Twenty years ago, as a 34-year-old grad student at Pat Robertson’s farm for churning out fundie nutbags, Regent University, McDonnell wrote a master’s thesis charmingly titled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade” (those grad students, they sure love them some colons in their paper titles!). In it he trumpeted all the tired hash those hacks always go on about: contraceptives shouldn’t be legal for unmarried people, women should be in the homes raising kids (seriously, no shit!), gays should have no legal rights, blah, blah, blah.

Unfortunately for him, Virginia’s pretty purply these days, and he’s been trying to appear kind of moderate, but this ain’t gonna help. To be fair to him, it sounds like he’s come a few steps out of the 4th century, considering one of his daughters fought in Iraq and both have master’s degrees, but the article I read didn’t say nothing about whether they have JOBS or anything.

Anyway, he’s already put the smooth spin on this, trying to turn it around on his democratic challenger, some guy named Creigh Deeds, but we’ll see how it goes for him. The other guy who posts here probably ought to say something about this, since he lives in that state and all.

Imagine this scenario: a 17-year-old Christian girl starts a Facebook friendship with a Muslim family in another state. After the girl has a fight with her mother, she runs away to that Muslim family (let’s say about 900 miles away) where she takes up residence and says that her father will kill her if she goes back home. The Muslim family insists that the Bible calls for killing a child who disobeys (hey, see Deuteronomy 21:18), so they are duty-bound to not return the child to the parents. In the meantime, the child’s parents insist they love their child and have never threatened her. But also in the meantime, the governor of the state in which the Muslim family lives says he’s committed to protecting this child and will put the full weight of the state’s power behind that commitment.

Implausible? Sure it is. That Muslim family’s home would be surrounded by gun-toting Christian yahoos before you could burn a Koran. Oh, and there’d be some Koran burning, too. Glenn Beck would shed tears and express his terror for the girl’s soul, and Bill O’Reilly would ball his fists and talk about how he’d personally kick the asses of the every Muslim in this great country before he’d let this girl be brainwashed. And presumably the government would come down on them like a whirlwind.

But, on the other hand, make that a Muslim girl running away to a Christian family, and you’re talking Florida reality. Riqfa Bary, 17, ran away from her family after a fight with her mom from Columbus to Orlando to live with the crazy reverend Blake Lorenz, head of the Global Revolution Church (which believes that the end times are upon us,  that the red cow coming into Israel portends the beginning of Armageddon, and other retarded bullshit). Lorenz and his nutbag Jesus-fuckers insist that the girl will be honor-killed if she goes back, despite the fact that the Bary family is from Sri Lanka (hardly a home of hard-core muslims, historically) and seems pretty secular. The girl is an honor student and cheerleader, and as local Orlando columnist Mike Thomas opined, it’s unlikely that a father who would allow his daughter to wear a cheerleader outfit in public regularly would be the type to kill her.

Anyway, the girl was remanded to a foster family by a judge, and we should find out on Sept. 3 what will be done. Charlie Crist will try desperately to hide his homosexuality and general moderateness by continuing to offer to defend the girl if the judge insists she’s to be sent back, and the yahoo blogosphere will explode in crazy indignation if that happens. If nothing else, it will be fun to watch. But it’s sad to know that there are parents back in Columbus who probably miss their daughter terribly and are unlikely to get anything like a fair shake in this whole mess.

PS–I’m back, bitches!

PPS–Fuck you, Christian wingnuts!

Also, Barry the Uniter needed to not have his party going all tribal and stringing up dissidents, so I’m sure his public two cents suggesting no punishment for Lieberman mattered. But Barry came from Chicago’s hard-core political scene: I can assure you that he has Lieberman firmly by the short and curly hairs, and Joe knows it. The next time Barry needs something from that committee, I bet he gets it. The evidence was all in Joe’s fawning and thankful comments about Barry, and his mewling apology for the things he said about him on the campaign trail.