YOU'RE NO DOUBT AWARE OF THE REMARKS MADE BY DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL WANNABE BARAK OBAMA RECENTLY about rural, small-town and otherwise working-class "home folks" types having lost touch with both political parties for want of concrete issues they could rally around, instead driving such salt-of-the-earth types towards distractionary non-issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion and school prayer vis-a-vis elections.

Methinks the following (thanks to Think Progress for the hat tip) seems to be one of those "distractionary issues" proving more attractive to the Podunk Center and Doo Wah Diddy kind of voter, thus raising Obama's rightly-deserved concerns (emphasis supplied):

Recently, Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern (R) came under intense criticism for making a host of incendiary remarks toward gays. For example, she said gays are a "bigger threat" to our nation than terrorism. She also warned, "Gays are infiltrating city councils." As an example, she cited the town of Eureka Springs, AR, whose city council she claimed is now "controlled by gays."

The American Family Association (AFA) has joined in promoting this myth of the evil gay agenda in a new video called "They're Coming To Your Town." The poster advertising the DVD appears to have menacing rainbow-like lights in background. PageOneQ summarizes the trailer for the video:

The presentation in the AFA trailer…"They're Coming to Your Town," tells the tale of an uncharacteristically diverse resort town's government infiltrated by "a handful of homosexual activists" and bent to their will through the enactment of the town's domestic partner registry on June 22, 2007.

"Watch, and learn," says the trailer, "how to fight a well-organized gay agenda to take over the cities of America, one city at a time."

Watch the trailer here.

Eureka Springs is not pleased with people such as Kern, who claim that they have the city's best interests at heart. Responding to Kern, Eureka Springs's mayor said the city is "welcoming to all visitors and residents without regard to their race, color, sex, age, sexual orientation, disability or national origin. It is our hope that all people would aspire to this ideal."

This is not the first time AFA has launched a homophobic campaign. In 2005, AFA president Tim Wildmon backed a warning about "evidence of homosexuality and lesbian people on programs like HGTV and Animal Planet." AFA founder and chairman Don Wildmon also proposed a hypothetical trip to "the homosexual bathhouses," saying, "[W]e're going to confront these people…for what they're doing."

(Hoping, no doubt, to give the signal for the hand-picked droogs and malachicks in the tour group to, after Shakespeare, "cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war" in an orgy of Extreme Homophobic Ultraviolence which Rev. Wildmon could quickly excuse as being for G-d, Country and Family, if and when pressed to explain his involvement.

(The which could later be released on video scored musically, no doubt, to Link Wray's infamous 1958 insturmental hit "Rumble.")

In any case, such must make you wonder if homosexuals really pose a Clear and Present Danger to what Bill "No-Spin Zone" O'Reilly calls "the White Male Christian Power Structure," and the prepetuation thereof, same likely to be excused by overzealous interpretation of these remarks from Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) which upheld slavery by contending where blacks in general and slaves in particular

are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

Which, in turn, such specimens of Zealotry and True Belief would like to see extended to Jews, Muslims, Asiatics, Catholics, "mental defectives," "chronic and habitual welfare queens"--and, of course, homosexuals.

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A BIT OF IRONY HERE OBSERVED BY YOUR CORRESPONDENT:

Then-Chief Justice John Taney, who wrote the opinion in Dred Scott, is namesake of Taney County, Missouri, where Branson--the cultural conservatives' preferred centre of Amerikanischer Realkultur in its "pure" and, hence, idealised form--is situated.

Taney County also happens to be the ultimate derivation of Lake Taneycomo, byproduct of Ozark Beach Dam near Branson, constructed in 1911-13 by the Empire District Electric Company to provide cheap hydro power to southwest Missouri (and still does, with generating capacity of 16 megawatts)--the first of the Branson Tri-Lakes to be created (Table Rock and Bull Shoals being the other two).

(Incidentally, Branson is not the Taney County seat; that honour belongs to Forsyth, about eight mile northeast.)

As for Eureka Springs, their Great Passion Play--byproduct of the mind of Gerald L.K. Smith, himself a notorious bigot in his own right with as wide a following among Those Who Should Know Better as Father Charles Coughlin--is a popular part of the cheap bus tours to Branson as are especially popular among the Fox Prolefeed crowd and others with hard-wired delusions of Kulturkrieg seeing in Branson's music shows the Acme and Perfection of an idealised Amerikanischer Realkultur.

One, methinks, having overtones of the folk-culture festivals which the Kraft durch Frude movement back in Nazi Germany sponsored wholesale for "patriotic" purposes.

Can you feel the irony inherent?