Below The Beltway

In a column meant to rebut the assertions of Kathleen Parker, Jeffrey Hart, and others who have said in the weeks since Election Day that the Republican Party needed to distance itself from the Religious Right to survive, Rod Dreher ends up making Parker’s and Hart’s point for them:
Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests [...]

Apparently, some billboards paid for by a Colorado atheist are causing a controversy:
The message is but eight words divided into two short sentences set against puffy white clouds on a blue and black background.
One of the men behind the billboard message says his life has been threatened because of it, which seems an odd thing [...]

Jacko converts:
MICHAEL JACKSON has become a Muslim — and changed his name to MIKAEEL.
The skint superstar, 50, donned Islamic garb to pledge allegiance to the Koran in a ceremony at a pal’s mansion in Los Angeles, The Sun can reveal.
Jacko sat on the floor wearing a tiny hat after an Imam was summoned to officiate [...]

Call it a sign of a slow holiday news week, because The Politico is out with what may be the most irrelevant political story since Election Day:
President-elect Barack Obama has yet to attend church services since winning the White House earlier this month, a departure from the example of his two immediate predecessors.
On the three [...]

A Sikh man goes to a Christian charity in North Carolina and gets turned away because he’s wearing a turban:
ROANOKE RAPIDS, N.C. — A Halifax County man was turned away from a local mission when he refused to remove his turban while trying to make a donation.
When Gary Khera, went with his wife to the [...]

Via John Cole comes word that the American Family Association has gone off the deep end of anti-gay paranoia:
Residents of the small Arkansas town of Eureka Springs noticed the homosexual community was growing. But they felt no threat. They went about their business as usual. Then, one day, they woke up to [...]

It probably could have been expected, but the reaction on the right side of the blogosphere to Kathleen Parker’s column about the GOP and religious conservatives, which I wrote about this morning, has been quite blistering.
Jonah Goldberg essentially accuses his former collegue of bigotry:
I don’t know what’s more grating, the quasi-bigotry that has you calling [...]

Kathleen Parker that it’s time for the Republican Party to divorce itself from the religious wing of the party:
As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.
Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.
(…)
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP [...]

The Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim lie makes it onto a church sign in Kansas:
WICHITA, KAN. — A Wichita, Kansas preacher says he will not remove a message on his church sign that says President-Elect Barack Obama is a Muslim.
The sign is staying up despite the fact that Obama is a Christian.
The sign at Spirit One Christian [...]

A local church in Loudoun County exhibits a very special kind of insane religious fanaticism:
Rob Foster was 16 when his family unraveled.
He had told his parents that he wanted to leave Calvary Temple, the Pentecostal church in Sterling the family had attended for decades. But church leaders were blunt with his parents: Throw your son [...]