As we move into the holiday season, imagine a Southern town square with a resplendent Nativity scene on some warm December evening. Nearby, lights shine on the courthouse sculpture of the Ten Commandments. Passers-by wish one another ''Merry Christmas'' – no one would dare utter a ''Happy Holidays.''
Welcome to Missibama.
After Election Day, the bemoaning was no surprise. It would've happened either way, as it always does. The degree today, however, goes beyond histrionics. An Arizona woman who is none too happy about Barack Obama's re-election ran over her husband for his failure to vote, for example.
Closer to home, Loudon County Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio sent a Nov. 7 fundraising letter for his anti-gay organization, Public Advocate of the United States. ''My friend, right now Public Advocate is the only thing standing between the Homosexual Lobby and complete passage of their agenda,'' he writes – and I wish.
Delgaudio's not too happy about Obama's win, but his letter is more concerned with Nov. 6 being the first election in which constituents voted in favor of marriage equality, to varying degrees – four times over.
Over at the D.C.-based Family Research Council, that anti-gay group's president, Tony Perkins, warned in the wake of those wins that if the Supreme Court follows suit and overturns the Defense of Marriage Act, we may have a revolution on our hands.
At the National Organization for Marriage, also based in D.C., NOM President Brian Brown vowed in a Nov. 7 statement: ''Though we are disappointed over these losses, we remain faithful to our mission and committed to the cause of preserving marriage as God designed it.'' In light of the Bible's harems and incestuous pairings, it was not clear to which ''God designed'' marriage Brown was referring. Brown has also pledged to make Starbucks, a corporate supporter of marriage equality, pay the price for this stance in lost Middle East profits, according to The Colorado Independent.
Calm down. No need for revolution or succumbing to the ''homosexual agenda.'' Why follow Brown to the Middle East when we can far more easily bring some notion of it to North America?
This is where Missibama comes in. And, to be clear, I'm not the first to coin the term. Though unlike one blogger – Rafi D'Angelo who'd just as soon eliminate these Gulf Coast gems – I say hand them over. Considering that since Election Day, the secessionist movement has gone into overdrive, there are loads of people who no longer want to be a part of these United States. So let's set aside these two (because I'm not willing to give up Austin or New Orleans) very red states and bring in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to take their place.
Brown, Delgaudio, Perkins and everyone else who has come to find the U.S. unbearable can make Missibama in their image. It will be a sovereign Judeo-Christian nation, where the penalty for abortion is death, homosexuality is once again a criminal mental disorder and prisoners can do the work that migrant labor once handled. Grover Norquist could be treasurer. Rick Santorum could be the first president. The U.S. left behind wouldn't have to worry much about Missibama, save for the refugee camps we'd need to set up at the border to help those fleeing, which would likely include Mississippi's Constance McMillen, the gay teen of canceled-prom fame.
In the meantime, the vast GOP majority that remains with its American brethren can get to work. Job No. 1 is amending the Constitution to scrap the rule that presidents must be ''natural born citizens.'' That leads to job No. 2: drafting Cuban-born Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) to run for president, as a strongly anti-Communist, right-of-center moderate who knows that welcoming gay servicemembers into the military is a truly conservative stand. And the sort of candidate who could put the GOP back in White House in no time.
Will O'Bryan is Metro Weekly's managing editor. Reach him at wobryan@MetroWeekly.com.
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