Hey, remember the angry evangelicals? The quivering clan of militant Christoholics who propelled Bush into office and seized the national narrative for a few terrifying moments about five years back, ran deep into the woods with it and rubbed it all over their naughty bits in a frenzy of fear and confusion and lust for all things homophobic and saccharine and spiritually denigrating?
Dying. Nearly dead. Gasping their last. Very soon, a footnote, a caricature, a gag, a punch line, blasted to the dustbin of history like dried housefly limbs after a sneeze.
Yes, you are right, they already were a caricature, a cultural pothole, a nasty rash in the armpit of the culture. But it wasn't all that long ago that they were, through a bizarre series of sociopolitical machinations still being parsed by baffled historians, a powerful rash, hugely newsworthy, as dangerous and unstoppable as they were wrongheaded and sad. Remember?
You were not much younger than you are right now. As the Bush era crested, as neocon power reached nuclear levels, the evangelical right - led by the most virulent, spittle-flecked gaggle of mental throwbacks to ever stain the American news wires, the American Family Association and its nefarious leader, Dr. James Dobson - controlled, for a brief, awful moment, the national dialogue. They were the temporary arbiters of taste, the warped conscience of a freaked-out culture. And lo, it was ugly.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/10/DDPG11MIS6.DTL&hw=gay&sn=002&sc=949