COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVES, VERSION 2.0. It hadda happen: noted right-wing nut and let's-pretend Democrat Orson Scott Card, whose sad case was examined in this space last December, has weighed in on gay marriage, starting with the treacherous courts that approve it:

...every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.... Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot... Which is the modern Jacobin equivalent of crying, "Off with their heads!"

(Signal difference, Orson: the Jacobins could actually get your head chopped off.)

Marriage Is Already Open to Everyone.

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Thassa good one. Y'all ever hear the one about the faggot on the garbage truck?

The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them.

Card has gay friends? (Actually: Card has friends?) I wonder if any of them have read Card's "Hypocrites of Homosexuality":

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books... to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

If they have read this, and they still want to be friends with Card, I have to ask them: are you busy during the Republican Convention? Because I think we can get you a photo op with the President.

THE END OF SOUTH PARK REPUBLICANISM. At first Glenn Reynolds, perhaps sensing that his regular-Southron-guy schtick needed a boost, backed Howard Stern versus Clear Channel, which had pulled his radio show.

Then, in response to the values finger-wagging of James Lileks, Reynolds got halfway back in line. While declining to disown the ribald Stern's content, Reynolds suddenly remembered that Stern wasn't "censored" after all -- he was fired. A good libertarian cover!

Maybe Lileks then called the Professor and had Gnat gibber to him until he cracked, because now Reynolds is apparently down with the official line: he implies that Stern promotes racism.

In this era of Jesus promo films and legislative fag-bashing, I predict you're going to see a lot of this sort of thing. Guys like Reynolds who like to insist they're more fun- and freedom-loving than those Puritanical liberals will start telling us how important it is to keep a clean mouth and a closed mind.

Prime candidate for early conversion: a guy who back in April was telling people to lighten up about Little Green Footballs -- whose Muslim-bashing he interpreted as "raw, unashamed criticism... of such sacred cows as 'religion' and 'culture'" for people who are "just plain sick and tired of bullshit." He praised LGF as "a cornerstone of neoconservative/South Park Republican thought." Now he's shilling for the FMA. It won't be long, I'm sure, till he starts telling us that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is an Al Qaeda plot to sap our will.

When the Jesus freaks talk about a new Great Awakening, is this what they mean?

DAS CAPITAL, CONTINUED. I had a little extra time in D.C., so I went down to the Mall, mainly to see if the Constitution was still there. It is. But you can't go up the majestic front steps of the National Archives anymore; you have to skulk in by a ground-level side door. Sigh. On the plus side, I was able to query a knowledgeable guard about a few things. He was in many respects your typical Fed guard, working-class and no-nonsense, but very tall and supple, and he gestured with his whole arm toward the objects being described. He asked leading questions ("And at that time, George Washington was president of...?" "And what do you notice about Dickinson? Seven men in from the left") -- or should I say leaning questions, because he tilted over you when he asked them. If he didn't know an answer, he said, "Possibly, it might have been," and if you brought up an old wives' tale about the documents or the facility he took quiet but obvious pleasure in debunking it. I think as a kid he may have wanted to be either a dancer or a teacher, but always had too much sense to put his mama's son on a path to starvation.

He's right up there with the pudgy, deep-voiced, twinkle-eyed fellow with the cane at Westminster Abbey whom I observed patiently informing a mispronouncing tourist, "This is not the Stone of Scahn. This is the Stone of Scoon. Scahn is what you have with jam and butter for tea."

LIVE FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL. I'm down in the D.C. area for my semi-annual Von Hippel-Lindau examination at the National Institutes of Health. Don't worry, libertarians, this is a fair, one might even say laissez-faire, trade; the Feds get to study my rare genetic disorder toward the purpose of finding a cure for cancer, and I get treatment if things go wrong. Beside, fuck you, I like big government, and the NIH is big government at its best. The NIH does great work -- NIH-funded scientists just won another Nobel for chemistry -- while your big-pharma buddies were spending billions trying to get one boner pill to sell better than another.

I also like hanging around D.C., though I haven't had much time for it on this trip so far. The neighborhood near my hotel (Calvert and Wisconsin) seemed pretty luxe. When I got in around 9:30 pm, the few people on the street were either jogging or on their way to party at Marguerita-and-vanitas joints of the sort popular across American in the 1980s.

I usually wind up staying in one part of Georgetown or another. Everyone there seems extremely well-off. Yuppies in D.C. dress a little differently than they do back in New York. In New York business dress is a concession to necessity or an assertion of raw power. Here it seems more signficant in the clinical sense: clothes announce niche. There are dogged wonks and nerds in suits that are of excellent material but never hang right from their hunched shoulders; activists in courderoy pants and frayed oxfords; Republicans with flag pins; mysterious white-haired bulls giving off a faint aroma of power, their ties enigmatically ensigned. Women of this class actually dress more interestingly here than they do in Manhattan -- my favorite this time wore an impeccable powder-blue wool coat (!) with matching leather gloves -- and have a greater tendency toward opaque stockings.

CROCODILE TEAR WATCH. Now that the President has, as anyone with eyes to see anticipated, backed the FMA, let us see what the famous liberal Bush supporters are saying:

Roger L. Simon: "We Need a Third Party Candidate! But not that self-satisfied prig Ralph Nader... I feel at a loss. It's going to be a long 2004 for me." (Translation: Gotta make sure my gay friends see this post before I put the Bush/Cheney signs back on my lawn.)

Michael Totten: "Yesterday I took aim at Kalle Lasn, the editor of Adbusters magazine, for cheerleading the mayhem of World War IV. I’m not finished with him yet. His newest editorial is even worse than the last one...." (Translation: If I stay in my happy place, it will go away.)

Actually that last routine is the one currently favored by many in that crowd. Maybe they'll come out of their shells by the time you read this...

At least Sullivan finally got the picture -- for the time being, anyway.

UPDATE 2/25: Simon's lawn signs are already back up, and he's commending Bush for deploring Iran's mullahs. (Never mind his dagger poised at the Constitution -- he expressed disapproval of our enemies! Whotta man!) Totten made a quick negative comment, but his fellow "independents" are now setting him straight in comments, bringing up activist judges and AIDS and other reasoned counterarguments. They probably needn't worry, as Totten defers to someone who basically argues, oh, well, the thing will never pass so we better focus on stopping Kerry, who will invite Osama Bin Laden to pick off random Americans for the amusement of his best friend Jane Fonda.

Or some such shit. I can't even pay attention to these guys anymore. At least the people who are overtly cheering the FMA know what the fuck they're trying to accomplish.

ANIMAL FARMERS. The social scientists at the Washington Times, after praising the holy name of Reverend Moon and sacrificing to him a bottle of single malt, report that evil liberals make conservatives look evil by calling them conservatives. For example:

Throughout the election, news organizations used the term "conservative" to denote the radical, hard-line Islamic candidates supporting the absolute rule of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and "liberal" to denote the reformist candidates favoring a dilution of the ayatollah's power and a loosening of Islamic restrictions.

Even conservative dumbasses like Andrew Sullivan have some idea what "liberal" and "conservative" mean, particularly in the context of a nation like Iran, but the messhugineh messiah's acolytes stick by their willful misapprehension, and prescribe a punishment:

Mr. [David] Horowitz suggested that Republicans restore truth-in-labeling in politics by reflexively labeling their opponents "Left," "Far Left," and "Radical Left."

Talk about coming late to the party! Folks have been tarring the Democrats as Jacobins/Socialists/Pinkos/Leftists since the 18th Century. And to this day, rightwing operatives from the humblest Astroturf composer ("it's obvious where he stands -- very far left... he sure has an elitist attitude") to the most exalted Propaganda Minister ("When jobs move overseas, poor people there get work... You'd think that the Left, which is supposed to be for redistibuting wealth from those who have more to those who have less, would be pleased...") continue spreading the bullshit.

I understand there are some morons who wish to claim the work of George Orwell as conservative. Maybe these folks mistake 1984 for a how-to book.

DUDE! I get pretty harsh in these posts sometimes, but I surrender the palm to Mark R. Levin at NRO:

John Kerry and the other Democratic leaders are on the wrong side of history, as they were during the Reagan presidency. If they had won the day, and Reagan had failed, the Soviet Union would still exist, as would all the harm and suffering it unleashed, and American security would be far weaker as a result. And if they win this election thanks to a promise to undo the Reagan-Bush Doctrine, those cheering loudest will be the most evil-loving among us.

One imagines him punctuating this jeremiad with a gob of spit. "The most evil-loving among us"! I wonder if I qualify. This week I shall have to poll my friends and compare our levels of evil-love.

You know what's even funnier? This is only Feburary. By summer, Levin will be communicating soley by symbols of the sort used in comic strips to denote obscene and angry speech (snakes, spirals etc). By September his columns will all be non-verbal wav files. And by Election Day, when we open his pages, there will be no writing or sound, but we will receive a mild electric shock.

EAGLE SHIT. Ah, those glory days when Andrew Sullivan licked Ahnuld's asshole because he was an "eagle" who would "[fuse] low-tax conservatism with social tolerance." But now Schwarzenegger has shown his true colors regarding gay marriage:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger waded deeper into the debate over same-sex marriages, directing the state attorney general to take immediate legal steps to stop San Francisco from granting marriage licenses to gay couples.

Schwarzenegger told a cheering crowd at the state GOP convention that "in San Francisco, the courts are dropping the ball."

And what is Sullivan's response? Boy, that Kerry is soft on terror and hey, maybe we should raise a war tax.

I must reiterate: Sullivan's so full of shit, I don't even believe he's gay.

SHORTER WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY. The Iraqis had better be careful with their new Democracy. The 20th century lunacy of one-man one-vote can lead to nightmarish consequences, such as Hitler and Howard Dean.

A NATION OF STONECUTTERS. If you're worried that America's low-employment, high-efficiency recovery will leave a lot of citizens out to dry, relax, says Virginia Postrel. You can make stone counter tops -- a lot of people are getting into that, the editor of that industry's trade publication tells her ("the magazine added 2,000 fabricators to its 20,000 subscribers"). And, Postrel adds, "Equipping a fabricating business can cost less than $30,000."

Surely your unemployed friends have 30 large they can sink into stone counter top businesses -- and if that market turns out to be so flooded with budding entrepreneurs (or desperate former wage-earners) that there are not enough yuppie households to support them all, and their businesses fail, well, they can always do nails.

Our incompetent government thinks there are only about 30,000 manicurists in America, but a pair of trade journals shows Postrel that there are tons more, as their subscribers total over 120,000. As we all know, the more workers there are in any given field, the more jobs there are for late entrants.

Of course, Postrel provides these large numbers to show that there are employment opportunities beyond the humdrum ones many family men and women rely upon to pay the bills. When these jobs evaporate -- and Postrel flatly states that "those workers will not be recalled as the economy improves" -- their former holders will have to realize that "value can come as much from intangible pleasures as it can from tangible goods." Of course, when they come to repossess your car, you may feel differently about it.

But try to remain Dynamistic! Prosperity is just around the corner/There's a rainbow in the sky/So let's serve another double latte/and take home a smaller piece of pie.

(P.S. These sentiments are published in the New York Times, and echoed at the Washington Post, just in case you wondered where the Liberal Media stands on the subject.)

SHORTER DANIEL HENNINGER: If you say bad things about the President, or even listen to them, the boogie man will come and blow you up with a nuclear bomb.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD YOU SEE THE DARNEDEST THINGS. Crunchy Conservatives, South Park Republicans -- these kids today and their ephemeral political fads! Now at Tech Central Catspaw we have Nick Schulz filing a trademark on "Ambivalent Conservatives."

This is a single-issue craze, having to do with gay marriage. According to Schulz:

A curious thing happens when talking to younger conservatives about gay marriage. While many of them think same-sex marriage is in some ways an incoherent notion, I haven't come across any who think that gay marriage will not at some point be permitted. What's more, many of them are not particularly distraught at the prospect.

Isn't that nice? They're not like their Bible-thumping elders at all. They just find you and your same-sex partner's loving commitment to one another "incoherent." And they don't doubt that you will be able to marry "at some point" -- hopefully after they've risen to a high enough position at the American Enterprise Institute or in the GOP that they don't have to keep writing fence-straddling bilge like this about it for fear of being outed as a namby-pamby.

Schulz goes on to clarify his ambivalence:

...[AmbiCons] call themselves conservatives; but they are more comfortable saying that, while they certainly aren't exactly what you would call for gay marriage, they don't have much stomach to be against it, either... Jonah Goldberg of National Review captured some of this ambivalence when he recently wrote, "Whether you're for it or against it, many of us just don't want to hear about it anymore"...

Maybe it was the magic name Goldberg that knocked the scales from my eyes, but when I read this bit I suddenly saw what Schulz and his wholly lily-livered gang was up to.

As the anti-gay shock troops have been saying, gay marriage is now, will-you nill-you, a pressing issue. The weddings are happening, the courts are working, and it seems the FMA is coming, too. If you offer opinions for a living, or even as an avocation, on this one it's time to put up or shut up. (And let me state here for the record that I support gay marriage, gay polyamory and polygamy, straight polyamory and polygamy, and "mixed doubles." On straight marriage, however, I remain ambivalent.)

It's evidently easy to get young, ambitious conservatives to endorse the bombing of Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, but it is hard to get them to mount up with the queer-crushin' brigades, at least in public. That's because these milky lads, susceptible as they are to pressure from the big boys at the think tanks and party conferences and internet "journals of opinion," are also prey to peer pressure. "Lots of younger conservatives think of themselves as tolerant, freedom-loving and possessing metropolitan sensibilities," says Schulz -- and of course they do, because this is how any modern young person wishes to think of himself, and be thought of.

That's why the Bush Youth have been pushing South Park Republicanism -- it accentuates the "kick ass" part of the rightwing thing (Bomb shit! Make mad scrilla! Be P.InC.!) while playing down the less-popular Biblical strictures. Gay-bashing, even for one's boss, is just not rad.

Is it any wonder that these striplings, who are used to having it all -- conservativism and cred with their peeps -- balk at having to don, even momentarily, the white hood? What will Joe AmbiCon's gay friends say? Worse, what will his girlfriend say the next time he tries to fuck her in the ass?

AmbiConservatism is, alas, the best they can do. And a sorry spectacle it is. They do not acknowledge, even glancingly, the plight of gay citizens facing a wave of bigotry, asking instead: what about our needs? AmbiCons are made "uneasy"; they are left "scrambling for a political position they can articulate and be comfortable with." Sound like hell, doesn't it?

Actually, it sounds like gutless accomodationism by a bunch of punks who reflexively put party over principle, because the former is everything to them, and the latter nothing. They make Andrew Sullivan look like John Brown at Harper's Ferry.

If there's any doubt of this, it is dispelled when Schulz endorses Jonathan Rauch's gay-marriage Missouri Compromise -- a new version of the FMA with slightly more wiggle-room than the current one. There's no hope of passing it, of course, but like a new fashion speedily adopted, it may temporarily alleviate feelings of worthlessness.

Unjustly in this case.

DERBYSHIRE ON LOVE. Sweet but creepy, like a romantic ballad sung by Vlad the Impaler.

I wonder how he restrained himself from ending, "All the above does not apply to homosexuals"? NRO must have hired some better editors.

JUST A TASTE FOR NOW. There's a lot to deconstruct in the latest batshit burble from the Crazy Jesus Lady, and I'm sure others are hard on the case, but for now I just want to point this one lovely orgasmlet from her paen to George W.:

George W. Bush didn't grow up at Greenwich Country Day with a car and a driver dropping him off, as his father had. Until he went off to boarding school, he thought he was like everyone else.

Yeah, that's what made ol' W the Man of the People he is today: those crucial, formative pre-boarding-school years.

THIN AS A FLOPHOUSE BLANKET. It's time someone said it: The closer we get to the election, the more obvious it becomes that Professor Reynolds is a straight-up Republican operative.

Not that he doesn't try, however feebly, to cover. Witness his behavior when employing the latest GOP memes, which he always has factory-fresh on his shelves. Note how he uses the "People keep sending me this" dodge before going into a long, luxuriant description of the tainted and irrelevant Cong-quoted-Kerry dirtbomb. And after yet another lame attempt to drag the mouldering corpse of the Kerry intern story out into the spotlight, observe that he hastily changes the subject -- to "Bush-hatred." ("And speaking of such things, I highly recommend this article by University of Texas law professor Doug Laycock...")

Yes, there's always somebody else onto whom the Prof can deflect attention and responsibility -- like this Rush-in-training who told the Professor, John Kerry and the Viet Cong made a baby and I saw the baby and the baby looked at me! (to which the Professor replied, "Looked at you, eh?" and posted the tawdry tale). But the cover is increasingly flimsy. No one could read a full page of Reynolds and fail to get where he's coming from.

Yet he keeps pretending. Even now, on the very same page at which you can see all the aforementioned disinfo (and the usual Bush-War encomiums), the Professor claims he doesn't understand why people call him a conservative.

On the odd chance that one of the Professor's handlers reads this (hey, it's not impossible -- maybe an ambitious young turk is scanning the most out-of-the-way sources for fresh angles, to get in good with his boss), I have to say: I understand "deep cover," but I don't get shallow cover -- and in this case, Reynolds' cover is as thin as a flophouse blanket. Why are you guys even pretending?

Seriously, this whole kitbag of tactics -- the eventheliberal tactic, the as-a-lifelong-Democrat ruse, and the "Sigh, some Democrat come and save me" (or Lieberman) maneuver -- is absolutely played. It fools no one. Why not bring Reynolds in from the cold? You can spend the saved resources on something really important, like programming veterans to testify that Kerry came to the Hanoi Hilton to torture them in 1971.

LISTEN TO THE WARM. "I'm quite a synesthetist myself, experiencing sound in visual terms. (Based on my experience, this is true of most sound engineers, and many musicians). The sound of falling rain 'looks' like polkadots. A kick drum hit looks kind of like an overstuffed pillow, with the shape and size varying according to tone. Electric guitars look like multicolored spaghetti.... I suspect that this is actually useful, allowing more brain processing power to go to work on a problem." -- Instapundit, who fails to add that he's a wow at parties and great in the sack, and looks good in his Johnny Carson Collection threads, but sounds like he'll get to it at any moment.

Multicolored spaghetti?

LYING LESSONS. While neither as skilled nor as noble as the great rhetoricians of old, our present-day political columnists (or Party operatives DBA political columnists) can still teach us much. In fact, the pathetic simplicity and transparency of their tactics makes it easier for us to see how the gears move in their attempted word-bombs, and so we may regard them as medical students regard cadavers: noxious, even nauseating, but capable of giving instruction.

One such stiff is Brendan Miniter. In a recent column he compared Bush with Lincoln -- favorably, yet. Right off the bat, that's a neat trick: an encomium so outrageously inapposite, bordering on sacrilege against both Lincoln and common sense, that by the time dissenters have recuperated from their shock, the piece is over.

But there is one specific passage here that could furnish a textbook:

Fighting terrorism, however, is increasingly dividing this country -- and not always along party lines. There are two distinctive camps developing. One comprised of Americans who don't think the war is something that should touch their everyday lives. And another that sees combating terrorism as a fundamental struggle not just between good and evil but also over the soul of this nation--a struggle over who we are, as a people, and what we will tolerate on the world stage.

First, let's consider the "not always along party lines." From the evidence of all his previous columns, Miniter's purpose has ever been to give Republicans a leg up over the Democrats by establishing the former as serious, and the latter as frivolous, about the war. But now that he is speaking of Lincoln and therefore of history, Miniter seems aware that he must pad the glove a little better. By stating up front that the comparison he is about to make is not strictly partisan, he creates the illusion that he is delineating eternal tendencies of humankind, as might Shakespeare or Moliere, instead of GOP talking points.

The comparison turns out to be basic conservative sputum: opponents are cowards and shirkers ("don't think the war is something that should touch their everyday lives"), we are patriots ("fundamental struggle... good and evil... soul of this nation... who we are, as a people, blah blah blah"). Still, there is a chance a few inattentive readers may be fooled into thinking they have been conducted into an examining room rather than an abbatoir.

Then there's Kaus, who spent days trying to stick a bimbo to John Kerry, and now talks about "Kerry thugs" -- operatives of the Democratic front-runner whom Kaus compares to ancient Indian assassins because they have promised to run hard against the opposition (rather than spend their time promoting fictitious sex scandals, as real patriots do).

And there's the New York Post, which might be said to have reached a new low with this bit, were its crapulence so obviously without nether limits:

Kerry's flip-flopping on the Iraq war is "consistent" with what he has done throughout most of his career: Flip -- then flop.

Of course, he did that with the Vietnam War: Months of admirable service; then, back in the United States, years of leading activists in protest against the war.

The Post hacks clearly love the term flip-flop, and use it several times a day, seeming to believe it has talismanic powers over the hearts and minds of their readers, but I must confess that even I never dreamed they would try to attach it to a man's military service: He disagreed with his country, yet served with distinction in its military! How inconsistent is that!

But, as Tammi Terrell sang, ain't no valley low enough...

SELF-PROMOTION. After a long hiatus I've put some new fiction up at my portfolio site. If you have any suggestions as to what magazines might be interested in this sort of stuff (the New Yorker has been strangely unresponsive) you might let me know.

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN. The folks at Wampum have announced the 2003 Koufax Awards for lefty blogging. No doubt they would prefer that you read their whole announcement (and why shouldn't they? They worked ferociously hard and diligently on these Awards), but in the interests of exposing this worthy enterprise to a wider audience, here's a short summary:

Best Blog: Atrios.

Best Writing: Billmon.

Best Post: Billmon, "What a Tangled Web We Weave."

Best Series: David Neiwert for Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism."

Best Single Issue Blog: TalkLeft.

Best Group Blog: Daily Kos.

Most Humorous Blog: Tbogg.

Most Humorous Post: Atrios, "Preznit Giv Me Turkee."

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition: South Knox Bubba.

Best New Blog: Kicking Ass and Whiskey Bar (billmon).

Best Expert Blog: Informed Consent.

Best Commentor: zizka.

Best Non-Liberal Blog (the "Drysdale"): Tacitus.

Best Design: Daily Kos.

Best Special Effects: Uggabugga.

As Koufax followers will know, alicublog was a finalist in every single category (with multiple citations in several, including Best Blog, in which voters could choose between alicublog with fart jokes and alicublog without fart jokes), and heavily favored by London bookmaker William Hill to sweep until my announcement on January 31 at the plaza of the Fox News Building (with amplifications at the Lakeside Lounge, the corner of East 7th Street and Avenue B, and the 9th Precinct Stationhouse) that I would decline all victories unless I were preemptively laurelled in the Special Effects category for my creative use of animated smiley faces and my blinking BUSH SUX banner. But I trust this will not taint the achievements of today's worthy victors.

JESUS HATES YOU. This morning's The Corner is the usual smorgasbord of psychopathology, with lots of expected outrage at civilly-disobedient gay marriages ("Can't someone do a citizen's arrest of these law-breaking registrars in San Francisco?" cries John Derbyshire, smartly clapping his hands in front of his chest as if to summon a constable chop-chop. "Where on earth are the state authorities? Where is the Governor?" Many thanks to the always hilarious Derb for starting my workday with an image of Rainier Wolfcastle striding through the Castro, torso oiled and an automatic weapon in each hand, marvelling, "I musd kill dem... und yet... dey all look chust like me!")

But the quote of the day is from Tim Graham, one of the many holy rollers who now help maintain The Corner's standards of excrescence:

And could we have an ABC special without absurd 'Jesus scholars' like John Dominic Crossan, touting their theories that Jesus was just a social revolutionary, a misunderstood hippie before it was popular?

It is so rare these days to hear a Fundamentalist even allude to the idea that the Carpenter was more like a hippie than he was like, say, Tim Graham.

And it sent me back to those dear, dead days of the early Seventies, when it seemed the Jesus freaks were all hippies, too -- the days of Jesus Christ, Superstar and Life magazine spreads of busty, braless hippie chicks gettin' full-immersion baptised (woo hoo) and "eleven long-haired Friends a' Jesus/In a chartreuse microbus."

Back then I was just getting debriefed from an extremely strict, commie-hatin', working-class Bridgeport Catholic grammar school. No one was teaching us St. Patrick's lads "liberation theology," I can tell you that much. Yet I instantly recognized the connection between the longhaired Jesus minstrels and the Jesus we had been taught about, because as hardcore as the nuns were, even they had to admit that Christ's new law was about love, distasteful as they found it, and forgiveness, impossible as they found that. The hippies were just wearing their gospels on their sleeves.

In later years I met a few certified Jesus Freaks and found them very pleasant company, if you stayed off the topic of religion (which, believe it or not, they could, though they ended each encounter by praying that one day I would "come to Jesus"). For years I thought followers of the Man from Galilee were perfectly OK.

Well, we all know what happened after that. American Christianity became a witch-huntin'. homo-hatin', muscle-flexin' affair. The nuns of St. Pat's, apparently, hadn't been hardcore enough; they'd been unable to make that final leap of faith, and present to us a different Jesus that did not love, that did not forgive. What was needed in this new, crucial age was not a Jesus who would lead us down to the riverside for veggie casseroles and wet t-shirt baptisms, but a Jesus that would lead us into battle, and that namby-pamby "Prince of Peace" character just wasn't going to make it.

Rev Falwell and the boys took care of business, and gave us the current, punitive, ass-kicking, tough-guy Jesus, covered with NASCAR decals and Republican endorsements, that Tim Graham and the rest of his buddies can worship. Judging by their behavior, this Jesus don't want no one-another-lovin' -- that's fag stuff! No, the new Jesus wants 'em to get up and spread venom (and sometimes amicus briefs) against those who have not gotten with the heavenly program.

People who talk about how the true meaning of Islam has been "hijacked" by belligerent radicals might want to turn their attention to the motes in their own eyes.