Honestly, have some of you even been to America?

FightingFalcon: While I agree that we are "diverse nation of diverse opinion," I think you should tone down the knee-jerk patriotism a bit.

I live in the rural US South and obviously not everybody is a gun-toting, right-wing racist Bible thumper -- but let's face it, the percentage is much higher in the South than, say, Massachusetts. My neighbors are very friendly, but I wouldn't want them making educational policy.

This particular story from Texas may not be the end of the world, but it doesn't deserve to be minimized: the Christian Right's strategy seems to be "death by a thousand paper cuts." Each of these incidences is indeed a threat to secularism and our tradition of church-state separation.

People like McLeroy have constructed an elaborate alternate version of reality, where lies are truth and black is white, and that, together with their financial power, is what makes them dangerous. We ignore them at our peril.