Sunday morning paganism

So a cheating ex-House Speaker and a fundamentalist preacher former governor walked into an evangelical church ...

No, seriously. They did. Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee went to church together. OK, it was a political forum held at a church. But they went together. Talk about your odd couples.

I dunno about you, but Newt Gingrich as a leading religious figure I never saw coming. Newt and morality don't belong in the same sentence, although I just did it right there.

By the way, that's Newt's lesbian half-sister Candace up there. I couldn't bear to see Newt or Mike in that spot. I once took Candace to a baseball game. She almost caught a foul ball.

And what is this obsession my colleagues have with this guy anyway? He's a bitter, nasty politician who won his first congressional race by pummeling Democrat Virginia Shapard, a married mother of two, with campaign ads like

Newt will take his family to Washington and keep them together; Virginia will go to Washington and leave her husband and children in the care of a nanny!

Right after winning the race, of course, he served his wife with divorce papers. While she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. I think he wanted to marry the staffer he'd been screwing or something. What a swell guy.

And some kind of expert? Other than being a former House Speaker and all around pig, Newt Gingrich is known for being a "historian" who writes books speculating that the Confederate army won major battles they actually lost during the Civil War.

Just for the record, if you'd really like some speculation about the Confederacy winning that war and what might have happened on this continent in that event, try Harry Turtledove's alternate history The Great War series, which begins with the idea that the Confederates won the Civil War and carries that scenario through the middle of the 20th Century, detailing the very bloody (alternate) history that might have occurred and the horrors that might have been unleashed. Quite unlike Newt's little fantasies where the South wins and all is well after that.

Again, Newt and Mike -- too much. That's Harry Turtledove.

But I digress, as I often do with too little coffee.

So Newt and Mike walk into a political forum at Rock Church in Hampton Roads, Virginia, where Huckabee says that the California Supreme Court decision upholding Proposition 8 is "a miracle from God's hands" akin to the Americans' victory over the British in the Revolutionary War and Newt says

I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.

...

I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history. We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.

Holy shit. I guess socialism just wasn't bad enough. But now we're all pagans. And damn, I didn't know that it took "our creator" to make us citizens of the United States. I thought IT WAS BEING BORN HERE OR NATURALIZED.

But hey, that's why the right has a little credibility problem. They go on and on about patriotism and the Constitution and what not, but they ignore it when it comes to dredging for votes.

And how nice they're still dredging at the bottom of a leaky barrel.

But let's get back to this pagan thing. Like, what's wrong with being a pagan, I mean, other than not being Christian? The word itself is one of those Latin roots words -- paganus, which I think meant rural bumpkin or something. Right wing, evangelical Christians, though -- the kind that Newt and Mike were patronizing on Friday -- take it much further these days and generally use it to mean "not us." They sometimes make allowances for Judaism -- because of that whole Armageddon thing -- and used to make allowances for Islam, before the recent unpleasantness. I'm not sure that Muslims aren't now lumped into the pagan category. Or maybe they're just labeled "terrorists."

I'm sorry he didn't say "heathen," though. I used to refer to myself as a pagan, before "neopaganism," whatever the hell that is, got all popular among the Not Christian crowd. Now I prefer heathen. It's the same word, really, heathen being an Old English translation of paganus. But there's something much more unseemly about heathen. And I'm nothing if not unseemly.

Much the same as I was peculiarly attracted to the word "queer" in my second grade spelling book. I guess the spelling book people were oblivious to uses of the word other than how they defined it, which was "odd" and, oddly enough, "peculiar."

I guess you could call me a queer heathen.

Actually, you can call me whatever you damn well please. One thing I've learned in all my years -- well, actually in the last few months -- is that the only definition of me that matters is the one I have. So you can call me queer, call me heathen, call me pagan, call me batshit insane if you want, but it really doesn't matter. Says more about you than it does about me, unless, of course, you actually call me what I am. And then it still says more about you, that you actually get it.

But please. Don't call me a Republican. That'll really piss me off. It'll prove you're stupid, and I have a real problem with stupid people.

Which, of course, brings us back to Newt and Mike and going to church on Friday. Ollie North spoke at that little event too, which was called "Rediscovering God in America." I guess lying and cheating and breaking the law is OK by God in America, although I'm also guessing that it would not be OK by God in America if someone from the Not Christian crowd did it. Or someone, like, say, the president, who is perceived as being Not Christian by the extremist Christian crowd.

Not that I'm implying anybody is a hypocrite or anything. I'm just sayin.

I lay it out the way I see it. You decide whether it's bullshit.


AWOP Political Contributing Editor


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Peace Y'all