[shadowfyr]

Umm. Would, "Its being flushed down the toilet by an increasing number of right wing appointed judges, who tend to side with the lunatics, instead of with common sense.", give you an idea. lol Seriously though, the latest tactic is to have some large well funded church group or "family values" organization raise a huge stink and/or sue someone that doesn't have the time, ability or money needed to defend themselves. This invariably leads to lots of out of court settlements, which the fundigelicals can then parade around as "proof" of how much better a bully they are than last year.

People are fighting, and in greater numbers, but you a few serious problems:

1. Moderates that don't want to take our side, because it might inconvenience them and they are not 100% on our side anyway.

2. Apologists, that like to insist its only a few bad apples the nuts are going after, not everyone, even while all evidence is to the contrary.

3. Appeasers, who figure that playing along will get us farther than pushing (never mind that we have been playing that game for the last 50 years and are now, at least according to one article I read in like Scientific American or something, second only to Islam in the level of radical authoritarianist lunacies some of our political groups believe in. But, heh, as long as you are not an abortion clinic, you don't have to worry about *our* radical lunatics blowing you up...

4. Those that think that pushing too hard will hurt the cause.

Well.. The first group are not going to budge until they realize that they are being duped and the consequence of not acting is *way* higher than they think. The second group... are just deluding themselves. The third group is what allowed the nuts to get elected officials into office and, via them, political appointees into positions that can endanger rational policies, in the first place. And the last group completely fail to grasp that a) you can't fight for something until/unless the majority find it at least "not completely objectionable", and that isn't going to happen if you don't push it out where people can see it, and where they can learn that its not dangerous and b) the people pushing that edge are "not" the ones trying to carefully nudge things in the right direction. They are the ones *making* people see it, and challenging the common held belief that its a bad thing in the first place. This isn't to say that we must "all" be pushing the edges that much. It does imply that you need to show some guts and not assume that you are alone. Example: Where I live the conservative city council and "some" people backing them pushed to ban toplessness and enforce nudity laws on the lake. I know of **no one** including one evangelical lady I know, who is, being such, a bit nuts in other ways, who actually think that the real problem had anything to do at all with nudity or women without tops on. Its probably 1% of the city pushing it. Another 50% probably don't care, and the rest think that the city is bloody stupid and clueless, and shouldn't be making out police waste time chasing breasts, when the *real* dangers are drug dealers and drunk boaters. But, everyone I know *thinks* that they are part of a minority, with no power, who can't do anything about it.

I just got an email indicating that one group I belong to has signed its 360,000+ or something member. 90% of the people I know on other sites *hate* the name of the group, calling it arrogant and refuse to belong. Think about that. If it has 360,000 members, and 90% of the people I know don't want to be part of it, because they think the name sounds stupid and arrogant. That is, in theory, about 3,240,000 people that might be out there that never the less *support* their positions, even if not all of them join. How the heck many do you need to not be "alone"? And think of this. There are about 3 billion people in the US, of which maybe 80% are old enough to be invovled in this issue, of which maybe 0.1% of them *belong* to these ultra radical groups. That would be what, 2,400,000 people? Its not how many of them there are that is the problem. Its that we are idiots when it comes to presenting our causes in a way that people can understand, and they have spent **decades** perfecting the hypnotizing speal of rhetoric, Bible quotes and anecdotal BS they use to promote that they are the ones in the right.

They even do it with the founding fathers. Their **#1** quote claiming that Jefferson was pro church is something a judge would throw out of court as unusable. Its a letter from some Baptist minister, who claims that some friend of his, 20 years earlier, when a child, once ran across Jefferson, who made some positive comment about churches. 100% of everything the man ever wrote himself called churches a bane on humanity and nothing more than a place for the power hungry to drive gullible ignorants into doing what the priests wanted, yet, the words of some child, quoted second hand, by a priest, is their entire basis for the idea that he supported a state religion... WTF? But its *exactly* how they do everything. Anecdotal stories, claims that, if you look hard enough, the Bible can explain everything from toothpaste to heartburn, and the claim that only they know the truth, so you had better not try to figure anything out without consulting them first.

The quote(s) supposedly supporting this, and their dissection:

In short, one part is pure hearsay, the rest is a silly exaggeration of what, had it been any *less* religious, would have practically been a college frat party. lol