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!