The main problem with youth groups is one of ontology: Namely, the youth group isn't really the youth group unless it's assembled, and that almost never happens in an official capacity unless there's a trip involved. Sure, many or most of the members might come together on a particular Sunday morning or Wednesday evening, but that's a matter of routine. And, yes, it's common for the members to hang out together as a group in a distinctly secular capacity, like the time my youth group got together to go see American Pie, after which a couple guys who were sitting near our group latched onto us outside and picked up two of our single female members, making the entire evening a pretty good example of things the youth minister doesn't want you to do at all, especially if his name's attached to it, hence our hanging out as friends and not some kind of bizarre group of emmissaries for the church. Of course, the American Pie night wound up being a bust long-term for the girls in question: One of the guys turned out to be a local pot dealer with no small amount of paranoia, and the fact that he coincidentally dealt to one of the male members of the youth group is just one of those freakish twists that makes you think P.T. Anderson really knows what he's talking about. Anyway, once the girl found out he was holding, they broke up.

But back to the thing about trips: Youth groups go to all kinds of conventions, camps, and what have you throughout the year, and the process usually entails loading everyone up in a trusty van — again, completely absent of any mouth-to-body hanky-panky — and driving to a nearby major city and crashing in a hotel for a night or two and in general throwing every last ounce of decent behavior right out the baptistry window in pursuit of the kind of low-grade trouble that fuels young men's very being. Some examples of said screwing around:

• When I was 12, there was an event in downtown San Antonio, which the youth minister must've viewed as a plus, since we wouldn't have to lodge anywhere, just drive downtown every day and spout off randomly memorized verses before collecting some cheap ribbon we would throw away later and heading for home. Of course, being in 7th grade and hanging out with other boys my age, we were flabbergasted at the relative amount of freedom we had to roam the Riverwalk in the free time we were able to carve out, not to mention the fact that there were girls everywhere. At 12, your body is producing so much testosterone you can't see straight, and you don't even want to. Girls drive every word, thought, action. Basically, it's the same as your 20s, only without cars.

Which is probably why we, being 12 years old and thinking we were pretty much as good as it gets, went to Hooters for lunch one day. Just walking in was some ultimate combination of defiance of our moral leaders and acceptance of the carnal desires we were howling to let loose: They were like fire shut up in our bones; we were weary of holding them in; indeed we could not. I remember loving it there, even though the waitresses were probably either annoyed or slightly creeped out by our little band of horndogs. And in retrospect, they probably weren't even objectively hot or anything; this was, after all, downtown San Antonio.

• There was an event in Austin when I was in high school, either a junior or a senior. It was toward the end. I remember roaming the streets of downtown with a few other guys, wandering through the UT campus, and eventually coming across a Scientology center, at which point the leader of our group suggested we go in and take the test these people were offering us. And being very, very bored — and broke — we did. I left before I found out my results, though, since we were around 24th and Guadalupe and I had to be at 6th and Congress in a very short time, so I jogged my fat ass back through town, which isn't exactly easy in flip-flops. I almost didn't want to make it back on time for whatever lame event I was supposed to "compete" in (they said it was a competition, but everyone still got a plaque or ribbon or some retarded certificate saying they'd done their due diligence), and had I been older, I would've just blown it off. But I made it back, and performed, and didn't really care what happened. I didn't even care about hanging out with this blonde I'd been minorly obsessing over, which was probably just as well, since the sight of me showing up sweat-drenched and heatstrokey probably wouldn't have sent her libido into overdrive. I just went in and did what the adults wanted me to do, and hated myself every moment.

I wonder if the adults ever know how little we cared about those trips, or the church-as-corporation aspect of them. I guess not.

As I've already indicated, growing up in a South Texas youth group adds considerable confusion to the normal adolescent yearnings. It was probably in the spirit of answering those yearnings that, when I was in high school, our youth minister — an unnervingly energetic man in his early 30s with a wife and kids — arranged for our youth group to go on a weekend retreat wherein we would follow curriculum provided by the folks at True Love Waits. For those who didn't grow up in either the South or Colorado Springs, True Love Waits is an organization dedicated to keeping Christian teens from screwing their brains out like their hormones are telling them to. (For what it's worth, I have no idea if the program actually works; the teens I knew who actually left high school with their virginities intact did so out of circumstance, not a higher moral calling. Teens think about sex, food, and sex.) So anyway, we all piled in a van — this time careful not to touch each other — and headed to a dirt-blasted waste of a campground in the middle of nowhere.

One evening, the youth minister and his wife held a kind of panel session, where we, the sexually inexperienced, could submit anonymous questions to them, the sexually knowledgable. Many of the questions were pretty predictable: One guy (it had to be a guy) asked about the moral/spiritual implications of, um, onanistic pursuits, to which the youth minister, not wanting to start a mutiny, gave his grudging and qualified approval. But eventually things got downright weird.

I don't remember how the subject came up; it was 10 years ago, and to be honest, I've done a fair amount of work to bury specific moments like this one. But at one point the youth minister began to wax poetic about the kind of unforced errors that can plague recently married couples who, either from having grown up in somewhat conservative households or just out of a reluctance to do a little research beforehand, find themselves in a bit of a wedding-night pickle. On the topic of lube — and it was here that my fragile teen mind began to crumble under the unfortunate weight of the mental image of my youth minister and his wife in coital repose — my youth minister cautioned us not to use too much, or else things might "become like a Slip N Slide." I believe he even extended his arms briefly when making this joke, much like the guy in the photo above, though that detail could just be my subconscious screwing with me. It's happened before. Anyway, what little information I'd managed to retain from the disastrous Q&A went pretty much straight to hell because all I could see was my youth minister and his wife in what had to have been a small kiddie pool's worth of KY.

The rest of the night was pretty much a wash, too. The girls in the group gravitated toward my youth minister's wife and began sharing their own horror stories from the private hell that must be the female puberty experience (not that the male side of things is a cakewalk, but still, everyone knows we got off way light). The girls invaded the cabin that had been assigned to the boys and began to sit around and have a lengthy confessional in which they each talked about their individual tales of getting their periods in the school cafeteria, etc., as if finding the horrible remnants of their burgeoning womanhood smeared into a tacky paste on their seats was like any other story worthy of cocktail-party reminiscence. The other guys and I stood outside for what felt like hours, throwing the football in the crisp evening and wondering when the hell they would tire of their mutual shame circle and let us go to bed.

He and his wife left a few years later.

As loyal readers — all seven of you — may have noticed, I have deleted a post from earlier in the week wherein, in a whimsical and honestly pretty entertaining tone, I recounted a legendary story from my youth group days as a bewildered teen in South Texas and how two of my peers had engaged in some low-level sexual hijinks in the back of a van on the way to church camp. I have since received mountainstwo emails advising me of the factual errors in my story and requesting either a correction or full retraction of same, and since the missives themselves were from the once-horny parties at the center of the story — she righteously pissed off, he merely bemused — I felt obliged to comply with their wishes and delete the post. I was a little surprised to find that my (I thought) harmless ramblings had stirred up all kinds of crazy ranging from coast to coast, though I take that more as a sign of the power of gossip as opposed to any indication of my global popularity. (Although, if the map on the left side of this page is to be trusted, I'm currently blowing up across the continent.)

Anyway, sexual hijinks were indeed part of the story, but in a different manner than I previously implied. But that tale grew with the telling, and was something of a minor legend among my compatriots in those depressingly formative years, and for what it's worth, I almost prefer the myth to the history. Nevertheless, I wanted you all to know that I got it wrong, and I won't actually be filling you in on what actually happened between the couple, but instead let you fill in the images for yourself. It wasn't even that big a deal, but you'd almost never know it to be on the receiving end of all this.

Finally: I've got more harrowing tales of church-based pubescent angst coming up in the future — including a kind of Q&A panel session with the youth minister and his wife that scarred me for years — but that's for another day. For now, simply know that I was incorrect in my previous story, and will endeavor in the future to hew more closely to the facts, whatever they may be.

I'm sure whoever thought this up means well, but still, this is frightening. Plus, what if you get them dirty and have to wash them and sleep one night in regular pajamas? Or what happens if you lose the shield or something?

Man, I'm glad I left the South.

I liked Super Size Me as much as the next guy, which is to say I found it a smart and humorous skewering of the fattening of America and the McDonaldization of our culture at the expense of members of lower social and economic strata. So when I saw last summer that the film's director, documentarian/brave-Fu-Manchu-wearer Morgan Spurlock, would be bringing a show called "30 Days" to FX that would conduct similar freshman-level sociology experiments in random areas, well, I was pretty excited.

And at first, I was a fan of the show. The pilot episode featured Spurlock and his fianceé attempting to live for 30 days on minimum wage, and it was an eye-opening hour into just how genuinely crappy it is to be poor in America (not like this is any surprise, but still). But Spurlock only played an onscreen part in that first episode, serving as a producer for the remainder of the season as the episodes (a) began to focus on regular people and (b) started playing pretty fast and loose with some blatant stereotypes (again, not like this is any surprise, coming from FX, but still). But the "Muslims and America" episode was merely a glimpse of things to come.

The show returned this summer for a second season, the theme of which seems to be Let's Find Simplistic Ways To Let People Talk Out Of Their Asses And Reinforce Nonexistent Divides Between Groups Of Disparate People. The season's first episode, "Immigration," transplanted a gun-toting Minuteman into a family of Mexican immigrants. Mmm. Deep. But oh, Morgan had some better treats in store for the third episode: "Atheist/Christian."

The episode followed a female atheist tasked with spending a month with a family of fundamentalist Christians. The entire concept smells like Texas, and sure enough, it all went down in the Metroplex. The entire outing was irrational and poorly planned, and overall just extremely depressing for two reasons:

1.) I'm so sick of reality shows that I could puke blood all over my TV. And I love my TV. The whole mindless sub-genre has managed to pare itself down slightly since the c. 2001 heyday of the format, but programs like "The Apprentice" and "Project Runway" and "Laguna Beach" still remain. The shows are tightly scripted and written/produced within an inch of their lives, pulling out every melodramatic trick to make the viewer think they're watching some kind of legitimate human drama when they're really not seeing anything but film-school-reject Final Cut Pro tricks accompanied by a predictable soundtrack. The shows are overprocessed to an insane degree. They're like the visual equivalent of late '80s adult pop, all synthed-out and soulless. Watching crap like "30 Days" is like listening to Starship's "We Built This City." Over and over again. And liking it.

Reality shows like "30 Days" thrive on creating conflict where none existed, which means that instead of having two clear-headed people sit down to discuss their respective beliefs/nonbeliefs in God, Spurlock's show found a couple of extremists, tossed them into a jar, then shook it up and watched them fight. This is an unfortunate but expected turn of events for reality TV, but it gets a lot worse.

2.) These are fractious times, the man said; fractious times, and we need each other badly. The country is bitterly split right now, and confused about it, not least because members of both political parties and those of various faiths and beliefs feel like the government has been hijacked. So I was hoping — because I cannot make myself stop hoping — that maybe Spurlock's show would take advantage of the current political climate and use their religiously themed episode to maybe spread a little tolerance.

But the atheist never got a straight answer out of the patriarch of the Christian family she'd been staying with about just why he believed what he did. Granted, I completely sympathize with the guy, since there's only like an 11% chance that someone who randomly lived with me for a month would pick up on any kind of religious belief. But this guy was (a) on TV and (b) attempting to answer some pretty big questions, and I would have appreciated it if either he'd been smarter or Spurlock had picked someone else.

I don't even remember most of the answers the Christian guy gave. As the month wore on, his temper seemed to shorten. At one point, he advised a group of atheists that, if they didn't like the fact that America was a Christian country, they were welcome to leave. Yes, leave.

I held my head in my hands.

As if the thousands of denominational splits in the country weren't sign enough, most people tend to forget that not all Christians are the same. Not even close to it. Referring to Christians as a solid group that acts/thinks/votes a certain way makes about as much sense as calling it "the black community." Still, I hoped that maybe this guy would try and use his public platform to say something along the lines of: I believe in an ultimate right and wrong; I believe that these notions of right and wrong are independent of human consensus, i.e., an act is right and therefore recognized as such, not right because it is called such; that God is the source of the right and its separation from the wrong; etc. Granted, that's all pretty vague, but still, it would have been a good place to start.

But "30 Days" offered none of this, just an angry, increasingly hypocritical and closed-minded man doing his best to alienate those who don't share his beliefs. The whole thing was just so sad and sick and depressing. I'm trying to figure out faith and culture and politics a day at a time, and it's extremely hard, and the last thing I need is Spurlock making it seem like I'm one and the same with the hardcore extremists who advise non-Christians to leave the country. But I guess I should have seen this coming: It's always the crazy ones that wind up in front of the cameras.

Thanks to David Plotz over at Slate, I've learned something important from the book of Leviticus, a dull and oft-ignored book of the Bible. (And it's right up front, too, which is a shame. Whoever ordered the books should have remembered that a good compilation tape is hard to do: The third song can be slower, but not too much. This book is much more of a track 10-11 affair.)

Anyway, it turns out that Leviticus 13:40 reads: "When a man has lost his hair and is bald, he is clean." Other translations place an even greater emphasis on the ceremonial cleanliness of bald men. And even if you're balding from the front, as was the case with more than a few of my friends in college, you're still ceremonially in the clear.

Good to know.

Dining at Taco Cabana late one night in the summer of 2000, my friend and I got drawn into a conversation with a homeless man on the patio. I don't remember why we were talking to him; probably because he knew he had a captive audience, since it's hard to simultaneously eat a breakfast taco and edge uneasily away from a crazy person. He had on a striped Wendy's polo shirt, the kind their employees wear, and a dirty beard. He said his name was Lee, and he was of the Baha'i faith. Since I had not yet moved to California, I thought he was making his religion up, but it turns out they're a real group. They've even adopted a stretch of the 101 out near Ventura County, and that's a pretty nice piece of road.

Lee told us that pretty much everything we saw was and/or could be God, like the pitcher of water on the counter or a nearby shrub. He said he didn't want to swear in front of "the lady," by which he meant my sister, but then he he promptly turned to face the street and flipped off several passing cars, shouting "Your mama!" at the traffic.

No idea what happened to him. He's probably dead now.

[This has been today's edition of True Stories With Real And Depressing Conclusions.]

---

"It's a vicious circle."

"Yep. Just keeps going around and around."

"Never stops."

"That's what makes it vicious."

"And a circle."

Filmmaker Rik Swartzwelder has crafted a blunt, mocking rebuttal to the commercialization of his faith that he witnessed in the marketing blitz surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. His four-minute video, "The McPassion," is available online, though the site's navigation is a little clumsy. [To watch the video, click "Watch" at the bottom of the page, then scroll down and select format and speed.]

Shocking and occasionally wince-inducing, the video is also really, really funny. Swartzwelder has said that his goal in making the short was to inspire debate, and I'm glad he's doing it. Churches are sacred places, and using them to push a commercial product or political agenda is a dangerous thing. The purchasing hype surrounding Gibson's film was disturbing, especially the upsettingly casual merchandise.

There's a world of difference between telling people to vote with their conscience and heart versus telling them that one political party is doing the Lord's work while the other is catering to atheists and abortion doctors. Similarly, using the pulpit to turn a profit makes me queasy; I know you want people to go see The Passion or The Chronicles of Narnia, but be careful not to sound like you're doing PR for the studio.

Swartzwelder sums up his position: "We're on the brink of prostituting our pulpits beyond recognition. When we start showing movie trailers during worship services and telling the faithful it’s their duty to buy tickets to the Cineplex … or to buy anything … I believe that’s as offensive as anything in 'The McPassion.' I'm not judging anyone's motives; by and large, I think people's hearts are in the right place … but I believe it's time for a fresh look at this issue."

I'm glad Swartzwelder's doing this, though I disagree with him that crapfests like End of the Spear can be considered progress for faith-based filmmaking. That film makes Left Behind look like, well, a slightly less crappy version of Left Behind. Anyway, I hope Swartzwelder's short stirs up debate.

Several states are considering implementing new laws or expanding current ones that ban protestors at funerals. The reason? Rev. Fred Phelps, of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. Phelps and members of his congregation have been picketing funerals of servicemen and -women who have died in Iraq with signs reading, among other things, "Thank God for dead soldiers." They reason that God is punishing America for its tolerance of gays, and as such is exacting the lives of the troops as the price for openmindedness.

Couple of quick hits:

• Every Christian in the country right now needs to tell the next 100 people they see that everything about Phelps is a violation of any semi-reasonable view of God. They need to decry him, and they need to do it now. Don't just shake your heads at this guy; most people, and I'm one of them, think that Christian conservatives are (1) hypocrites or (2) bomb-building zealots. I dare you to change my mind.

• Every Christian in the country right now also needs to issue a retroactive apology and denunciation of Phelps. Why? Because he's been doing this for years. This is the guy whose church traveled from Kansas to Wyoming to picket Matthew Shepard's funeral with signs reading "God hates fags." What he's doing now, praising his version of the creator for the growing body count in the Iraq war, is abonimable, but to pretend that this is the first time he's done this is foolish.

• And Mr. Phelps, if you're reading this, I don't exactly think God harbors hate for anyone, and probably doesn't use the word "fag" all that often, but I don't think he likes assholes like you that much. There are people out there trying to do real good and just live a day at a time, and you make them want to abandon their faith and everything they grew up on when you turn God into your bigoted big buddy. You're killing your religion, Phelps.

For his part, Phelps claims that such laws target his First Amendment rights and discriminate against his religion. I'll let the courts rule on that, because I really don't think it should be an issue. Phelps, you soulless piece of filth, you shouldn't be at those funerals to begin with. No mother should ever have to bury her son, especially not with your vile face screaming obscenities from 50 feet away. Do you really expect people to respect your faith when it's so repulsive?

Whatever. No one really cares, or if they do, they just assumes this'll blow over. So go on, go to Cabela's and Wal-Mart and Cracker Barrel and just pretend this never happened. I'll go with you. It's what we're good at.

Last year, conservative Christians flocked to the cineplex in throngs to watch The Passion of the Christ, making that film one of the highest grossers of the year. Despite the inevitable trouble that theater ushers had to deal with from watching these hordes of seemingly complacent people come stumbling out of the film weeping, wailing, wearing sack cloth, etc., the people watching the movie genuinely enjoyed it. Conservative activists and politicians, never ones to let an opportunity slip by in an election year (and they're all election years), praised the film for its message and tone and said that Hollywood should make more movies for the flyover states.

It's happening again this year, with March of the Penguins, the second-highest grossing documentary in history behind Fahrenheit 9/11 (come on, Christians, buy some more tickets and show that Michael Moore who's boss). Penguins is being lauded as revolutionary; such "film critics" (and I use that term so, so loosely) as Michael Medved have said that Penguins is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Medved adds, in regards to the audiences he believes have given the film its stellar boxoffice performance: "This is the first movie they've enjoyed since 'The Passion of the Christ.' This is 'The 'Passion of the Penguins.' "

Caught off-guard by the conservative frenzy building around a nature documentary, the film's American distributors have said that the movie is just a story about penguins, and no deeper meaning is intended or should be inferred. In a statement probably too practical to register with the religious community, Laura Kim, a vp of Warner Independent, said: "You know what? They're just birds."

Good luck, Laura. Try making your case to Ben Hunt, the Ohio minister who has organized field trips to see the film and who encourages parishioners to extrapolate moments from the film and apply them to their religious lives. Not one to let himself be upstaged by Medved's fairly clumsy "Passion" double-reference, Hunt has stated: "Some of the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians." Hunt's statement seems a little biased in that it only takes into account the lifestyles of Christians living at the South Pole who annually hike through 70 miles of snow and ice to copulate and reproduce in the middle of a giant glacier, and it's agreed that they're a generally unstable group. Hunt has even provided an online workshop form for people to take to the film and write down things God tells them as he speaks to them. For Hunt, religious zealotry makes it permissible to commit what I consider to be a greater sin: talking during the movie. Additionally, Hunt advises people who view the film to not discuss it with each other afterward, but to instead to go with the group to an "off-site location" to discuss what each person was "shown" as they watched the movie. A movie about penguins.

The joke, though, may be on the conservatives in the end. After raising their young for a few months, the adult birds in Penguins swim off into the sunset, and the narration tells us that they'll more than likely never see their young again. Is this the movie Medved wants people to use as a guide to child-rearing? Abandonment and complete severance of all ties with your kid when they turn 7?

It gets better, but not for the right-wingers. It turns out that, although penguins do often mate for life, male penguin couples have also been documented, placing a rock in their next instead of an egg. Last year, the Central Park Zoo replaced one gay couple's rock with an actual egg, which they raised as their own.

It remains to be seen whether the conservative interpretations of March of the Penguins will address the issue of dude-on-dude penguin action, although given their track record, conservatives could wind up stoning the gay penguins or just ignoring them all together.

John Roberts, nominee for associate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, is now being considered for the role of chief justice following news of the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died Saturday at age 80 after a long battle with cancer. Roberts was originally nominated to the court when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor retired in July.

The opening on the court, and Roberts' subsequent nomination, were cause for celebration for right-wing televangelist and possible coke fiend Pat Robertson, whose rants against everything from liberals to common sense often land the preacher in hot water with the American media (recent examples include Pat's exhortation of political assassination on the airwaves of his program, The 700 Club).

But given Robertson's obvious lack of caring when it comes to murdering those with whom he disagrees, the question must be asked: Did Pat have something to do with Rehnquist's death? The chief justice was hardly in good shape, but Robertson's eagerness to capitalize on Supreme Court openings raises certain suspicions.

In 2003, Robertson asked viewers to take a break from going to Wal-Mart or sexually assaulting each other to join him in a 21-day "prayer offensive" -- because prayer is all about attacking people -- three Supreme Court justices with whom Robertson had grown displeased. In addition to this, Robertson said it might be a good idea to "shake things up" by tossing a "small nuke" into the State Department.

The nomination of Roberts led Robertson to announce on The 700 Club that God had answered his prayer and provided and opening on the court, and now viewers should continue to pray that another opening be made available soon. Was Robertson targeting Rehnquist with his prayer offensives, hoping that his vitriolic, misguided attempts to persuade the Almighty to take out an old man with cancer might allow the country to turn away from the moral decay toward which we have so eagerly run and begin the long, painful trek back toward ethical rectitude?

My guess is, probably so. After all, after the United States was attacked on Sept 11, 2001, Robertson stated that the events happened because have been "consumed by the pursuit of ... health, wealth, material pleasures and sexuality." He added that "this is God's power and he sent this thing to warn us. ... We needed a shock."

I don't know what conclusions to draw from this, if any. But I know that since I disagree with Pat Robertson, I hope he doesn't find out my name, or worse, pray for me. I've got a long life to live.

[*All quotes in this column are, sadly, true.]

Sunday marked the second Justice Sunday, the sequel to April's original rally designed to remind Americans that just because you're crazy doesn't mean you can't lead a nonprofit organization and attempt to run the country. The full title for the Aug. 14 gathering was "Justice Sunday II: God Save the United States and this Honorable Court!," presumably because "Justice Sunday II: Why Do Minorities Smell Weird?" would have been a little too esoteric.

Despite the title, the rally was actually designed to foster an atmosphere of limiting the abilities of Supreme Court justices. James Dobson, Focus on the Family founder and curious embarrassment to many of the nation's less frightening Christians, said that the justices were "unelected, unaccountable and arrogant." This seems to be a case of the pot calling the kettle unstable, because many conservatives seem to embrace the judiciary only when it does what they want it to do. Indeed, the cries from the far right against "activist judges" are often untrue, but critics have latched onto the word "activist" as a comfortable way to incite fear in their conservative constituents; "activist" is scarier when it's left undefined.

Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader and voted Most Likely To Expose The Nation's Moral Decay in high school, also spoke at the gathering. DeLay spoke out against the bench in April when they declined to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, who was being kept alive via feeding tube. Back then, DeLay had urged the Court to be more activist and intervene, and his sudden about-face so confused the bench that Sandra Day O'Connor stepped down 3 months later just to avoid any further dealings with "that odd man from Texas." In response to the Supreme Court's nonresponse, DeLay vowed that the judges would have to "answer for their behavior."

In a true showing of their own exclusivity, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wasn't invited to speak at the conservative meeting because of his recent opposition to President Bush on the matter of stem cell research, a surprising show of dissent and fortitude for which Turd Blossom will surely have Frist sent to Gitmo for a "visit."

The two things make sense together: accusing the bench of activism when it's really being objective, and denying one of the right's strongest voices an invitation to the rally simply because he has a slightly different view of only one of the issues at hand. They're indicative of a larger problem, mainly the perception that because most Americans claim belief in God, that all will naturally share the same opinions on topics like gay marriage or abortion rights. The attendees at Sunday's meeting seem to be forgetting that Americans choose their faith, and prefer not to have it handed down to them from the state. One of the members of Sunday's crowd (which frequently responded to DeLay's speech with shouts of "Amen!") said that American laws "are based on the Ten Commandments," a statement that would be laughable if it weren't so frighteningly popular in parts of the country. There is no federal statute designed to punish citizens for coveting their neighbors' houses or failing to honor their parents, and to insist that federal laws should literally interpret scriptures that not all Americans believe in would be to deny those Americans the most basic of freedoms that things like Justice Sunday seem to overlook. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness don't look the same for everyone.

Click it up.

This one too.

Thanks to the South for destroying the faith, one psycho preacher at a time. Here's an earlier version with more background.

[The Post probably requires registration, which is free, but you should do it anyway just to, you know, stay informed.]

Step right up, get 'em while they're hot. If kindness and love aren't working, turn on the smug superiority. [I'm sure there's a verse about it somewhere, maybe toward the back.]

Tired of having to reason with people? No worries! We've got your t-shirt comparing abortion rights with the Holocaust right here. Murderiffic!

What's that you say? You'd like to frighten people into believing like you do? Then try this one on for size! Nothing counteracts compassion like a heaping helping of sulfur and brimstone!

What's that, sir? You want something that shows your unequivocal support for unilateral invasions around the globe wherever our best interests or slightest whims may take us? Then you, sir, need to slip into this stunner and let the neighborhood know you won't be doing any thinking of your own any time soon!

And finally, for when you want to just turn people completely away from the notion of a loving God: this always works.

In conclusion, thank you for shopping at HZN, the Home Zealots Network. Feel free to contact us anytime via phone, fax, email or pipe-bomb. Haha, just kidding about that last one, folks! But seriously, you should only bomb the heathens and unbelievers who really deserve it, like single mothers and ethnic minorities.

See you next week!

[Paid for (probably) by Pat Robertson and John Hagee.]

I'll usually come across something once or twice a month that makes me ashamed to share the same religious label as others of my faith.

This is the latest example.

The Democratic National Convention ended last week, and each night I watched as over-groomed adults and their weird offspring paraded around for several days, regaling the oddly rapt crowd with boring personal anecdotes or poorly delivered speeches. The talks from the former Democratic candidates were the worst, each one giving us a healthy reminder how lucky we are the party isn't nominating the makes-Gore-look-peppy Gen. Wesley Clark or the Ferengi-spawned Dennis Kucinich or the hostile hairdo that is Al Sharpton.

I'm not a staunch Democrat. At 22 years old, I'm not much of a staunch anything except an unemployed drain on my parents. But I liked the speech Kerry gave on the convention's final night, despite its corny nature: in his opening statement Kerry announced he was "reporting for duty" as he saluted the crowd, a move they loved but reminded me of every lie an adult's ever told me and mine, of which there have been many.

Behind the staged flourishes, though, were things I liked hearing: the U.S. will only go to war if it has to, not wants to; more money for education; increasing the minimum wage; the promise of other programs that sound appealing to me, a young man raised in a church supposedly geared toward caring for "widows and orphans."

That's why I'm currently supporting Kerry. His delivery and presence, coupled with the encouraging things he said, genuinely affected me. Do I believe President Bush is an evil warmonger, painted by the left to be destroying the world? No. Do I think he lied about Iraq, among other things? Yes, I do.

Being raised in that widows-and-orphans church gave me a supreme love for the First Amendment that allowed my family to practice our faith openly, and that same amendment also lets Bush's supporters continue to freely support him.

But I want a reason.

"He's a good man." So what? My father's a good man, but he couldn't lead the nation. "He appeals to the honest working class of middle America." I don't want someone who's going to dumb himself down (or, more frighteningly, naturally play it dumb) just to sound more folksy. "He's a Christian." So what? I've known plenty of misguided and genuinely awful Christians.

No longer will I stay silent when someone I know arbitrarily praises the president without supporting their admiration with a reason. I'm tired of letting the rabid and deluded members of my generation, the one that has the potential to actually be the greatest, claim that they've found the enlightened path to good government and I must be some kind of heathen (or worse, liberal) for not voting with my congregation.

You determined to keep your state red? Fine by me and the Founders. But you'd better be able to tell me why. Otherwise, you're no better than the names you call me.

"I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side." -- Sen. Kerry in his speech on the convention's final night