I wanted to blog about Ross Douthat's marriage column and the ensuring firestorm, but the deep, riveting discussion that has followed it is still in progress. Therefore, I'll just try to sum it up, add some incomplete thoughts, and hope you will follow along.

In the original column, Douthat laid out his conception of "the marriage ideal," which holds that there is a particular value to monogamous heterosexual marriage that would be pushed further from the mainstream by the legalization of same-sex marriage. He admits the bankruptcy of arguing for marriage as heterosexual monogamy on historical grounds, and of suggesting that it does not cut sharply against human nature. He also admits that this marriage ideal would be in deep trouble even if homosexuality did not exist. But the positive core of the argument:

We didn't have to wait long for the reactions from conservative Christians to yesterday's decision in the Prop 8. They're predictably hyperbolic:

Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America:

"Judge Walker’s decision goes far beyond homosexual 'marriage' to strike at the heart of our representative democracy. Judge Walker has declared, in effect, that his opinion is supreme and ‘We the People’ are no longer free to govern ourselves. The ruling should be appealed and overturned immediately."

Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

"In one brazen act of judicial energy, California’s voters were told that they had no right to define marriage, and thousands of years of human wisdom were discarded as irrational. ... The central institution of human civilization suffered a direct hit, and its future hangs in the balance."

Daniel Blomerg of the Alliance Defense Fund:

"What’s really chilling about this decision is the way the plaintiffs and the judge directly attacked the faith of millions of Americans. They presented doctrinal beliefs about marriage as evidence of bigotry, as unreasonableness."

Let me first comment on the hilarity of Ms. Wright saying that overturning a ballot intiative is a challenge to "representative democracy." Ballot initiatives are themselves challenges to representative democracy, as they seek to bypass legislators and allow voters to essentially write law from the voting booth. California is a mess on their account. Prop 8 was the real challenge to representative democracy, and it should have been overturned on that fact alone.

I missed this appearance by evangelical titans Tim and Beverly LaHaye on Mike Huckabee's Fox News show, but thanks to Andrew for flagging it. It's a dismaying reminder that the religious right has not gone anywhere; in fact, its mixture of theological gibberish and hysterical politics get substantial airtime on the most watched cable news network in the country.

One couldn't find a more succinct encapsulation of the politics I grew up immersed in -- not so much by my parents as by the Christian media we consumed -- than this five-minute chit-chat. The impending apocalypse was reinforced everywhere, from hosts on Christian talk radio programs to entire sections of books in Family Christian stores. The United Nations would grow to become a one-world government, which would lead to the rise of the Beast (probably somewhere like Iraq) who would impose worldwide totalitarianism and brutally persecute Christians. This was why, they said, we have to stand against liberalism: because it was inside job by militant secularists who wanted America to hand over its sovereignty when their moment of atheistic utopia arrived. Entire organizations were devoted to monitoring this process by connecting world events with biblical prophecy and, usually, articulating a Zionism-inflected conservative politics. These delusions reached their zenith in Tim LaHaye's bestselling Left Behind series, which fictionalized a global future many evangelicals actually believe to be in progress as you read this.

From Slate's Explainer today:

Pope Benedict XVI announced Sunday that he would pray for the 19 revelers trampled to death at a techno musical festival in Duisburg, Germany. Do Christians think praying can help a dead person get into heaven?

Not exactly. All Christians believe that only God can determine whether a person belongs in heaven or in hell.

If only all Christians believed that!

Earlier this week, Rush Limbaugh devoted a significant chunk of his show to a sprawling essay from The American Spectator arguing that a vast American “ruling class” runs the country and shuts out dissenting views on every major issue. It circles the wagons around its liberal self, perpetuating its own ideas and protecting members of the club from competition on merit and a true marketplace of ideas.

I am still without words when it comes to people in the U.K. who are writing with straight faces that Obama's interactions with BP have been "xenophobic" toward the British. Thank God for Chris Lehmann for taking an axe to The Economist's latest restatement of that nonsense.

I'm re-reading Giles Whittell's column from last week's Times of London to calm myself down. The crux of the matter:

The notion that American attacks on BP are anti-British is embarrassing. It is a fiction incubated by the thin-skinned, solipsistic and broadly anti-American world view that bubbles up like warm bitter in the best-kept villages of Little England whenever anyone in Washington has the temerity to break with the tradition of referring to the Old Country and its pretensions with anything other than awed admiration.

My previous thoughts on this unbelievable phenomenon here.

Over on his blog, Martin pushes back against the demonization of BP by President Obama, arguing that he's gone "cowboy" on the London-based oil company and is doing damage to American-British relations. I am not making this up.

First, I want to make plain that I'm unimpressed with he administration's handling of the BP ordeal. The urgency from the White House has been completely out of proportion with the scale of the calamity. The private sector should have been set on this mess long ago, as well as all of the scientific and international hands we can get. Instead, we're getting what from all appearances is a delayed reaction from a government agency wholly unprepared to deal with an historic disaster in which its own lack of oversight is complicit. So this is in no way a defense of Obama's handling of the spill, or the MMS's regulatory practices.

But rather than make a coherent argument, Nathan is parroting men from the British parliament and press who seem to have an astonishing inability to assess the moral culpability of the company they are defending. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's trying to express sympathy for the many innocent Britons whose finances are likely to be devastated by BP's misfortune. That does indeed suck. But the stop-hating-on-BP argument is worth taking on because it is so out of touch with the painful reality in the Gulf.

The idea is that Obama is "turning the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe into a BP blame game." But this formulation of the situation is deeply wrong. It strips the entire situation of its moral weight and reduces it to tactical politics; it hints that Obama is just interested in winning a "game" and that BP is somehow getting more blame than it deserves.

There's really no way to explain how heartbreaking these are. The statement of the commenter who supplied the title of this post is about as close as I can come.

In a Memorial Day special on WORLD's web site, Lee Wishing jumps off Russell Kirk's The American Cause to do some typical musing that results in a typical insinuation: the American cause and the Christian cause are all but the same thing.

Kirk cautions that we not make an idol of the USA, and become jingoistic and the self-appointed “keepers of the world’s conscience.” But it’s clear he thought we should work to preserve, protect, and promote the Christian ideals that make American society thrive, such as belief in an unchanging God who made people in His image and entitled to life, liberty, and the protection of their property; punishing actions that violate these inalienable rights; an understanding that mankind and societies are not perfectible through government tinkering and revolution; recognizing that leaders who think otherwise are dangerous ideologues; tolerating other religious faiths and valuing liberty of conscience; and cultivating free and orderly markets to improve the human condition.

Defending America begins with understanding her Christian foundation and that America, its faults notwithstanding, is the greatest society the world has known for upholding human dignity. As America battles foreign enemies and domestic ideologues this Memorial Day, understand, Christian, that you and I bear a great responsibility for defending this nation and we owe a great debt of gratitude to those whose graves are decorated today.

First, I've no objection to recognizing the ways that Christian ideas, even though they were filtered through a kind of theistic rationalism, shaped America's political and legal infrastructure. But that admitting that fact is different than the embracing the kind of seamless blend of 20th-century evangelical Christianity, conservative economics, and national ideology on display in Mr. Wishing's post. I feel obligated to call attention to that particular intellectual cocktail wherever I see it because it does neither Christians nor Americans any good. If anything, it prevents some evangelicals from letting their faith critique their national ideology by helping them make-believe that God and Country are one and the same.

Up at The American Scene is the first installment in what I hope will be an occasional series about the politics of France, for the purpose of following the country's progress in opening up to the modern world, and as a comparative study to the American issues we get so fed up with.

This one is about pension reform. What do you do with a government that can't pay for its system and an electorate that would rather imagine the problem will go away if it's ignored thoroughly enough?

Read on.