For all that she supposedly hates gay people, WIngnut Magna Mater Maggie Gallagher apparently thinks that it's a good idea to brand her new anti-gay initiative by borrowing from the syntax of gay personal ads. 

Right on the heels of their much-mocked zombie ad sponsoring their Opus Dei buddy, NOM brings us their latest:

In just a few minutes, NOM President Maggie Gallagher and I will hold a press conference in Trenton, NJ, announcing an ambitious new nationwide “2 Million for Marriage” (2M4M) initiative.

C’mon. You’ve got to be kidding.

Surely her PR people are having a laugh at her expense. Can anyone really be in PR and not have at least done a quick google to see if your new acronym is going to engender giggles?

Although…. if I saw, “Hi, we’re 2M4M and we are against marriage”, it might make some weird sense.

But seriously, how is this even an accident. It’s not like M4M is new. They were using it in the personals columns before the first chat room ever lit up a green blinking curser on a solid black screen.

Yes, that's correct. The same geniuses who named an internet based political organisation in such a way that it's an acrostic for NOM are now branding an effort to rough up gays and then toss the bloody bodies into a closet as "Man For Man", syntax straight from the personal pages of....well, any major newspaper.  Most papers even have little boxes explaining what the codes are.

I wouldn't try to read too much into this. Call this a corollary to Occam's Razor: when discussing religious right figures, the simplest explanation is that they're stupid.

-dx

God, this is pure pure pathos.

-dx

This is just way too funny:

Some of the fantasies at the Canal Street Brothel got a little rough.� For those who liked that kind of stuff, there were whips, chains and a lot of leather.� Jeanette says that most of the clients who wanted to be dominated were Republicans.� She cracks a smile, then adds, "They wanted to be spanked and tortured and wear stockings--Republicans have impeccable taste in silk stockings--and these are the people who run our country."

Jeanette is no stranger to politics.� She and her girls used to party with a former Louisiana governor who is now serving a 10-year federal prison sentence in connection with charges unrelated to his penchant for prostitutes.� Jeanette also had a three-year affair with an ex-mayor of Baton Rouge, the state's capital.� The ex-mayor, a former LSU football star, later died in a French Quarter flophouse after binging on alcohol and cocaine.

What the hell is up with The GOP? Should it now stand for Gantry's Own Party?

-dx

Man, this Vitter affair doesn't stop getting better.

From teh WaPo:

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), approached by a group of reporters outside the lunch, offered an unexpected defense. "All of us have to look at it and say that we could be next," he said in answer to a Vitter question. "We all think that we're not vulnerable to something like that happening, but the fact is this can be a very lonely and isolating place."

Yikes. Might other senators be on the Madam's list? Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) jabbed a playful elbow at the questioner. "Note a swift elbow to the ribs," he instructed.

As Cornyn threw the elbow, Vitter's spokesman continued to duck inquiries about the senator's location. "I'm not allowed to talk about that," the office receptionist said. On the senator's Web site, the latest item under the "Recent News" section was from June 29: "Vitter Applauds FDA Ban on Chinese Seafood."

Now, the question is, which Senators made use of her services? God, if we're lucky, it'll be Sam Brownback.

-dx

Okay, so while my favourite part of this story is the "THOU SHALT NOT TOUCH!" sign, this is the terrifying nug:

Many of the quarter of a million people expected to visit the Creation Museum by the end of the year will be children. They will be indoctrinated into an ideology that systematically warps their understanding of the physical world and fills them with hostility toward the facts and concepts of modernity. As we have learned over the past few years, this doesn’t mean that they’ll be outcasts and failures. A great political party has largely abased itself before their world view and offered them unprecedented access to government power. The Creation Museum, a combination of a natural-history museum and a Communist Party propaganda center, will help to arm and arouse the next generation of Christianists in the ongoing war against secular and scientific America.

It’s tempting to treat the museum as an interesting cultural diversion, rather like a guided tour through Colonial Williamsburg, which is how Rothstein, at the the Times, took it. But the museum’s creators are more serious than that, and in a sense they have it right: the family from Columbus came looking for a middle ground that doesn’t exist. Either you accept the claims of science, or you might as well believe that dinosaurs made it onto Noah’s Ark. This disagreement is the size of the Grand Canyon. The mass of ordinary visitors were every bit as alien to me as the few Mennonite families in their nineteenth-century bonnets and long beards. We might speak the same contemporary American dialect, wear the same T-shirts, and eat the same fatty foods, but our basic beliefs are so incompatible that it’s hard to know what political arrangement could ever satisfy us both. Rothstein ended one of his reviews by saying that a visitor “leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.” My experience was different: I had the sense of being a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state, and I kept my reactions to myself. As I was driving away, I realized what the barrage of falsehoods written on slick signboards reminded me of. It was the telescreens in “1984.”

These people are terrifying.

-dx