, including that nation’s infamous “Kill the Gays” bill.

According to Wilson’s report, the NCF (which counts among its biggest donors Rick Santorum’s billionaire buddy Foster Friess, by the way) has emerged as the biggest funder of the anti-gay, dominionist Christian right over the last ten years. Groups receiving NCF grants include James Dobson’s Focus on the Family; the Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center-certified anti-gay hate group; the Fellowship Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the subversive D.C.-based fundamentalist shadow organization known as “The Family;” and Harvest Evangelism, a California-based ministry whose founder, Ed Silvoso, has worked with Julius Oyet, a leading promoter of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

NCF also funds The Call, led by Lou Engle, a notorious anti-LGBT extremist who frequently uses violent imagery in his tirades against homosexuality. In 2010, Engle brought The Call to Uganda, where the legislature was already considering the infamous “Kill the Gays Bill” – authored and sponsored by MP David Bahati, a member of The Family. Engle’s rally, which Bahati attended, stoked the fires of homophobic hatred and helped to create an even more frenzied climate of intolerance in that country.

American anti-gay groups like The Family, The Call, and Harvest Evangelism are waging a global war on LGBT people, exporting their hateful bile abroad even as the tide turns against their dangerous views at home. While stopping a brutal warlord is an admirable and important goal, it should not be done at the expense of LGBT Ugandans. Invisible Children needs to account for the very disconcerting ties between their organization and the religious right. More fundamentally, though, they need to decide: are they going to be idealists or ideologues? If Invisible Children is a group that simply seeks to do good, it is incredibly irresponsible for them to be affiliated with the funders of anti-gay fanaticism.

The National Christian Foundation isn’t the only connection between Invisible Children and homophobic bigotry. Invisible Children also received contributions from Californians Terry and Barbara Caster and their foundation. The Caster family contributed heavily to the successful push for the passage of Proposition 8, California’s constitutional marriage discrimination amendment, in 2008.

As usual, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman does a splendid job dismantling the arguments of conservatives, who have become an irrational and illogical bunch. In today’s article, the columnist tackles the GOP’s inexplicable attacks on education. They really want America to be a dumb nation that fawns over religious idols and has contempt for anyone with actual knowledge.

First, Krugman addressed Mitt Romney’s stingy and oppressive views on higher education:

Here’s what the candidate told the student: “Don’t just go to one that has the highest price. Go to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education. And, hopefully, you’ll find that. And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.”

What Romney wants is a large underclass of undereducated people who can basically be his servants — fetching whatever he desires, while grateful for whatever bones he throws their way. For those who manage to make it through college, they will have rounded up enormous debt before they even begin their careers. This makes it almost impossible for young entrepreneurs to start their own companies and fulfill their dreams. Burdened by a choking level of college debt, they have no choice but to become corporate slaves with people like Romney serving as their masters. The debt will also make it difficult to change jobs or take risks, because it will always be hanging around the necks of the young debtors, like an unshakable albatross.

Thanks Mitt!

Even as the debt rises for students, the real value of a college education is decreasing, thanks to savage budget cuts by family values politicians who ensure that future families will not have the proper education to be upwardly mobile.

Adjusted for inflation, state support for higher education has fallen 12 percent over the past five years, even as the number of students has continued to rise; in California, support is down by 20 percent.

One result has been soaring fees. Inflation-adjusted tuition at public four-year colleges has risen by more than 70 percent over the past decade. So good luck on finding that college “that has a little lower price.”

On to the buffoon, Rick Santorum, who despite having more degrees than a thermometer, has hypocritically derided Obama as a “snob” for trying to enroll more Americans in college. Santorum is upset because he ignorantly and incorrectly believes that college is a threat to religious faith — which is rather demeaning because he is essentially calling religious people stupid.

It’s not hard to see what’s driving Mr. Santorum’s wing of the party. His specific claim that college attendance undermines faith is, it turns out, false. But he’s right to feel that our higher education system isn’t friendly ground for current conservative ideology. And it’s not just liberal-arts professors: among scientists, self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans nine to one.

I guess Mr. Santorum would see this as evidence of a liberal conspiracy. Others might suggest that scientists find it hard to support a party in which denial of climate change has become a political litmus test, and denial of the theory of evolution is well on its way to similar status.

The current GOP is a mess and those who enable such idiocy are harming the Republican Party and the country. Without offering young people an affordable, superior education, America will go downhill rather quickly and will not even be a power, let alone a superpower.

But, maybe people like Santorum genuinely want America to become an ignorant, second-tier, superstitious nation that would vote for someone so outrageously extreme and absurd as Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum doesn’t want to talk about social issues except for when he wants to talk about them all the time. As usual!

[h/t Joe]

Google seems to have changed their search algorithms in favor of more recently updated websites. Since SpreadingSantorum.com hasn’t been updated in a while, it’s no longer one of the top results.

Sad face.

Never fear, though, it’s not as if Google is caving to the Frothy Mix’s whining:

…the first result (after election tallies) is a link to the Urban Dictionary definition of Santorum.

To me, it looks like Google has tweaked their algorithm to favor more recently updated sites, and since the landing page for Spreading Santorum hasn’t been changed for years, it was downranked. Four of the 10 first page links that aren’t news or election results still link to a frothy mix site, so it’s not as if Google is censoring that meaning.

So, no big deal. We all know what “santorum” really means anyhow.

Chris Barron, gay conservative person, in denial about the fact that his party has been taken over by the useful idiots who used to ensure their electoral successes:

If Rick Santorum wins tonight, Michigan may forever be known as the place the Republican Party went to die – a political Waterloo.

A Santorum win, in a *must* win state for Romney, would be the clearest sign to date that the conservative coalition within the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams.

Was already happening. Look at who’s voting in Republican primaries. For the most part, it’s bitter, old, white, xenophobic bigots. They are choosing the candidate they deserve.

Much has been made about the proverbial three-legged stool of the GOP: social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and foreign policy conservatives. A Santorum nomination effectively turns the party into a one-legged stool. Make no mistake about it, if Santorum is the nominee, something that was unthinkable just a few weeks ago, this election will become a referendum on the least popular and most-outdated parts of the conservative movement: opposition to birth control, hostility to gay people, etc.

I’m really confused as to which Republicans are being left out in this primary process. The teabaggers are effectively a dead movement, having been absorbed back into their erstwhile resentment zones in the Religious Right and on the Free Republic forums, or perhaps they just got tired. The “foreign-policy” conservatives have pretty much had it handed to them when it comes to, er, foreign policy — I mean, we’ve been fearmongering about Iran for how many decades, and, please, who killed bin Laden again? And the economy is, ahem, recovering.

Anyway, that’s not the point. Pass the popcorn.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is on target when he savaged right wing Republicans and their wimpy enablers that stood by as the party was hijacked by loopy extremists that have worked to drag this nation into the gutter.

Here is what he had to say in today’s column:

All across the nation, there are mainstream Republicans lamenting how the party has grown more and more insular, more and more rigid. This year, they have an excellent chance to defeat President Obama, yet the wingers have trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.

But where have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise? They were lying low, hoping the unpleasantness would pass.

The wingers call their Republican opponents RINOs, or Republican In Name Only. But that’s an insult to the rhino, which is a tough, noble beast. If RINOs were like rhinos, they’d stand up to those who seek to destroy them. Actually, what the country needs is some real Rhino Republicans. But the professional Republicans never do that. They’re not rhinos. They’re Opossum Republicans. They tremble for a few seconds then slip into an involuntary coma every time they’re challenged aggressively from the right.

Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity. Two kinds of candidates emerge from this process: first, those who are forceful but outside the mainstream; second, those who started out mainstream but look weak and unprincipled because they have spent so much time genuflecting before those who despise them.

Neither is likely to win in the fall. Before the G.O.P. meshugana campaign, independents were leaning toward the G.O.P. But, in the latest Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll, Obama leads Mitt Romney among independents by 49 percent to 27 percent.

The problem is that the GOP has put “too much God” into politics. When you turn every issue into a holy war it makes it impossible to compromise and find reasonable solutions. If one stakes out a position in the name of God, if the position deviates, even slightly, it is portrayed by wing nuts as unprincipled and unGodly. This explains the gridlock in Congress and the feckless or fanatical candidates running for President.

Clearly, the solution is someone like Santorum winning the nomination and getting crushed by a 20-point margin and horribly damaging the GOP’s brand in the process. The wreckage has to be so severe and complete that the Religious Right is expelled from the GOP. Or, the remaining Wall Street Republicans are so sickened by the nuts that they stop enabling them by cutting off their financial support.

Until this major realignment occurs, the GOP — and America– will be hostage to extreme and unsavory elements who will continue weakening the foundation of this country.

The Pat Robertson/Ralph Reed/Tony Perkins/ Rick Santorum/Michele Bachmann crowd have been in power long enough. It is time they are permanently expelled from the GOP and forced to the margins before they further corrupt and undermine this nation.