Aye Carumba! as Bart Simpson has often said.

I get all fired up to write a little piece on the death of the Republican Party and the birth of the Christian Party, and I run across something that makes me really angry. What to do, what to do?

Why, write about them BOTH!

June's Texas Monthly ran a story about Hubert Vo's victory in the Texas legislature election from a predominantly Republican district. Here's an interesting quote (emphasis mine):

“AS A POLITICAL FORCE, the Asian community is still in its infancy,” says M. J. Kahn, a Pakistani American real estate developer who represents Alief [Vo's Houston district, and a suburb of Houston] on the Houston City Council. “We haven’t decided yet whether we are Republicans or Democrats.” Kahn decided to run as a Republican in 2003, after Arab Americans had voted in record numbers for George W. Bush in the previous presidential election. But the political allegiances of Houston’s immigrant community are fluid, and last November a plurality of the city’s Muslims—many of them frustrated with what they perceived as racial profiling by the Justice Department after September 11—voted for John Kerry. Kahn sees the fickleness of Houston’s Muslim vote as an indication that neither party has succeeded in winning the community’s allegiance. “In some ways, we feel for the Democrats, because it is the party of minority rights and of education, which is a very, very big issue for us,” he says. “But in other ways, we feel close to the Republican party, because many of us are small-business owners, and we are conservative when it comes to our families and our religion. The challenge for Republicans and Democrats is to convince us that their party is our party. Until then, this community is up for grabs.”

I think that's an interesting quote. Houston's Muslims support the conservative values of the Republican party, but prefer the minority oriented focus of the Democratic party. Why? Could it be the take over of the Republican party by the Christian Right?

Then I ran across a list of the ten most harmful books of the last two centuries. Since it's on a conservative (read "Christian") site, I knew it would have a few corkers on it. Sure, Marx, Hitler, and Mao made the list. So did a few others I don't agree with. But what hit me was a couple of runners-up: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead.

I can understand Darwin (given the site), but Mead? Hell! Her theories were invalidated a few years ago when it was revealed she made up some of her data.

Some bloggers out there have started calling the United States "Jesusistan." Even though I prefer the United States of Jebus (see previous posts), he's not too far wrong. We're watching the country turn into a religous state on the same level as Iran. And, frankly, I'm scared.